Stinky McGee and Crying in my Wine Weekend Recap

Good Monday morning everyone!  I hope you had a fun, productive or completely lazy, self-care weekend.    We had an interesting kick-off to our weekend.  I ordered a new mantel to hang our stocking by the gas vent fireplace with care because I was tired of our 23-year-old mantel.  Originally, I was going to take the mantel down myself and even scored it.  But when I slipped and cut a sliver of drywall, I didn't want to screw it up so we decided to hire out for it to be removed and put up the new one.  It was bittersweet.  We were excited to have a fireplace and mantel of our own when we were 21 and 23 years old.  We hung our stockings there for 22 years and our pup warmed her booty under it when she was chilly.  But we were tired of builder grade and I wanted something big, chunky and rustic.

(Notched back so it could be hung on a 2x4)

The dude who showed up opened the conversation by saying "well, I was on my way home but my boss said "no you're not.""  The last time a worker opened up a conversation that way, we had a gas leak and almost exploded because he wasn't paying attention and was more worried about telling his girlfriend why he was going to be late.  I wasn't having it.  I said, "if you have something you need to get home to, I have no problem rescheduling this."  He wasn't expecting that and he's like "oh no, that's okay."  I said, "because we need your full attention on this because we can't do this ourselves like we were going to."  He started stuttering a little and was like "no, I was just kidding."  Mmm hmm.  Then we showed him the instructions that came with the mantel and corbels and twice he was going rogue and creating issues that were addressed in the directions.  I promptly would say "yes, in the instructions it says how to do that."  After the second time, he said "you're probably like "if you'd just read the instructions.""  I just smiled and didn't disagree.  He also REEKED of cigarette smoke to the point I was coughing the entire time.  I felt like I'd just smoked a carton.  We had to air out the house for an hour then run the diffuser for 6 hours to get his "essence" out of here.  He was quite skilled but still, why do we get the whiners?  (He went off about his boss for five minutes at the end of his time and overcharged us by a quarter-hour because he stopped doing his job to tell us stories and we got to pay $22 for the pleasure.  Thanks a lot, Stinky McGee.

In the end, we were SO glad we treated ourselves to having someone else do it.  I easily could've gotten that mantel off the wall doing exactly what he did but scared myself with that drywall nick.  Besides that part only took 10 minutes so it wouldn't have saved us money anyway...stopping him when he'd say "long story short" with "too late" would have.  I'm going to do a proper before and after post for you.

The mantel looked so good, it made our pathetic pass-thru shelf to the kitchen look like crap.  Well, it's looked like crap for 10 years.  The wood is super soft and even sitting a mason jar on it dents the paint.  Yeah.  So something needed to be done about it anyway.  I wanted to make a shelf facade to cover it that matched the mantel.  Sounds simple enough, right?  I got a primitive planer from an antique mall but there was no way that thing was touching the oak since it barely made a dent in soft pine.  We went to an old school hardware store that had a block planer and that looked like it would do the trick.  The problem is, despite expert measuring on the notch we had to work with on the pass-thru wall, we could not account for the crap show that is the unevenness of the wall itself.  The Mr was doing the best he could and when he was done with the 20 cuts/re-cuts, we had a bit of a mess on our hands.  I seriously have NO IDEA how the crappy builders here were able to build that thing.  I was in tears out of frustration on something that should've been relatively simple and I'm sure he was like "why didn't I marry the chick my mom tried to arrange a marriage with in high school?"

At this point, we finished up what we could, got it glued and brad nailed until we could bring it inside to sit overnight.  I'll work on staining and polying it today and hopefully be done today since we've got a delivery coming tomorrow and I won't be able to deal with it then.  Let's just say the day ended with this...

(That is called mulled wine.  The Mr didn't like it so I took his.)

I'm not a drinker, therefore after one mug, I was walking sideways.  Thank you, Aldi.

Don't forget the deadline for sharing your favorite holiday lights (your own or others) is Sunday!  I've got one submission so far so run outside tonight and snap those pics!  You can either email me at mrs{at}successalongtheweigh{dot}com or message me on the Facebook page.

How was your weekend?

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