Answer: "Laying glass tile and cultured stone." Question: "Name two ways of cementing a friendship?" (With bonus deleted pics)

I would like to begin by issuing a huuuuge thank you to our friends, newly christened Okanagan residents (Kelowna), Neal and Kelly who sacrificed their weekend to school us in the finer points of installing our kitchen backsplash and the stone on our fireplace.

They're excellent teachers because within a few minutes, Kelly put Sarah to work.

I was unable to participate in the "fun" but from what I understand, the tiling went quite well and it took only about three hours to get the backsplash completed. Notice the red T-shirt twins getting ready for the big reveal.

Tah-dah! Not too bad, hey?

We took a leisurely wine and cheese dinner break before Kelly and Neal were cracking the whip for us to get back to work and squeeze in a few hours of painting the bedrooms and bathroom. My suggestion for anyone with a fair amount of painting to do - if you plan on doing it yourself - I highly recommend enticing/bribing/begging a couple of friends to help out. It makes the work much more enjoyable and it's amazing how much gets done. Also we'd like to give a shout out to Kelly for her paint colour suggestions. They look fantastic!

Move to Sunday morning and we're prepping to begin stoning the fireplace. This is the before picture,

This is Neal performing the inaugural cut with the wet tile machine,

This is me setting the first section of stone, (what a messy, sloppy job)

A few hours later and not without a few glitches, setbacks, expletives and some re-cutting - and if you've used a tile saw, you know how messy they are - we were making slow progress.

By the end of a day's work, it turned out pretty, pretty good. We've got a considerable amount of work to do before the stone is finished but it's gonna look really nice. Credit my wife for her vision on this one.

*EDITOR'S CUTTING ROOM PICS, SEE BELOW

I suppose there area couple of ways to hang tile. Turns out Sarah found an entirely new method. Pilates, anyone?

Neal was the eternal optimist throughout the weekend and it was nice to have him around.

. . . He even talked me into installing a classy new porta-potty by the pool!

Happy Valentine's Day! What better way to spend the evening than to spend the evening with our first upstairs meal?

Two kinda pizza, deep dish and thin crust, Cedar Creek Merlot and the best company in the world. We're optimistic we'll actually be upstairs by this time next year.