Recycling Milk

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, and finally got around to it..... definitely should've done it a while ago. I cut small notches in two sides of a milk crate, making two recycling bag holders.

Bag Notch

Crate with Two Bags

"Uncle Frank"

I've been pondering the idea of putting an animal mount in my stairwell for a while, and after Jeremiah forwarded me a craigslist posting advertising 2 caribou and 8 deer head being sold, the idea came to fruition.

It looks even better than I thought it would. The pictures really don't even do it justice. The amount the head comes out of the wall and commands attention is incredible. Standing at the top of the stairs, your eyes are just about in line with his, and as you walk down the stairs and look up, you gain additional perspective on his antlers.


I like how it looks and (although it sounds kind of lame) the earthy feel it gives to my otherwise calculated interior so much that I think I want to get more. The woman I got it from has 8 or more deer heads still for sale and last night my friend Nick had a pretty amazing idea to place one at each end of my dining room table, coming out from the center of foam that I have mounted on them. The contrast of the highly geometric, entirely man-made foam with a large wild animal would be really impressive I think.

Here's what the wall looks like on both sides of my dining room table (just one side shown, but it's the same on both).

Transitions

This is a fairly unexciting topic, but it took me a while to do this and I'd been putting off doing it for so long, I think it deserves its own post.  I installed transition strips/thresholds this weekend between the cork floor and the sliding glass windows and the bathroom tile.  It wasn't a big deal, but also took some finagling to get right.  Pictured above is the transition by the front sliding glass window.

Not shown is the one I did for the other sliding glass window and the bathroom strip.  For the other sliding glass one, I cut small holes in the strip on the two ends so I could run some speaker wire under it and have my movie area wired for sound.  I'll take some pics of that when I document the main living room area and projector screen sometime soon.

Room Curtains!

I spent many-a-mornings with my room bright as the day because all I had on the sliding glass doors to prevent the light from coming in was a thin white sheet.  Last week though, my mom took the extra material from the curtain in the living room and made it into curtains for my bedroom!  I think it looks pretty great, and it definitely works well to keep the sun out.

It even allows me to leave my plants and my cats' bed in the window box and lets them get sun while keeping it out of the room.

In this picture you can also see that I've made a little seating area by the window.  My bed had been in the middle of the room, with a night stand to the right of it, but I moved that towards the door of the room and brought in two of the old-school/retro office chairs I have.  Now you can sit there and read or watch TV or just lounge.  I'm really liking the way the room feels with this area setup as opposed to before.

Ceiling Mounting the Projector

This weekend I worked on ceiling mounting my projector with my mom.  Since I got it, I've had the projector sitting on a little school desk between the couches.  It was fine while sitting down and watching movies, but walking in front of it caused you to be blinded by the bright light, and the power and video cables going to/from it were just asking for an accident.

I got a projector mount when I purchased the projector as part of the package, but in order to get the cables to/from it I needed to either install various types of video jacks in the ceiling, have cable run through the walls to another jack, where I'd plug things like my DVD player, comptuer etc into so that I could see them on the screen.  This would've been pretty expensive, so I went with the cheaper route of installing "raceway" from the projector, along the ceiling, to the wall, and then down.  Raceway is just a plastic guide for the cables to go in so they're not conspicuous.  It's fairly cheap and the sell it at Lowes and Home Depot.

I also had to cut out sections of my foam wall decorations/sound dampeners so that the raceway could run behind them, but that was pretty easy because of the fact that they're foam.

Once I finalize where my dvd player etc are going to be located, I'll run some more of the raceway horizontally along the wall to where it will end.  I also plan on getting a black power cable as opposed to the orange one you can see.

$450...

...is how much I'm going to get back on my taxes just from installing an energy efficient hot water heater ($300) and furnace ($150).

Definitely something to consider when considering upgrading appliances. Make sure to take advantage of this if you're able to.

It's about time...

Since I moved into my new house I've walked across the house every morning to shower in the guest bathroom which is off the living room. Then I'll come back to my room to walk through my bathroom to go into my closet, then maybe I'll have forgotten to brush my teeth, so I'll walk across the house again to go back to the other bathroom.

Before I bore you with the details of why that happened, I'll cut to the chase and show you the video of the bathroom tour. The begining's dark, so give it a second or two:



(ok, now get ready, this is gonna be boring)

There were a few reasons for my "master bathroom" (my mom hates that term, so I don't use it much and now it sounds a bit funny/pretentious) not being ready. First it was because the contractors didn't measure right for the cultured marble order and had to jury rig it slightly, and as a result, needed an extra piece to cover a joint. Then once I finally got that piece ordered and picked it up, I found that it was made slightly incorrectly and had to be replaced. Then I got it back, had the contractors come back in to install it, but realized that the caulking they'd used on the rest of the cultured marble was the wrong type. I got the right stuff for them and they came back, got rid of the old stuff and put the new stuff on. So all good, right?

Wrong.

They did a terrible job applying the caulking. The transition between the black caulking and the white wall looked horrible... it was varying thicknesses, not a straight line, missing in places, etc. Anyway, I was sick of relying on them to get it right so I decided to do it myself.

Removing the caulking kinda sucked, and after trying to put the new caulking on "free hand" with my mom, we realized that you really need to mask it off to make it look good. Sooo, we did that... then when I went to touch up scratches we'd made in the paint removing the old caulking, I discovered that masking tape doesn't stick to silicone caulking! This made painting pretty difficult.

After a good bit of work with all this, I think tonight I'm all set to use "my" bathroom for the first time tomorrow morning. I even installed the shower head my parents got me for x-mas that has a spinning center, haha.

Closet, I have it.

I finally installed the rod under my stairs for my coat rack. I have another idea I'd like to use for hooks hanging from the cieling, but that would be in addition to this. Wow, that picture's terrible.

Netflix should thank me...

... cuz I won't be driving over their DVDs anymore :P

Basket with cork back board

(Sorry for the poor photo)

I have a mailslot on my garage door, but no mailbox on the other side, so the mail just falls to the ground. My mom got me this plastic basket-type thing for x-mas to use as a mail basket and I finally got around to installing it on my garage door with a few bolts. After doing so I realized that the basket didn't return to it's normal position after the garage door went up and back down, making the mail miss the basket. To get around this, I bolted a piece of extra cork to the back of the basket, acting as a stop for the mail, as well as making it so people can't look into the garage.

Looking up at the basket on garage door in it's open position:

Number Ni... Seven.

I got this wood letter from Jo-Anna Fabrics, painted it with the same color paint as my siding and put three of the screw-bolts used to attach the siding in it (for show). It's too cold now, but when the weather's more temperate, I'm going to attach it to the concrete block with glue. For now I taped it to the front window though.