Oh Christmas Tree

Tom's favorite holiday is Christmas and I would rather refer to it as a happy holiday.  Mainly, our purpose for the season is getting to spend time with friends and family.

Some people may refer to me as a grinch, but that is not the case.  Growing up in the town that has the world's largest Christmas store mildly taints my perception of things.  Since Tom loves the holiday, I try to do something every year.  Winter-themed dish towels and a decorated tree count, correct?

Anyway, this is our holiday homage.

  Yes, it is a baby tree which cost us a whopping total of $13 plus a pot we had hanging around for planting season.  As you can see, there is a bit of door scraping in the background.  Oh well.  Our house is constantly under construction.  After the holiday, we plan on putting the tree in our yard.  We hear that it may not survive because of the massive change in temperature, but we'll probably put it in our cold laundry room, then in the freezing basement before we finally take it outside.

I'm in love with this tree.

Jessie

Currently Listening to "Cherry Bomb" by John Cougar Mellencamp

Oh My Sweet Carolina

Ok, in this case, it would be "My Sweet Savannah" and oh-how-sweet she is for passing along this golden nugget of information to all of us in the blogging world, particularly in the home improvement arena.   Here she is on a special post called, "How I refinished my wood floors".  Please check it out - it's totally worthwhile and amazing, ESPECIALLY if you have a home with wood floors you would like to contemplate some sort of project about. 

Many people have somewhat frequent blog posts about objects, craft items or furniture they love.  Well, this is similar in that my loves and likes are about different methods of home improvement, tools and the like. 

You may have noticed, but the floors in our house are original hardwoods and I have been PINING (you see what I did right there?) to clean them up and do some refinishing.  

Does anybody know what that ring around the floor is about a foot in from the walls?  I can't seem to figure out what the world could make those patterns. 

Same deal going on here with the weird ring going about 1' in from the walls.  We had radiators (well, the house did at some point judging by the 1" diameter holes in our floors) at some point in time, but those could not have caused what we are seeing now.  It's a mystery!

In our kitchen, you can tell the previous owners tried to paint the floor the same color as the dark, icky green walls.  From what it appears, they then decided it was a horrible idea and proceeded to sand the floor down.  Awesome idea, poor execution.  This is only a little section, but the ENTIRE kitchen has green stained planks.  *sigh*

Seems fairly quick and easy, right?  Now we just have to come up with a few hundred bucks, a place to put all of our stuff temporarily, a weekend and a way to protect the floors that we would inevitably end up scratching up terribly.

After seeing her post, it made me want to run to Home Depot or Lowe's and rent one of those zamboni-esque machines.  You'll see what I'm talking about when you read the Savannah post.

I suppose we have to finish the painting, master bedroom/bathroom, platform bed, etc, etc, etc. until we can undertake another project, but ahhh, a girl can dream.

Jessie

Currently Listening to "Somebody's Baby" by Jackson Browne

Cry, Cry, Cry

Though this was the song I was listening to at the end of my last post, it seems to be more appropriate right now.  I love drawing plans on engineering paper (you may have noticed).  It makes me feel pretty smart.  Tom likes to go over it and tweak the dimensions to use the least amount of materials possible.  We make a pretty good team.  We also love building things together and haven't gotten a chance to do much of that since we have moved in.

In comes the bed platform.  Originally, I wanted to go with Anna White's plans for a King Store Bed on Knock Off Wood.  It's beautiful and functional and after I figured out the materials we would need for the king-size model, I looked at the price tag.  Oye.  Those plans go out the window even though they are so beautiful.  We just can't afford to spend $200+ right now even though a box springs and frame would be more than that.

So we went with 2x4's and plywood.  We had some 2x4's in the basement from deconstruction (yay for reducing and reusing!) and leftover plywood, so we didn't need to buy nearly as many 2x4's.

After the plans were finalized, we measured the actual mattress (the sweet one we got on a super sale from overstock.com).  King beds are supposed to be 76"x80" unless it is a California King, which ours was not.  Dimensions for our bed were 75"x79".  Another oye! here.  At this point, the original beautiful drawing on that engineering paper was looking rough from edit after edit after...you get the point.

Finally, we started measuring and cutting and loving our chop saw that has the amazing mitering feature (more about that in a tutorial to come).  So all the pieces were cut and we realized that our platform was going to incredibly heavy.  Oh well.

Next step is to actually assemble the pieces.  We went to our two stashes of screws - we had 3" screws!  However, they were decking screws for outdoor use, not wood screws.  My stash contained 5 boxes - 1 1/8", 1 1/4" and 2" wood screws.  Well, that's not going to work when we need to go through 1 1/2" wood and actually secure it to another piece.

You know how we come across roadblocks?  Ta-dah!  Here's another for your entertainment.  At least we got half the work done.  Optimus even helped!

Life is funny?

Jessie 

Currently Listening to "Primative (The Way I Treat You)" by Ambulance Ltd