Soapy bubbles

You see, after 6 months of washing dishes outside with a bucket of suds and the garden hose or washing them in the bathroom sink and rinising them in the bathtub, I would have settled for a 1950s model dishwasher. And watching how far Kade's 6ft giraffesque frame had to bend to wash anything over the sink, I think he would have too.

Luckily, we don't have a current need for the 1950 deluxe "Dishmobile" cause we've got a new Frigidaire of our own!! Now we can no longer say we have everything but the kitchen sink...because we have one of those too. Hopefully our remaining traces of dishpan hands are a thing of the past.

She's super shiny and she runs pretty quiet--much quieter than Harley purrs

She fits flush and incognito with the cabinets--her magical washing controls hidden perfectly at the top.

Don't let the red tape fool you-our sink is resting on Kade's homemade plywood countertop, soon to be a solid surface of some sort

In love with a stripper...

The secret is a good stripper! It's a little hard to see in a small pic, but the words "Easley, SC" are written in flowery cursive after a Manufacturing Co. name, which might mean these doors are original to the house. Can't make out the Co. name yet though.

I'll be honest, I am IN LOVE with a stripper. I don't think Kade is quite at the level of love for this stripper that I am, but he wasn't around for the bad kind. He's only seen the one that puts on the best show this side of the Mississippi, so he has little comparison. This isn't just any stripper...and no, it's not the kind found at a platinum club, but a cheaper one sold at most home improvement stores.

Here's the story: Two weekends ago, when the weather was warm, Kade and I decided to continue our door stripping mission in order to have doors up in the house before I turned 86. What we thought was going to be an easy process, turned out to be 3 hours of stripping ONE side of ONE door, and it wasn't even completely finished. And that was 2 of us working at it. At that rate, no doors would be up in either of our lifetimes. The secret we would learn was in the stripper.

By some stroke of good fortune, Kade and I chose a different stripper on one of our last outings to Home Depot than the one we'd been using. The first stripper we bought lacked the talent or magical chemical composition to handle layers of paint, stain, paint. And as our old stripper ran out last weekend, we opened the new one. And my goodness, our new stripper knows how to take it off!! We were able to strip an entire trim piece and two more doors down to the bare wood last weekend. The stripping process still isn't a pretty one but we've found our magic stripper!

Ahh the work of a professional stipper on our wood door


A close up of the panels--there are 6 on each side of the doors

A stripped trim piece around an unstripped door.