Anyone seen a MUG 'round Here?
Well things have kind of calmed down, though work is keeping me busy and so is working on the the house. There are still a lot of things that need to be done that I haven't gotten to yet, but I think that I will be able to accomplish everything in the next month. By that time I hope the weather will have warmed up so that it is more summer like and then maybe I will have a chance to enjoy it. I'd like to have more time to do some bike riding and I haven't been able to do as much as I would have liked. The other thing that I would like to find more time for is getting the local MUG back off the ground. Hopefully, I will be able to get some help with it this time around.
Weekend Projects...
These last two weekends we have been extremely busy working on the house...
and finishing up some of the projects we had started before last winter and then were not able to finish. Clicking on any of the above photos should open another, higher quality image of the same photos. Photos are described in row order from left to right, top to bottom.
In the first photo, we took all the shutters down, stripped the paint, filled holes, sanded, re-stained and replaced all the mounting hardware.
The second photo is of a rain barrel made from an old keg. The drain pipe coming off the roof had to have a 75mm section cut out, then a special piece put in which has a chamber for catching rain water and funneling it off as well as a bypass for when the keg is full. We also had to build the stand for the keg to keep it high enough off the ground to put a watering can underneath the spout.
The third photo is of the entry way to the house, which Adriane repainted in a light tan. The floor here is not level and slopes down from the stairs towards the front door. I had the wardrobe leveled out using some scrap lumber, but finally found some pine legs that would fit under and so all I had to do was use the miter saw to trim them down to the correct height.
The next photo isn't really as bright as I would like. The stairway had been painted white with a peach trim which we hated. The upper part is painted in the same tan tone as the entry way and the bottom is painted in a gray-blue. We're looking for a nice wall paper trim in a maritime theme to finish it and then we'll hang all the light houses and stuff back in there.
We got new balcony furniture, but I miscalculated with width and so the couch was 3cm wider that the balcony was. A friend and I remedied this by removing the balcony railing and adding a spacer 3cm thick extended the railing and allowing the couch to fit. It doesn't sound so hard, but if you had seen the number of screws (and their length) holding the railing you'd appreciate the amount of effort that this took.
Lastly, the garage. I had put the garage door opener in a few weeks ago. There was a small junction box on the wall that was packed full and had no more capacity to add anything else. So I had to use a power strip plugged into another outlet and then tie-wrapped to the garage door supports. The last weekend I spent a full Saturday disconnecting everything in the old j-box, removed it and replaced it with a larger one, ran the wire for the outside light, moved the light switch from the center of the wall to the end closed to where you enter from the house, removed the old light and switch (circa 1950's), and mounted a double, covered outlet in the ceiling. The only thing left is to clean-up the wiring for the light and patch some holes where the old stuff had been mounted and then plastered over.
It's been a busy, but productive few weeks. Feels like I will be getting all this done just in time to leave.
