Our kids come through the door after a long day of school and their packs and shoes either overwhelm our small laundry room or randomly fall from their little bodies like leaves from a tree, if that tree was able to walk around and randomly drop things all through the house.
We want to change that:
Gabe had a free form assignment to make a model of the solar system. The lovely wife and Gabe batted some ideas around and got to work:
Laying out the planet orbits:
Laying out the asteroid belt:
Proud Gabe shows off his creation:
Click for full size- photo credit to Paula Movie
Speaking of Graydon, this is a scan of a portrait she drew of me. I’m using my parental perogative and calling it Picasso-like:
Ooops. Long time with no posts!
Graydon had been asking about making a birdhouse for ages, so we gave it a go. Click images for full size.
We started with the hand saw, but used the power miter saw later for our 45 degree cuts.
I had some stainless exterior screws left over from a [Gaines] project, so we screwed the roof on instead of nailing to make cleaning out the house easier.
This was a super easy project. The cedar fence plank was about $2.50, a small pack of stainless wire nails was another $1.50.
The inspiration was a [Ana White] post, with some technical details on the hole size and placement from [wild-bird-watching.com]. We went with a chickadee size hole and Graydon looks like a happy builder.
A pair of old floor lamps had made their way into the garage, which is the lovely wife’s way of saying “put this in the trash”. I disassembled the lamps to keep the push button floor switches and decided to try to make something out of the bases.
Two rules for this project. The first was $0 spent. Anything on hand that wasn’t earmarked for another project was fair game. The second was that it was a junk box from scrap, so no spending a lot of time fussing over it. The goal was to make it look good while also putting it together quick and dirty style.
My leap into changing my disc brakes turned into a leap of disc brakes + rotor. The upside is that it turns out that doing disc brakes are way easier than drum brakes.
Also, got an assist from Charlie Kate. It was kind of neat to see her figure out where the lug nuts went and watching her put them back on. The gif below came from a series of phone pics that Google went and did their [Auto Awesome] thing.
Here’s a static shot if the one above is making the dear reader a bit seasick…
We had to have a few trees taken down at the Anderson Rocky Valley Estates. I had hoped they would rebound and push out green leaves, as they were nice tall oak trees, but it wasn’t to be.
When the tree service folks came, I had them cut the trees down and leave them on the ground. Turned out to be a lot of wood…
First tree project is firewood. The lovely wife’s parents have a wood burning fireplace, I have a bunch of wood, wasn’t much of a stretch to make firewood.
Step 1: Build firewood rack. Simple stuff here, pressure treated 2×4 and 4×4 pine with deck screws and galvanized lag bolts.
Step 2: Knock the logs down into firewood. Chainsaw and a splitting maul made for fun work. Several different muscle groups vigorously protested upon being pressed into service after a long hiatus. I wasn’t sure how much firewood would fit the rack I built, so I guesstimated at 1 trailerful:
Step 3: Deliver rack and wood:
That managed to use up about 10% of the fallen trees I have in my yard. Stay tuned for other projects.
