Bouncing Marty

This weekend we had a free Sunday afternoon so we headed to the mountains. Vegas has a surprisingly large mountain range just to the West, with peaks over 12,000ft tall, and plenty of cool temps and sublime pine forest. Don’t tell the other 2 million people down in the valley about it though. They can stay down there and gamble.

A 30- minute drive took us to the trail-head of Mary Jane Falls, a 5 mile up and back to check out some springs and cool limestone cliffs and caves. We took off in the early afternoon and strolled up the above wash, which quickly turned into 1,000ft of nice forested switchbacks. Great weather, and good views as we climbed out of Kyle Canyon.

(I can’t do a TR anymore without including dog photos…must be done.) We climbed up passing plenty of dogs and other fellow hikers. I was surprised by how many other people were up there. I managed to keep them out of the photos at least. At the top of the climb was the falls, and some cool caves which we explored.

Fun times. Good warm-up for future training for future climbs for future summits for future skiing. That’s my train of thought at least.

And my attempt at purdy photography.

In addition to the flooring install, we’re tackling the hall bathroom. Well not really tackling. Porcelain isn’t very forgiving.

Here’s a cheesy panorama of how bath looks. This shot was taken with the new toilet and tile installed. A great improvement over the peeling yellow lenolium and leaky small toilet that came with the house. At this point, I still needed to install the new pedestal sink, plumb in the faucet, patch my drywall destruction, re-texture the wall, and repaint. Then replace the light fixture, new towel bar, and install an new mirror.

The sink went in fairly easy. I had some sequencing issues. I took out the light fixture prior to installing the sink, and didn’t replace until after the sink was done. I like to think I did it just to increase the challenge. Plumbing by headlamp is romantic afterall.

At this point we have a new light fixture installed (after another set of fixtures was installed and deemed not worthy…back to Home Depot). Holes patched and painted, good as new. We are still on the search for the ‘perfect’ mirror and towel bar…and we are also planning on removing the mirrored medicine cabinet to replace it with something matching. Fun stuff.

The shirt says it all.

Things are progressing nicely with the house. It seems like when I’m ready to report on what we’ve just recently done, I realize that I haven’t said anything about the last bit of work we completed…so here’s some photos of some of our laminate flooring install.

We tore all the carpet up, and spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the best way to install the flooring. Overall its really an easy process. However, I was bound and determined to make things as difficult as possible. We are installing the flooring in the front room, down the hall, and through the master bedroom. After a lot of planning, I put together these fancy corners. Here’s how it was looking.

See how the diagonal joint comes out, instead of the boards just laying straight? Looked pretty cool. Unfortunately, doing this had some poor consequences. There is one location about 7″ long at each joint that doesn’t interlock, and when we put weight on these locations, the flooring warps and gaps emerged. Not good…would lead to a lot of wear, and just look bad in a few years I’m sure.

So, the boards went straight. Ended up tearing out a lot of flooring and doing things several times to get it back to the way I should have done it in the first place. So the corner went straight, and cleaned up really nice. Not as ornate, but sure looks good. The hall went quickly after I made the corners and cut in the doors/closets.

This last weekend we finished up the hall bathroom, and completed the flooring in the master bedroom. Minus about 6 boards, which I came up short of course. I’ll order them and slap them in sometime next week. I can’t believe the difference between the crappy carpet and the laminate wood. Looks a ton better. Here’s the hall, before and after.

Fun stuff. Next up is baseboards…then we’ll move on to getting the backyard landscaped. Never ending….