potpourri

Before I start on what we have been doing, here are a couple of fun things.

I ran across this while researching auto parts.
Monkey Business

Ian sent me this link.
Nerd Sniping

Dianne and I have been preparing for a remodel of our master bedroom including adding square footage to the upstairs. The start date moved up recently so projects already started have come to a halt and we are concentrating on the preparation for construction.

One of the things we have done is clean out our wood pile. I put some pieces aside that I thought might be fun to work with. I stripped the bark off one piece. The picture at the top is a closeup of what the insects have done. Here's a picture of the complete piece of wood.

Our front door has been leaking air since we moved in. Before we owned the house someone had cracked the door frame, and the previous owners had installed the tile floor without raising the threshold. We bought a used door at an architectural salvage place and had it installed. Dianne is making curtains for the glass that will allow the dogs to look out, and provide privacy from people standing outside.

Until the curtains are up we have to remember to close our bedroom door when we are not dressed!

I have been working on refinishing a set of chairs. This is one of the projects on hold. I was going to wait until further into the project to post pictures, but that might not be until much later in the year. Therefore I will brag now.

These are bend wood chairs that we bought used several years ago. The finish failed and the chairs came apart at the joint. The seat is plywood which pushed all the joint apart as the wood dried out to Colorado humidity.

I'm stripping all the old finish off. I started with the worst chair which had a piece missing. If you look at the left tip of the picture below you will see the grain does not match. This is my first attempt at replacing missing pieces of wood on furniture. The next picture shows the patch from the back of the chair.


This weekend I took time to go the the Tri-State Swap Meet, a very large auto event that attracts people from several states, and vendors from across the country. I spent $16 to park and get in, and $15 on stuff. I won't talk about the economics of this. I did have fun.

If you were interested in some of the popular makes and models of old car (Mustang, bucket model T, some Chevy, ...) you could buy every part here and assemble the car in the parking lot.

This is the car corral where most of the for sale complete cars were. I'm guessing that this takes up less that a tenth of the total show space.

When I got home I went back to preparing for the construction. The dogs' sandbox will be in the way and had to be emptied. In the background next to the bench is the sand pile. The sandbox is 8 feet by 11 or 12 feet and averages 1 1/2 feet deep. THATS A LOT OF SAND! I finished Sunday.