Garage Finished

The garage is finished! We got our slidelok cabinets installed yesterday and the floor was finished last week. I'm very happy with how it all turned out, now I just need to put back everything that's been moved out. It'll never look as nice again :(

The pool

I turned the magic switch that puts the pool water through the solar panels on the roof on Thursday and by Sunday the water had warmed up from 50 to 65°F. It feels cold once you're in but it should warm up more soon and it's actually fine for swimming. It was nice to finally get in the pool again, feels like ages since we last used it. Last year we could use the pool by April 15th so it's been a late spring for sure.

A very busy weekend

It was a very, very busy weekend. Saturday I assembled some IKEA furniture. I'm getting really good at it now. Here's some top tips, use glue. Take a kitchen towel and cut it into 1" strips and use these to clean up the excess glue that seeps out. Assemble it on the cardboard that it comes in. Since you're gluing stuff, be very very careful will the instructions and don't take a break until you're sure you have everything right.

Here's the biggest piece I made. It's great for showing off Pooh stuff (until the 'quake hits). We had a little difficulty picking it up, I'd checked it was in stock and when I went to pick it up, it was 'in the air' which meant I had to go back the next day, bitching and moaning about it was worth a $25 gift card though. I still need to align the doors a little. I'm pretty pleased with it. I also put together a toy box for the baby's room.

The rest of Saturday and almost all of Sunday I worked on emptying out the garage, we're getting the floor epoxied this week, in preparation for the cabinets coming in a few weeks. It's going to look great! I've never seen the garage empty, since there was a tenant when I moved in and we bought the house while we were renting it. It's amazing how much stuff we have in there (too much leftover wood from other projects) and hopefully the cabinets will help us keep it organized. I cleaned the curbs since we didn't want them pressure washing it and damaging our new walls.

I also learned all about SketchUp this weekend and want a model of our home in the worst way, I'm going to have to work pretty hard on making that happen.

Drywall Garaged

The Drywall in the garage is done. I admitted defeat and we hired someone to finish it off. Who knows how much we saved (or cost) ourselves with the amount of drywall hanging we actually did, but it's done now and I'm happy about it. This weekend we'll be sealing it with drywall sealer and then painting it and then I can put in some pimpin' cabinets and finally put everything away, finally! The drywall guys were quick, they finished the job in under 2 days.

I also got a mirror and shelves for the bathroom medicine cabinet I've been building for the last 2 years. There's nothing like having a baby to make you want to get everything in order. There's still some work to be done on it, but it's going well.

New Tower of Fun

Ginger Cat's immense ass finally killed the $30 wal-mart tower of fun we had in the bay window. There was a huge crash and there it was on the ground and Ginger Cat was all wide eyed and freaked out. We went out the next night looking for a replacement and found one that was really nice and not as expensive as the $400 tree like structures they were selling.

Here you can see Oreo and Ginger Cat checking it out, the best feature is the holes in the top and bottom shelf. They love twocking each other in the head between them. It's also in the window by the fireplace which means the big bay window is wide open and the living room looks much bigger now.

It's curtains for me!

I put up 30ft of curtain this weekend. Finally our living room and den has curtains. To try and keep the heat in we got velvet curtains and they all look great. They cover both the windows and the doors and are nicely out of the way when they're open. I really don't like the curtain rods you get at the store (the ones where one rod slides inside another rod) and custom made curtain rods are super expensive so I made my own out of 1/2" iron pipe. It cost $100 for 5 rods one of which was 12ft long. I cleaned, metal etched and then spray painted them black and they look great! I'm super happy with how they turned out.

Macro Photo Time!

I borrowed some extension rings for macro photography from my camera geek coworker, hoping to get some good pictures for the field guide. Well we lucked out, we didn't see anything new, but our first find was a ringneck snake who was stuck in the pool (and cold and slow) He was a great study for a lot of pictures. On Sunday we found two more ringnecks one may have been the pool swimmer. I added pictures in their own ringneck gallery.

We also got a few pictures of a Western Fence Lizard.

Using the extension rings was a pain, there is such a small distance from the lens that is in focus, I really need to learn more about using them.