My dirty little secret

I'm not 100% certain why, although I'm fairly sure it has something to do with the amount Super Mario Bros I played as a child, but I love plumbing. Seriously, I LOVE plumbing. I'm sure somewhere deep down in my soul I have a place that's made almost entirely of rusty pipes, valves, and wrenches.

How much do I love plumbing? Shortly after we moved into our house I decided we needed a new faucet on the kitchen sink. It actually had something to do with the sprayer breaking but it's been a while. So I wedged myself into the funky space under and behind the sink and changed the faucet.

If you're looking for a quick and relatively easy improvement I highly suggest changing a faucet. It looks awesome when you're done, it's totally satisfying, you get all dirty so it looks like you actually did "real work", and it only takes about an hour.

Anyway....Recently we had a major pipe burst. By major I mean that it flooded the neighbors driveway and we were without water for about a week. On the outside I was saying "Holy crap! This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened!" Yeah, I'm a bit of a drama queen. But on the inside, I was squealing like a little girl "Eeeeee! I get to use my tools!"

So my husband set about finding the leak.



It was conveniently located in our neighbors yard under an oak tree. We took turns chopping and digging. One of us had the axe and arbitrarily hacked at the ground till we got tired then the other one shovelled the loose dirt and root bits out of the way. Funtastical-ness.

My mom even came over and helped dig. Eventually we ended up with this.



Upon first inspection what we have is unexplainable plumbing stupidity. What we actually have is the location of the former T joint where my house and the neighbor's house were being supplied with water off the same meter. That elbow doesn't actually have any water flowing in it, its just a dead pipe. The straight pipe with the compression fitting and cap is mine, I've got water flowing nowhere.

First I tried to cut it.



But I broke my tool and ended up just taking the compression fitting off.

This is what I found on the underside of the nipple.



The hole was so big I could seriously put my pinky all the way into it.

Hmm, I feel like I just got some glazed looks when I used the word nipple.

Here,




Better?

I ended up replacing everything from the old compression fitting down with new stuff because I couldn't figure out how to weld steel. ( And, I was getting tired of the idiots at Lowe's talking to me like a mental patient)

So here it is now.



Yeah. I did that. I even used pink thread tape so if anyone else ever needs to dig it up they'll have some clue that a girl did it. And...Yes, that's a brick "holding" it in place. I wedged the brick between the end of the new plumbing and the side of the hole just in case.

Hey, I said I love it, I didn't say I was good at it.

The best part about this is that to have a plumber come out and simply tell us it's broke would have cost $70. Then it would be $400 or more to have them dig up the yard and actually fix the thing. So in the end it would have been $500+ to fix a rusted pipe.

What was the cost doing it myself? About $12.

It would have only been $6 but I had to buy everything twice because I'm solid muscle and I over tightened the first fitting and stripped all the threads off.

Dirty little secret no more!

Later.


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Roadside Rescue

I'm fairly certain this will turn into a series. Mostly because I pick up a lot of stuff off the side of the road and not everything is deserving of a name.

Anyway, Tom and I were rolling through Antioch at 3 am bumping our newest mashup mix-tape and I spotted a busted up piece of furniture on the side of the road. Naturally, I stopped because it was just too cute to pass up. (Yeah, I just used rolling, bumping, and cute in the same sentence. I'm so ghetto-fabulous. I thought you knew.)

Fortunately, none of the wood was actually damaged, it just needed to be reassembled.

I didn't get a before picture of my own (I'm far too enthusiastic for that) so I took one from the Internet. This is basically what it looked like after I pieced it back together.





Nothing fancy, just a little bench thing.

Here's mine right before I put the upholstery on. Oh yeah, and my Husband playing air guitar on the baby.



This is what it looks like now.



Not too bad, huh!? The husband wants to sell it. I suppose I'll be setting up an Etsy store soon.

Later!

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My Humble Abode (A Series)

I've said before that my family moved into our current house in 2010. At the time there were only four of us and the house seemed to fit well. There were three bedrooms and a pastel pink bathroom.

I discovered quickly that no home is ever perfect. Three weeks later I was actively ignoring my husbands prodding about how late my period was. Eventually I was forced to admit that I was very pregnant and with that came the fact that our new house was about to get much much smaller.

We set out to finish the partially finished upstairs. Now, by "partially finished" I mean that I'm pretty sure the people that rented it before we bought it were growing pot up there. There were some random walls, with some random holes in them, very large industrial garage lamps, and assorted crap.

I don't have pictures but trust me, it was bad.

Now we have a hallway that leads to The Monkey's room and the attic. Yay! It's not perfect, we still need to put some trim up, and paint but at least we've got enough room for the kids.

The unfortunate part was that we didn't have the time or the funds to fix the stairs. So we basically had a hermit kid that seemed to live in the attic. It was fun for a while. I really enjoyed telling people we fed her buckets of fish heads.

We recently got the stairs finished. Yay! Again, by finished, I mean someone else built them and I'm responsible for smoothing, priming, painting, and poly-ing. It's an incredibly slow process, but it needs to be done.

Here is what we had before.






Fun, right?

No.

Well, the stairs are all rebuilt and looking nice. I'm finishing the walls and whatnot right now and pretty soon I'll get to show you what all that looks like!

Oh, and no one has answered the giveaway question.

Later!

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Oh Joyous Rapture

Has anyone heard that Incubus song "New Skin"?

No? Oh well.

Anyway, check out this intense mastery of your sensory perception!



Woohoo!

You don't get it do you?

I just made you see blue! I did that. I just momentarily took control of your brain!

No?

Ok, let me explain.

So, in the real world what would happen is you would look at a piece of wood thats actually in front of your face. White light (from a bulb or the sun) would hit the wood and everything but the blue light would get absorbed by the wood and the blue light would be left to bounce off. And so, since your eye is aimed at the piece of wood, your eye is collecting the light that just bounced off the wood. Cool, huh? You wait, that was just the physics.

Ok, in our real world example, your eye just caught some blue light. It just stays bouncing around in there forever, right? WRONG. We all have these neat little structures dispersed around the back of our eye that are designed to be sensitive to specific types of light. Rods and Cones, you've probably heard of them. The Rods pick up light intensity, how bright something is. (They're the ones that leave that little white dot when you look at a camera flash) they work kind of like those "Measure Your Strength" carnival games.


Was I right? Just like the carnival game. The the light hits the Rod and the rod says how bright it is. DING

The Cones are responsible for telling the different colors apart. Guess what? There are three different types of Cones! (First person to correctly tell me what the three different types of Cones are responsible for in the comments below will get a custom antiqued mirror a'la Elizabeth)

After the light hits the rods and cones they send the information along a series of small nerves to the main optic nerve of each eye. Watch out for those blind spots. Those nerves meet up at a little junction called the optic chiasm and split into two parts. So now we have light information about a single image broken up into four parts. Two parts, two eyes, two plus two is four, yes? Ok, moving along. Your brain takes those four parts to four different places in your brain for processing.

Once all that is processed, your brain sends the processed information to other parts of your brain. When it gets to the linguistic center you may say to yourself, "that's a nice blue". When it gets to the memory center it might bring up that episode of The X-Files when the guy with brain cancer kept saying "cerulean" until a police officer drove into a semi-truck.

Anyway, I TOTALLY just hijacked your brain.

And I'm going to do it again.



I made you see red!

Here's another one. What do blue and red make?



Purple!!

Um, oh yeah. This is a blog about my awesome stuff. What in the hey does all this have to do with all my stuff?

Well, those colors are actually wood stains that I made. Yeah that's right, Minwax doesn't have purple wood stain but I do.



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Jacinda's Makeover

Oh Jacinda, she is quite possibly the most sultry piece of furniture I've ever laid my eyes on.

Unfortunately she was a little under the weather. Her last, uh, uh, lover? kept her in a garage and forced her to hold up a sofa. Poor girl (I think it was an abusive relationship).

Anyway, all that's over now. I've got her and I'm giving her a fabulous makeover.

Just a sneak.



Look everybody! It's Jacinda-henge!

Oh yeah, she's going to be purple. It just gives you the tingly shivers doesn't it? The color is called Blackberry Harvest. It's rich and velvety like good milk chocolate.

I'm on a major purple kick right now so pretty much everything I'm churning out is some shade of purple. Let me know if you get tired of it.


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The Beautification of Elizabeth

Meet Elizabeth.



When I first saw her at the Habitat for Humanity Restore (I'm going to call that place The Cashville Orphanage from now on) in Nashville I knew I had to get my hands on her. Luckily for me Tom saw her too, and he "needs" a replacement medicine cabinet for his bathroom redo. So he forked over the outrageous sum of $16.50 and I brought her home.

Wait? Did I say "Medicine Cabinet"? Yes. Yes I did.

This is what the inside looked like.


Ewwwww.

When I got her home, I took her apart, cleaned her *gag*, and fancied her up.
Now-a she-a looks-a like-a dis-a!



Here are some "before and after" pics.

The frame



The cabinet.



The mirror.



I like her.

The whole process only took a couple of hours but I had to space it out over about two days. Stupid laundry.


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Gaman

In January of 2010 my family moved into our current home. It was roughly triple the size of our previous home. As we unpacked boxes and boxes of previously stored goodies I quickly realized that what we seriously lacked was vertical storage.

I spent a fair amount of time looking for some solid locally made bookcase, because that's the kind of thing that makes my husband happy. (HI JEFF!!! ) Everything I found was unbelievably expensive. Then I spent some time looking at thrift or secondhand stores, because that's the kind of thing that makes me happy. I couldn't find anything I liked enough to commit to rehabbing or refinishing it.

Ultimately I decided I'd just build one my own damn self. I think those were my exact words of exasperation when I brought it up to The Husband. Much to my surprise he was completely fine with it. Woo hoo!

I found the plan in a book on decks and gazebos I checked out from the library. I wish I could find that book again but the library gods apparently hate me because I haven't seen it since. I scaled it to the size I wanted and headed to Lowe's. A super nice, and patient, and attractive guy helped me cut all the wood to the sizes that I wanted. He actually set it all out on the floor and squared everything to make sure all the joints were right. It probably took about an hour and a half and I enjoyed it.

Anyway, when all that was done, I called in some construction instruction and got some schooling on how to properly place screws in joints that for all practical purposes shouldn't even exist. When that was done, I had built my first bookshelf!




Neat, huh!?

It was the first thing I had ever "built"! Yay! I was so freaking proud!

Of course, I'm in the middle of anchoring it to the wall so it doesn't kill anyone and The Husband says "So, you're just going to leave it like that?"
"Like what?"
"All RAW like that."
"Raw? What does that mean?"
" I just didn't think you were done."
POP!!!Fizzle...

Apparently he wanted me to carry the thing outside and stain it. At 2 in the morning. In the middle of January. In the snow. I'm sure you can see where THAT conversation was going.

So last week I bought a quart of Minwax Bombay Mahogany Poly-Shades. I cleared off the crazy shelf and enlisted The Monkey to help me get it on the porch.

Now it looks like this:


In all seriousness, If I had known almost three years ago that this shelf would turn out this beautiful, I would have gone out at 2 in the morning, in January, in the snow and stained it.

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