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Monday, November 2, 2020

I don't like to stretch

Hey All... good day. 

I'll spare you the reading about how I never blog anymore... you already know that.  I wish I could get back into it, but I just feel like I have nothing to say.

I'm getting old.  I've gained more weight than I want (before COVID even hit) and I'm having a real tough time dropping those extra pounds.  It's sad that the main reason I've even realized I need to drop them is because of some health issues ... nothing major (yet), just some acid reflux that I've never had before and some sciatic nerve pain that I've been dealing with.  

In effort to try and lose some weight I've been working out a few times a week, but haven't really been able to get my eating to change... I don't eat fast food as a rule, but I also don't eat a lot of veggies with every meal.  So I'm not super unhealthy, but I think I just eat more than I should most of the time.  If only I could get portion size under control, I think it would help a great deal.  

The other part is I've been looking up how to deal with this sciatic issue, there will be times when I'm in a certain position and my leg will get tingly and start to feel like it's falling asleep after just a couple seconds.   So there are a whole bunch of stretches that you can do to help and I thought... 'oh, this'll be easy for me to do on breaks at work'... but as I sit here and try to find the right stretches, all I can think is 'ugh, I hate stretching, this sounds like such a chore'.  I think this might make me the odd man out a little bit... I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they don't like to stretch, so that makes me feel silly.  

I know that I have to do it in order to help, but stretching makes me feel uncomfortable and never leaves me feeling much better.  This must be the same reason I don't have the patience for yoga... I've tried that before and could never get into it.

Well anyways, that is all I have to say today.  I hope everyone is staying safe from COVID and gearing up for a winter of quarantine 😠

~Cheers~
Ang

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Black Pipe Bar Shelf

Well Hello Lovelies!  It's been a minute, eh?

So, I wanted to post something I made last winter, cause I'm pretty proud of it and it took a lot of research and thinking to pull it off.

Here is the finished product:

Since finishing our porch Lounge (we're actually calling it the Hotel Lobby Lounge Bar now) we knew we needed something to hold all our booze... not that we have a problem, but we are adults and every adult that drinks needs a nice place to store everything, amIright?

So I started googling black pipe bar carts and bar shelves... there are some really neat ideas out there, but nothing has clear instructions on how to build it, so ... not only do I get to create my own design, but I get to figure out how to make it too (insert sarcastic great! here).

First things first, Steve wanted it to have nice thick wood, so we hit up a local lumbar yard and find some nice walnut and have them make the shelves for us (glue up, plane, etc.) - work we're not capable of doing because we just don't have the tools or experience.  We want them right.  They turned out beautiful, so the next step is to sand and poly them, the first coat of poly turned out so wonderful and really brought out the grain in the wood... I was so impressed and so much more excited to put this shelf together now that the wood is turning out so great!

raw wood on the right, wood with one coat of poly on the left

I really cranked up the contrast on this one to show the deep grain in the wood




So now the plan is to draw up the shelf; we had a lot of talks about what we wanted in this shelf, ultimately we wanted a big bottom shelf to hold bottles of booze and a top shelf working surface.  The middle shelf had a lot of different plans: wine bottle holder? shelf for glasses? hanging wine glasses? wine bottle storage plus a place for glasses?  We decided that we have enough wine bottle holders around the house so we really don't need more places for bottles, so we'll just make the middle shelf a skinny shelf to hold a few glasses for making drinks in and whatnot.  I drew it up, because there was no way I could figure this out without having it clearly measured out and figured out in advance.. I needed to buy black pipe based on dimensions.

So we obviously had the shelves made to fit the space we planned to put this shelf, we also bought a piece of Maple for the skinny middle shelf (the Walnut shelves were far from cheap and we didn't want the overall weight to be too much to move around on our own).  I put poly on the maple shelf too, but it wasn't exciting enough to take a picture of, apparently.  

So next is to spend hours in the black pipe shelf aisle at Menards to figure out what length pipe I could use where, where I needed connectors, how I was going to do the feet, how to incorporate a 'railing' of sorts so bottle aren't falling off with our old house and the floors being shaky and unbalanced.  SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT.  I ended up pretty frustrated after my first visit... so I quit.  I told Steve I'd never be able to figure this out and told him we'll just build something else with the wood we bought.  He knows me well enough to know that I don't quit anything and sometimes I just need time to process and think.  So he left it alone and told me if I need help, he will go sit in the aisle with me and help me figure it out.

FFWD a few weeks and I decide I'm ready to think about it again.  I ask him to join me in the black pipe aisle.  we make a night of it.  I show him my drawing and explain all the thoughts, dimensions, and ways to make everything equal out to our shelf depth.  We end up figuring out what we need for the most part.  

There was a lot of frustration in this stage because, apparently black pipe doesn't just screw together... yeah, you heard that right... you buy pipe, fittings, etc and you can't just screw it together.  After talking with some people at work I realize that I need to have some special sanding paper for pipe (cause the threads often have burrs on them) and a lubricant that makes the pipe threading easier.  After spending a few nights watching Big Mouth while peeling stickers off pipe, sanding the ends of all the pipe, and ruining my nails in the process, I finally can make some connections!!

If only I had a nice shelf to store all my alcohol bottles... I went through many drinks making this damn shelf.

I didn't take any photos while I was making the shelf, but basically, I took and made all the arms that  would hold the shelves first and then connected them from the bottom up.  I did have to solicit help from Steve a few times to be some muscle for me... turns out you have to get each pipe to line up perfect to connect the next, but you can't have it too loose or else it's wobbly.  I really didn't know this was going to be as much work as it was.







After I got the frame together, I had Steve figure out the best way to connect the shelves (having 2 cats, I wanted them to be screwed on, so nothing would move).  Additionally, the black pipe connections made the wood wobble so we needed to make sure they were secure in the same spots the entire length of the board.

He did a great job getting everything in place for me and I am so thankful for having such a supportive husband that is willing to help me and smart enough to figure this shit out when I can't.

Here are a few photos after I got everything in place and while I was figuring out what things to put on the top shelf.  We also have a nice fancy beverage center next to the shelf for our cold items:






~Cheers~
Ang

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

The Lounge...

...formerly known as our porch... being that everyone keeps asking "is it heated out there" I figure we should just call it something other than the porch from now on.

It's new purpose is a bar/lounge, so I'm going to test the waters calling it "The Lounge".

A quick photo journey of it's many stages:
Gross Brown and Cream when we first moved in

I painted the walls Purple first

with plans to change the ceiling and trim to bright White
Just priming the ceiling changed the entire feel of the room
White ceiling

Trim finally white
Then we decided to rip apart the ceiling; see those photos in this post.  All my hard work painting that ceiling... just ripped apart.

We have a couple different lighting options out there now:
Center light with a soft white temperature 

4 corner lights with Amber temperature (more of a mood lighting)

nicely lit room with all lights on

The finished product!
What's really cool is that all of the fixture 'globes' have matching patterns.  About 90% of the globes in our home have this same matching pattern.  I think that's pretty neat.
Here's a close up:

That's all folks!

~Cheers~
Ang

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Porch Project 2017-2018

Yo Loyal Fans... how I've missed you all!

Remember back in 2016 when I posted about a Patio Project Steve and I had started?  and then in early 2017, I shared a finished photo of that same patio?

Well... if you notice in those photos, there is no light on the front of our house (off the 4 season porch), which means on these dark fall nights I sit in the dark... not really all that cool.  So the next order of business after the completion was to put a light out there.  Well, as it turns out our home was built in 1923 and the wiring isn't as straight forward as any other house.  I won't pretend to know anything about electrical work, but something about needing a ground wire from somewhere.. so the electrician says we might be able to pull one from the center light in the porch... the ceiling of the porch looks like this:
so... both Steve and I being willing to get rid of that ceiling and upper wall, decided to rip it out and see if we can run the ground wire from there.

Here's the process of that... (PSA: demo day on Fixer Upper looks way more fun than it is):






Cool.. that only took a few weeks - turns out a full time job takes up a lot of free time for such projects.  Steve has this idea to add some lights out there but then wait... and even better idea...  let's build a coffered ceiling, so he has to figure out where these new lights need to go and get boxes hung... cool. 

He gets that done and we call the electrician out to wire it all up, next thing I know, we have a damn light on the front of our house, just in time for Halloween 2017:

Next things next... insulation; the people we hire are a few weeks out.. so we wait.  This is complete the end of November 2017:
spray foam insulation
Next step: hang Sheetrock




Cool beans, right?

Now comes the hard part; our 1923 home is not square nor is it level... so we lay out a grid for the boxes:

Then Steve has to get to thinking... and I'll just leave you with the building of the boxes in photo form - from base blocks to complete with antique ceiling tiles and crown molding:












There is so much detail that you can't even imaging, including but not limited to filling nail holes and sanding them and caulking all the gaps...

So this past weekend we got everything primed to be painted (we'll be painting everything white to match the window trim):




We're working our asses off this week so we can have this room open for the weekend and for Halloween 2018 next week... but I tell ya what... I'm sore.  My neck, my back, my shoulders, my arms.  Holy Hannah.  It's been a long process, and I'd never go out of my way to build a fancy ceiling again, but I gotta say... it looks amazing and I'm so proud of my husband for building this!

I'll post some final photos once it's done, hopefully after the weekend!

~Cheers~
Ang

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