The website is coming along amazingly well!

The guys at EBTech are true professionals and I can highly recommend them for any website design. Ours is a smallish website, but they even do one page 'impact' sites or do-it-yourself mini-sites too. I've been told that they were responsible for the London 2010 Special Olympics website. Very cool.

Anyway, they've been fantastic to work with (and with my writing skills getting them the 'copy' that they were looking for was a breeze – almost).

I'm including a screen capture of one of the pages just to tease you a little – I can't wait for the full thing to go live so you can check it out in all its glory! I really expect this website to drive about half of our guests here and then the other half will be you telling your friends and some brochures that we leave around the area.

Whohoo!

Life is really, really exciting when you're living your dream-come-true. I know that when you visit that my dream for you is Bound To Please!

We are finally taking pictures for the website. It means that we're close enough to actually hosting that we can hide the construction mess for half an hour and take some really cool photos.

We're still working madly on the ceiling for the Fireside Room. The bulkhead that we built is nice and we've got the second coat of mud on the ceiling and should be ready for a final sanding tomorrow.

We're hoping to have a bunch of people over in a week's time – all new friends from around the community. The place won't be totally ready, but we'll be in good enough shape to host.

One of the things that I'm personally looking forward to is getting my TV room back – I now own a Microsoft Kinect Controller and a couple of new games for it, but the room is STUFFED with the furniture from the Fireside Room. That doesn't leave a lot of room for moving around and using the Kincet Controller.

I can't wait for you to join us – I'm certainly going to challenge you to a game of Dance Central – we'll see just how well you can dance!

The right tools make all the difference.

I've likely said that here before because I say it all the time pretty much everywhere I go.

One of the tools that we looked into renting was a drywall lifter while we were doing the workshop and wine room seventy-two hundred years ago (was that just six months ago? Really!?!)

Turns out that if you rented it three times you could have bought it. I knew that we'd need it more than three times and now that I have a storage area above the wine room I went out and bought one. The story is kinda funny and I'll tell it again because I can't remember typing it in here and I can't find it in the archives.

I found a drywall lifter at our local Rona and it was $300. That's a bit much but it would still be worth it if that's the only one I could find, but I found a website where it was less than half that price. The shipping on that bad boy had to be a LOT since it was so heavy.

I decided to see if I could figure out where they were shipping it from and maybe, just maybe it would be within driving distance. When I found the shipping information page it told me that the source was Leamington. Ten minutes from here. Seriously? Yup.

I called and asked if I could pick it up and avoid the shipping charges. Yup. I was there in ten minutes and home in 30 with a shiny new drywall lifter.

We have nine foot ceilings in the Fireside Room and if we didn't own such a cool tool, Sherry and I would stand on chairs and hold the 900lb drywall sheet over our heads while I frantically tried to screw some drywall screws into my side and then rush over to secure Sherry's before one of her arms fell off.

Now we put the drywall on the lifter, slide the machine into place, crank up the arm and I take a leisurely stroll around the machine with my super-cool-three-step-ladder and put the screws into place.

Judging by this photo I need a haircut. And a new pair of jeans.

With the super-smooth ceiling in the Fireside Room and with all the really cool Room Names that we've picked out for you I know that a relaxing book by the fire is Bound To Please!

P.S. The website is coming along amazingly well. I can't wait to show you!