Weekend Chores

We finally started on the mega-project that is cleaning up and organizing the shop. Between our moving into the house, friends storing their stuff, the pottery studio, and the general craziness getting everything ready for the wedding, things've been piling up willy-nilly in there for a couple of years, and you can see the result: It's a big space with plenty of room for everything we've got in there, but we needed to organize to a higher degree beyond "heap on the floor" so that there'll actually be room to move around and work on projects. We didn't finish cleaning it up this weekend, but we made a great deal of progress. One more solid saturday and we might even be able to park inside!

In addition to working on the shop, we also cleaned the chimney in preparation for winter. Last year we burned a lot of green wood, so it seemed like a good idea to scrape out the creosote before we started firing the stove. Brushing out the stovepipe turned out to be the easy part of the job, Cary had no trouble getting up on the roof with the chimney brush and working it down the pipe. Vaccuming out the creosote flakes from the bottom turned out to be really complicated, because there are all kinds of crazy baffles between the firebox and the stovepipe. They make the stove burn nice and clean and efficient, but they sure do hamper efforts to get the shop vac nozzle where it needs to go! Eventually after much cursing I managed to get the baffles out, and then with Cary's help was even able to get them back in afterwards.

The cats had a productive weekend too, as you can see: Iggy and Sprout really enjoy the picnic table. Sanford prefers to lounge ontop of our cars. Marcel prefers to stay low to the ground, although he actually climbed up onto the observation platform - without any human help - for the first time this weekend, which is quite a milestone.