When Mom & Dad come to play...

... walls come apart.

My parents offered to drive up and help us work on the house. I gratefully accepted and we accomplished a great deal over the three full days they were here.

We (that's the royal we... meaning my dad with help from Steve) painted the kitchen green. I absolutely love the color and think it turned out amazing (in person, the green is much richer and not as bright as it appears in these pictures taken with flash). My mom did a lot of trim work and paint stripping.

These pictures of Steve admiring his work amused me (note our awesome new light fixture in the center of the room):

Then I asked for some consultation on a door that was sticking. And we found this:

Close up:

If you know what's wrong with this picture, you would probably make a better handyman than whoever did this. To be perfectly clear, this was not our contractor's work. It was done by the previous owner.

The header in the picture above has two big problems. One, it wasn't supported by anything; it's full weight was just resting on the door since the jack stud was cut too short. Two, the header wasn't doing it's job because there was no blocking between it and the structure above. So not only was the header pressing down on the door and throwing it all wonky (technical term) it wasn't doing anything to support the weight of the roof... which is the kinda the point of big chunks of lumber like that. Definitely needed to be fixed. And to top it off there was an improperly done electrical connection above the door as well (not our electrician's work). Which meant, of course, taking the door and surrounding frame apart.

I really like this series of pictures of my dad and Steve working on the door, so I'm going to post several. It ended up being a pretty involved endeavor taking basically an entire day. Steve even got to crawl around under the house to install some missing support structure (hence his coveralls). A fun time was had by all.

My parents also helped us repair much less serious problems on two other doors, put up curtains and run errands to Home Depot and Ikea. I wasn't feeling very good and was pretty stressed, and thus was pretty useless, but they did an amazing job and we were fortunate to have the help. Hopefully the next time they come up we'll spend less time on construction and more time on the fun decorating-type projects.