Christmas Past 2020

Here we are a few days into the New Year again.  Every year I feel the same way, where did the previous year go?  Yes, even 2020 flew by even with all of the challenges it presented.

In December of 2019, we were still far from finished with the remodel of the hut, so we did not celebrate Christmas at all.  This year, we're still working on the last of the details for the house, and I decided to decorate quite a bit to make up for the year before, even though we had no family or friends gathering due to the pandemic.

I put up three Christmas trees this year, one in each bay window and one upstairs.  Of course, two of the trees were only three feet tall and the other one was a six-footer, so all told, it was the equivalent of one twelve-foot tree.  This was our first year with artificial trees, too.  I kind of like them; they don't have the lovely smell of a real tree, but I did bring in some pine branches from the Back Eight for fragrance.

Above, is the dining room bay window.  Below is the living room.

Another view of the dining room, below.  We were able to bring the stained glass lamps home from storage at Joel's house the first week in December.  I found an antique oak table on Marketplace and it fits very well in the room. 

We didn't have any substantial snow until after Christmas this year.  I guess, like everything else in 2020, it was unpredictable weather.

The remodel is winding down, thank goodness.  I have to chuckle now remembering back in December 2019 that we'd had hope to be back in the house by Christmas.  What dreamers we were.  The last of the woodwork was completed just before Halloween. 

In keeping with the Craftsman style of home that we were trying to mimic, we had the cabinet maker build a set of three room dividers, or colonnades, as they are known, between the front foyer and the dining room and the dining room and the kitchen.  

We needed to supply the stained glass for the cabinet doors.  We decided to do a design to tie in with the railings that Carl finished in October.  He drew up plans and went to work.

 

There he is posing with the window and his face mask after soldering was complete on Window #1.  Five more to go.

 

We still need to putty the stained glass and clean the window, but we couldn't resist sticking it in the cabinet for now.

Speaking of the railings, they were completed at the beginning of November.  (Carl's been retired since March 2019, but he has had no time to sit around, poor guy.)  The railings were a monumental challenge for Carl; though the design was simple, so I thought, it was actually difficult to make everything even and there was a lot of cutting, welding, grinding and do-overs before he had them the way he wanted.

There will be more about the actual railing construction to come, but it took months to get them completed, especially when I threw in the idea of adding stained glass rondels to each design.

One of many trial runs to see how we liked them.

Newel posts fresh from the supplier, with Carl's hat hanging from a clamp so no one ran into the pole sticking out.

More trial and error, back to the drawing board, above, and finally, below, the finished product.

The sunlight coming in the windows shines through the rondels and throws interesting patterns on the walls during the morning and afternoon.  As the angle of the sun changes with the seasons, so do the patterns.

We were very happy to have this job behind us.

So, Christmas 2020 is in the history books, and we are looking forward to a much better year to come.  

There's a whole new year ahead.