If you’ve been missing my posts, my apologies. I’m playing “corporate wife” this week and next week I’m off to a new adventure. Both of these require significant travel, planning, and rearranging the 18 things I stupidly choose to do. Okay, so it only feels stupid when they all demand my attention at once or I go out of town. That means this week it’s stupid!

Around the 4th of July we enjoyed a wonderful weekend with the DSL, the daughter, and that precious grandson of ours. He enjoyed our covered back porch, splashing around in his very own kiddie pool and watching bubbles sail across the porch. To watch the delight on his face as he surveyed all of this fun was a joy to watch.

His tired parents even got a ride in our new 2-person kayak, complete with places to put fishing poles. Our Canadian geese did not enjoy the kayak because they were being very protective of their rapidly-growing gosling.

I finally remembered to take pictures, but let me reiterate, I am not the photographer of the family, so if these are blurry, etc., you’ll have to forgive me.

This is the view from the lakeside bedroom. You can see my brother’s blue kayak under the trees and now, there’s a new 2-seater kayak close by!

With picking a maroon-colored metal roof and gray stain for our cabin, one would think I had already decided on the exterior door color for our cabin and that this job would have long been done by the time we had finished the inside work, right?!

Wrong.

Our exterior doors arrived in a light cream color. We were so eager to have lockable cabin doors that we didn’t paint them in the beginning. In fact the cream color almost became the color of the doors. I was beginning to think that the dark colors I had chosen for the outside were getting too dark and the cream color actually worked with the other exterior colors to my astonishment.

Even my daughter talked about how nice the existing color was and wondered if we needed to keep them a light color. Then reality happened.

With all of the traffic through these doors to work on inside projects, we had managed to put dirt all over these poor doors. I thought they would clean easily with some good old-fashioned elbow grease and cleaner, but I was wrong. I either lightened the existing color (and it was in patches!) or the dirt remained.

Thankfully, this log cabin of ours does NOT feature one thing true of the original log cabins in the U.S.–an outhouse. Thus, I actually deemed it fun deciding how to “outfit” our 2 bathrooms, our kitchen sink and our laundry sink.

I wanted the bathrooms to have that arts and craftsman “feel,” so I already had decided that the fixtures would all be white, as they would have been back in the arts and craftsman era.

As you might suspect, this is where the hubby’s engineering end of the build came into play with my aesthetics end. This was particularly true of two plumbing areas: faucets and toilets.

I have had a lot of bad luck with faucets throughout my life. Why? Because I listened to commissioned salesmen “voices” who sold me on Moen and other brands I knew I didn’t like in the first place. In my experience other brands leak remarkably soon after installation and become a cleaning nightmare in the process.

Last Wednesday I talked about going to First Monday Trade Days in Canton, Texas. Thanks to numerous web sites telling me what might be available there for the cabin, I felt it was a must.

The hubby and I went last Sunday to find a unique laundry sink for the cabin. If nothing else, I wanted see if Canton might have one at a better price than what I was finding online.

It hit me about a month ago that there was very little about our cabin laundry room that would make it “stand out” from the other rooms in the cabin. I think I can safely say that I have ideas up in my head or already in place in the cabin to make several areas “fun for the eye.”

I already have some stories I want to recount for folks who visit the cabin as our guests. We do plan to rent the cabin when not in family use and I plan to put these stories in a photo album filled with the pics we have taken as we have built and furnished the cabin.

We are officially postponing the Log-Raising Event for our lakeside cabin at the Reserve in Montalba, TX until Saturday, June 11th at 10 am. Please see my post from yesterday regarding directions to the Reserve and email me if you need the code for the Reserve gate along with the number of people in your party. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause for those planning to attend this weekend. Unfortunately, I do not control the weather!

For those wanting to stay overnight, we recommend the Holiday Inn Express and the La Quinta in Palestine, TX. Please bring sunscreen, bug repellent, lawn chairs and rain gear (Hopefully, this will not be needed!). Wear comfortable clothing–this is definitely a casual event!

Questions? Post a comment below.