Present Joys

The guys from Schrocks were here again today to finish up odds and ends. They brought the completed doors for my front parlor cabinets (which are beautiful and will be wildly time-consuming to stain and finish), installed the mirror backsplash in my dining room (photos of that soon), and completed the cornice on the foyer bookcases. The color weirdness shown here is due to some parts being more pre-finished than others. Now that these are in, I can thoroughly finish everything.

Reuben, one of the Schrocks installers, did a beautiful job carefully coping out the bookcase cornice pieces to fit around the head block that will go in as part of the window trim (at the very far left corner in this photo). I have some work to do before the window trim will go back in, but once it does, it should be a nice tight fit.

Schrocks is coming Monday to begin installation of built-in cabinets I designed for three rooms: foyer, front parlor, and dining room. In true Victorian style, we are prioritizing the beauty and majesty of these three “principal rooms” while we continue to ignore our miserable kitchen. I will write more about the cabinets in each of these rooms.

The installers will bring most of the large cabinets and many assorted small trim pieces when they come next week. For now, Karen’s uncle Hosea was passing by Columbus and offered to drop off the two cabinet boxes that will go in the front parlor. For how much these things cost, it’s hilarious to see them hanging out of the back of a pickup truck, but I figure Hosea knows what he’s doing.

I’d requested to get these two in particular early so I could get a head start on finishing them. The paneled ends of each cabinet here will be installed close to the mantelpiece which is already in place. Today I frantically applied dye stain and the first two coats of polyurethane, which is a good start.