Here's an official welcome to any new readers who've made it over this way from Brooklyn Limestone! And for those that don't know, Wendy and I were invited to guest blog at Brooklyn Limestone, one of our favorite blogs, for a Conquered Closet series. To say we're giddy with excitement is an understatement!
We've been working hard behind the scenes here at Old Town Home to tackle this project, and our big conquered closet clutter reveal will be featured on February 9. We encourage you to pop on over to Brooklyn Limestone today as Mrs. Limestone is offering a sneak peek of all projects. Can anyone guess which one is ours?
In the more immediate future, we have a situation this weekend that needs some attention. Have you ever reached a point in a project where you either don't know what to do next or just can't get yourself motivated? Hopefully you said "yes" and I'm not alone (I'll just assume you did). In that case, have you ever reached a point in several projects that are going on at the same time where you just don't know what to do next, so you just sit around watching TV and wonder why you aren't actually working on something? Yeah, that's happening to me.
So I would like your help this weekend. I need you to tell me what to do. I know, I could just let Wendy tell me what to do, but I do that every other day of the week, so this weekend it's your chance. Don't worry, I'm sure she won't mind.
Here's a quick little poll so you can offer your two cents. Just select from one of three of our ongoing projects and the one that gets the most votes by tomorrow morning when I start working is the one that I'll work on for the rest of the weekend.
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
If you’re a regular reader of our blog you know just how much Wendy and I absolutely adore our pets, aka four legged crew members. Mel and Lulu are as much a member of our family as any humans could ever be. Non pet parents probably find this fact sort of odd, but pet owners can most likely understand where we are coming from.
Warning: We will be peppering this post with cute pet photos that have little if anything to do with the post, you may be powerless to resist.
Though Lulu is a young and energetic adolescent dog at just over two years old, Mel is a bit of a grumpy old man. Though his face tends to make him look more like a kitten, he’s been with us since 2001 and just turned 11 this past October. Because of his age he undergoes a “geriatric” screening when we have his bi-annual vet visits. Last month we had a little bit of a scare when Mel’s routine checkup showed an elevated liver enzyme level for the first time.
Now let me first say, Wendy and I will freely admit we are a bit seriously neurotic. When something a little off shows up in our lives, we fear the world may be ending. Wendy's mom even calls us the "happy hypos" (as in hypochondriacs). Quite honestly, Oliver’s diagnosis of canine lymphoma and the resulting treatment didn’t do much to calm our nerves with this sort of thing. So when we heard “elevated liver enzymes” we thought “how long does he have?”
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
We started off 2012 here at Old Town Home with a public proclamation of numerous New Year's resolutions. Even though we're only three weeks in, I glad to report that we're making substantial progress. One of our resolutions, do a thorough purge of our closets and drawers, is well underway and I can officially check our kitchen pantry off the list.
Okay, so maybe I'm using the term "pantry" loosely here, because in our modest home that merely refers to the two kitchen cabinets that house our food items. But here's a look at what we were starting with.
Sure I've seen worse, but the telltale sign that it's cabinet cleaning time is when you're greeted with an avalanche upon opening a cabinet door (see the lower left of the left hand cabinet for exhibit one). And it was time. If that Costco bag of chocolate chips smacked us in the face one more time I was going to lose it, so instead I invested about an hour of time to get things in order.
I started to pull everything out of the two cabinets...
...and then made a pile of items that were expired. Apparently we weren't fans of the vegan salt-free soups we purchased two years ago. Off to the recycling bin they went.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
One aspect of DIY home renovation that I really truly enjoy is doing electrical work. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps it’s the analytical way you need to think about doing electricity, or maybe it’s because it feels like you’re getting to the end of a project and the lights make the work come alive. Whatever the case, I just feel like I get into the groove with electrical work and just like doing it, but there are some drawbacks, especially with how my hands feel in the days after I finish the work. Much to my relieve, I recently found a tool that has largely solved these issues.
When I was working construction in college, the general contractor and electrician I was working for was always complaining about the beating his hands had taken over the years of doing construction work, and especially electrical work. Whether you’re cutting, twisting, stripping, crimping, splicing, or terminating, you’re using your hands in ways that put a lot of stress on your fingers in very tight spaces.
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As you may have seen in my last post about our custom office desk, we had great success in both designing and constructing a piece of “furniture” that was consistent with the style of our 1850’s antique bookcase inspiration. This was a particularly important aspect to the project as we wanted the desk to look like it really belonged in our 125-year-old house, and also like it was a professional and high-end item. Overall, we feel like we succeeded.
Though our desk was a success from an aesthetics standpoint, it wouldn’t be a true “Alex” project without doing some sort of high tech integration. Truth be told, part of the reason I actually wanted to build my desk from scratch was due to my desire to go on my typical techno-overload. In other words, I wanted to build a desk that was constructed with tried and true woodworking techniques but only felt like it would be worth it if I were also packing it full of technology bells and whistles. Weird enough for you? Well, it's sort of the story of our whole house.
We're covering a lot of stuff in this post, so it is a little bit all over the place. If you have any specific questions about anything that you want me to elaborate on, let me know in the comments and I can provide more info on it there or as a separate post. Also, I know we covered much of this information in our original desk construction post from back in November, but some of it is worth repeater for new readers.
Even though the majority of the bells and whistles wouldn’t actually be used until the desk was pretty much completed, our planning and implementation for these aspects of the project started very early on. We kicked it all off by creating an access panel in the side of the left cabinet next to where the computer would ultimately live.
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