A quickie before moving on to other things..

The pansy Jaywalkers are finished!



They're.. well, not my favorite socks. :/ Even though I knit the ribbing on needles a size smaller than the leg, the ribbing is loose and the leg is still a bit snug at the top, due to my shapely calves. The foot is a bit loose as well, because the stockinette for the sole should also likely have been done on a smaller needle size but switching between two different sized needles for each round would have driven me to distraction. *shrug* I'll wear them, I just won't likely make another pair.

In other areas of productivity, we've been back at the remodeling this weekend. Dad came to help us finish hanging the rest of the drywall:



That's Dad hamming it up as he paused before mudding the last corner so I could take the picture. *smile* You may also remember that there was a heating vent over the large hole in the wall on the right that was painted that lovely (*choke*) green; that was picked up this morning, along with the hardware from the door, by a man who lives just outside of town who does sandblasting. We should get them back all nice and clean later this week. We won't be painting them. Ever.

Hanging the rest of the drywall also meant that I could dig the door out from under the tarp (where it had been stored with the drywall to keep it from getting rained on - really an extra cautious step since it takes a very hard blowing wind to get rain back to the porch wall!). Now, before you look at the next set of pictures, remember that this door had been painted over completely at least four times, on top of a coat of varnish...



The worst part, not surprisingly, were the bits around the panels - they're rounded, or concave or however you describe them; the paint stripped out pretty clean thanks to the varnish underneath, but getting the varnish out required quite a bit of hand detail sanding and at least an entire pack of medium grain sandpaper. It looks infinitely better, but in truth, we still need to strip the varnish off the other side. :(

In a fit of.. something.. not quite sure what.. we also decided that it was time to make the stairs not quite so squeaky. At the moment, each and every stair creaks when you step on it. And this morning, there were rectangles of what used to be an off-white, rather thick nap carpet on each step that was *impossible* to clean - the vacuum couldn't quite get to the back corners, it was nearly impossible to clean the area up to the edge of the carpet without a toothbrush, etc. So the first step was to rip out all the little carpet pieces. Fortunately, they weren't glued down, just nailed, so while dad was mudding corners upstairs, I pulled nails out of the stairs, swept and mopped:



They're still rough - they really need to be properly refinished, but that's a bigger project than we're ready to undertake at the moment, so we're doing what we can with the knowledge that we'll need to undo it at some later time to do it all properly.

Tomorrow, Jack will nail the steps all down again, which dad tells us should stop the squeaking. Once that's done, we'll put in the carpet runner I picked up this evening:



(You can really see how bad the stairs are in this shot.. *cringe*) I think it will look really nice with the woodwork, but it does somewhat limit our options for painting the wall in the stairwell. *shrug*