So much for that goal of mine...

Much like you yourself are doing right this very moment, I spent a good portion of my free time this holiday break surfing the internet and reading stuff online when I could have actually been productive. In fact, I did a lot of things to avoid being productive. Oh sure, I had grand plans for the time off. I was going to finish the bathroom by the end of the year, so our kids could be brushing their teeth, showering and pooping in their grand new space while we could spend the next several days disinfecting the guest bathroom that they've now trashed. But as usual, the real world got in the way. Holiday parties, movies with the kids, and mornings sleeping in got the best of me.

While I certainly made SOME progress on the bathroom redo, along with the regular vacation distractions I my progress was also hampered by a family of mice that decided to make the wall behind the bathroom its home for the winter. Several evenings were spent trapping and disposing of the little critters and/or coordinating a plan of attack. The good news is that these were perhaps the stupidest mice around, and big fans of peanut butter. I'd place a trap each evening, and the next day I'd be getting rid of a little bugger. Seven days, seven mice. You'd think after two or three family members met their demise they'd avoid that scary thing that smelled of peanuts and find food elsewhere.

Despite my time spent hunting, I managed to finish the walls and begin building a medicine cabinet. Since I have two young daughters that will eventually have MASSIVE bathroom storage needs, I was looking for more than the typical wall-mount medicine cabinet the depth of a box of spaghetti. Instead, I wanted something as cavernous as a Ford Expedition. After a couple of visits to Home Depot I determined that I would be on my own to devise something. Fine by me. Conveniently the wall in which this cabinet is to be installed is a "plumber's wall", meaning it's over a foot deep and backs up to the other bathroom, so there's plenty of space to install whatever I want. I started with the reciprocating saw, tearing out a hole in the wall to make way for the cabinet. It was at this point I made one major mistake. I didn't quite realize the amount of vibration that the saw would cause, and during the tear out I managed to shake the wall so violently I caused a collection of glass candles in the guest bathroom on the opposite side of the wall to fall and shatter...in the toilet. I spent the next hour picking out shards of glass from there, thanking all that was holy that whomever last pooped in there had remembered to flush.

So far I've built the box that will make up the cabinet, and even surprised myself with the fact that it fit into the hole perfectly with the first try. I'm now working on the door, hoping against hope that I don't accidentally drop a trim router on the mirror as I do.

Speaking of routers, this project marks the first official use of my new router table. Dad and I built this into my table saw during his last visit, and it marks the introduction of a whole new set of opportunities to spend time in the workshop, as well as opportunities to spend money at my local Rockler store.