It’s snowing.  No better time to make sawdust.

Okay, I finished a corner of the house.  The area around the wood stove.  The mantle is done, the trim work is done, and I’m ready to declare that one eighth of the house is now completed.

The wood stove has a mantle.  Solid oak.  I set sheets of steel (painted copper) as a backsplash on the wall above the tile.  It’s painted with high heat enamel.  It is bulletproof.  If our wood stove explodes in a flaming conflagration that threatens to burn the house down, the metal sheets won’t help it a bit.

I built a little built-in bookshelf to help with the book creep.  Oh, what’s book creep?   That’s when your bookshelves are too full, and the books you’re reading start to litter shelves, tables, couches, chairs, pretty much any horizontal surface not previously occupied by a cat or a candle or anything else that takes up space.  Book Creep means you don’t have enough storage space for books.  Ergo, I build book shelves.

Oh, and that rectangle of drywall up there?  That was wood paneling.  Now it’s drywall.  We cheer, seriously cheer, for every square foot of old paneling that leaves this house, never to return.  We’ll paint it.  It won’t be white for much longer.

I was worried that the stove got too hot for a wooden mantle, but so far, the oak mantle has held up very well.  Hasn’t even burst into flames yet, and we’ve had quite a few fires in that stove since I installed it.  Those oak dowels conceal the fasteners that affix the mantle to the wall.  There’s quite a few of them.  That thing will never move.

Anyway, one eighth of the house is complete.  Fans of the computer game Ultima will rejoice, for I have not lost an eighth.