The bird man flyeth toward the heavens

Eat right, exercise, and you too may be doing this after you retire.

My father-in-law doing his thing

Canada wrap-up part deux

 Swimming at sunset

 Reeves caught another minnow

Uncle Steve instructing the boys on the finer points of hazardous behavior, 

although he did move the 5-gallon container of gas well out of range before the show

Canada wrap-up

The second shift: Shanosky, Horn, Vernot, Crome

Young boys and explosives

The finished product

Still a small space, but feels a little bigger after the renovation

The new bunkie gangplank

My summer vacation...or lack thereof

Our family's summer vacation trip to Canada was canceled at the last minute due to an unexpected water leak. When my brother arrived at the cottage 2 days before we were all scheduled to fly in, he found the cottage had been flooded by a leaking toilet valve. Although this should have been discovered by the person who opened the cottage and turned on the water, it wasn't. It leaked profusely for around a full week before it was discovered by my brother. Everyone except me canceled their plane tickets and vacationed elsewhere while my brother and I completely gutted and renovated the bathroom. It was not a fun week.

This is what the bathroom looked like within a few hours after I arrived. The first step was to strip out all the buckled flooring down to the subfloor, remove all the fixtures, and then cut out all the wet and moldy sheetrock. In the picture above I hadn't yet cut out the sheetrock, but everything else was gone. We opted to leave the toilet in until just before I laid the new floor. Wise move.

As the old saying goes, "You can take the boy out of California, but you can't take California out of the boy." Here is a California style restroom which served the needs of the Californians while I removed the toilet and laid the new floor. I couldn't get that new floor laid and that toilet installed fast enough.

Here is what the bathroom looked like after about 4 days of work. It still needs final paint, fixtures and trim, but my brother and his friends can handle that in the coming week.

There will be a full sized mirror above the vanity when all is said and done. I also wired in a new GFI protected outlet next to the sink, since it was lacking in the previous bathroom.

The new floor went down fairly easily and looks great. The bathroom is the nicest room in the cottage at this point – far superior to the previous bathroom that was installed. We did notice a number of technical deficiencies in the previous bathroom which we corrected during the renovation. I should have a few photos with all the paint, fixtures, mirror and trim installed in the next few days, and will post them once they arrive.

 Tim's boys spent half their time in our recently acquired 4-person paddle boat. A neighbor generously donated it to us as he was trying to get rid of things that he really wasn't using anymore. Both boys had a blast pedaling all over the cove and around the island without adult supervision. This vessel isn't pretty (unless you like pink boats) but is very stable and makes a great fishing platform.

The boys had never set off any fireworks before, so on one of my trips to the local Home Depot, I stopped at a questionable little roadside fireworks stand/gas station/Taliban hangout and bought a box of fireworks. We (they) set them off that night in celebration of Canada Day. They were pretty excited (look at their expressions in the above photo) that their crazy Uncle brought home the contraband and gave them a quick lesson in how to safely detonate the explosives. Tim shot some great photos with his new camera of the boys setting them off that night, so I'll post those once they're sent to me.

After the week of renovation, I flew to Ohio where I picked up my daughter's car, and drove all the way back to Texas the following day. It was a pretty quick trip, and I made the 1,150 mile drive in just under 15 hours. The only way I could have made it in less time would have been if I were wearing Astronaut Diapers. I'll leave that to the Californians.