Today we learn to varnish...

Table in progress, originally uploaded by CidnieC.

Maura was off with her cousins, grandparents and aunts and uncles enjoying a Thanksgiving holiday filled with laughter, fun, hot cocoa and pancakes. Back at the bay, we spent Thanksgiving working on the boat and boat related projects.

Our bayside house will eventually be our home base. Right now, its a staging area for projects and is furnished with a couple of sofas, a bed or two and lots and lots of tools. That's it. No tables, no internet, tv, curtians or any other furnishings. We didn't want to spend any real money furnishing what's really a work site, but we do need something to eat on and I do need to learn how to varnish on something that if it goes poorly, won't matter so much. So we purchased a birch door with the intent of sanding and varnishing it and attaching some Ikea legs to it. The end result will be that we have a place to eat and I will have the skill set to be turned loose on Ceol Mor's bright work.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner with some friends on a plastic covered slab of birch supported on saw horses with random chairs about it. I would like to point out that I managed to make a very tasty dinner with out burning a single item. Dinner was good because I did not make turkey. I've yet to cook a turkey that did not have the texture of shoe leather. I made a standing rib roast. Everyone raves about my rib roast. The thing is, you can not mess a rib roast up. You rub it with salt, pepper and fresh rosemary pop it in the oven at 300 degrees and leave it the hell alone for a couple of hours. That I can handle. I'd like to thank Mark for having the gas turned on at the house just for this occasion. No more making pasta in the microwave for us!

The day after Thanksgiving, it was back to work on the table. Sanding, staining the edges and more sanding. We are now ready for varnish. I am regretting not getting the varnishing done already. Having to entertain and care for a baby while working on a project will slow you down. My reason for regret is that Mark has made a friend at the marina who has a boat with "immaculate brightwork".

How did it get so immaculate? Apparently this chap has perfected a varnishing method that requires 20 coats of some epoxy type varnish, copious amounts of sanding and additional buffing of the finished bright work. As if the old method of varnishing and sanding wasn't time consuming enough, Mark has to meet the one guy in the marina who likes to over do things as much as he does and now has a "superior method" for me to perfect. Le sigh. I have never been so thankful for the limited amount of brightwork on Ceol Mor as I am just now.