Brett and Debbie

Building a garden bed

This past weekend we had some nice weather on Sunday and we finally
started building the garden bed after several weeks of planning and
accumulating the materials. It's a 20ft by 5ft cedar bed for
vegetables this spring and summer. We built it sturdily, so it should
also work as a bench when we get the final boards put on the top.
Charlie helped, but mostly by relaxing calmly in the yard on a nice
sunny and warm afternoon. Later when I was putting the screen in the
bottom of the box (to keep the moles or whatever we have digging in
our yard out of the veggies) he sat in my lap while I worked.

Now to start moving the 2.5 yards of (wet) dirt from the driveway into
the planter bed. Whew.

You can see the pictures here

Pictures from Debbie's visit to NY

Debbie got to visit Lake as well as her family (including the cute
Matthew) on a business trip to NY this past week.

Here are some pictures!

Good progress on the kitchen remodel

We've hit St. Patrick's day and the kitchen remodel is making great
progress.The walls are out, the new beam is up and the framing is
almost done. The electrical is done and the plumbing is done, so it's
time for inspections before the insulation and drywall people can come
and cover the walls back up.

It is difficult to live in a remodel though, the makeshift kitchen
downstairs keeps getting covered with stuff falling through the
sub-floor and everything moves regularly to get out the way of the
current work. We've found it a little challenging to find things and
deal with every surface in the house being covered with some kind of
dust/power/grime.

Check out the pictures!

Nice Portland Pictures

The past week or two we had some outrageously nice weather, briefly. I
found this nice photo of Portland someone else took I thought I would
share:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24516237@N00/393282690/

Washington Cask Festival

I spent the weekend with Ammi, Adam, Corey, Brian, and Carla at the
Cask Festival in Seattle, which was quite fun. They had 40 very nice
beers at a rather calm event compared to the local beerfests that I'm
used to. Good stuff. We also managed to stop by Brouwers, Bottleworks,
Murphys, Theo chocolates and still managed to get in a nap before
coming back to Portland for reality i.e. work.

Carla took some nice photos with her phone, which mostly capture the events.

Kitchen progress & Beer website

The kitchen is making fast progress, the walls are now gone and the
beam in-place. Unfortunately Debbie took the camera on her business
trip so I can't take pictures of it for now, but it appears to be
making good progress. We finally got all those staples out of the
floor, and I think the electrical stuff happens next.

I've been working on a beer website at squidoo, which is a pretty cool
place. It's easy to make webpages there. I have lots of links to the
beer info that I use when I make beer, including books, podcasts, etc.
I'll also put some root-beer info up there since I've been making my
own root beer lately also, but maybe that will have to wait for the
kitchen to get done?

http://www.squidoo.com/homebrewbeer

Kitchen remodel starts now

We had some nice weather this weekend and started a little project.
That is we started our kitchen remodel! Since we signed with the general contractor and the cabinet guy this week we started the demolition ourselves. Amazingly it's done after 4 (intense) days of work.

I posted some photos here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bretthall/KitchenDemolition