Wild Kingdom in Paint
A closeup of a series of four paintings I'm doing for the little guy's room. This is number one. I do a bit of sketching, but this is my first foray into paint. Acrylic to be exact. Pretty neat watching this little character coming to life. It's a cartoon, so not your 'high' art, but my audience is a little kid, so not too worried about critiques.



Here's the whole painting.

Long Time

We wrapped up a majority of the basement back in May. Finishing trim is about all that's left. And hey, you can live with unfinished trim. Besides when the lights are down and you're

watching a movie you can't see the trim anyway. Did I mention the movie screen is really big? And yessir you really do notice the sound comes from the screen and not off to the sides or bottom. Super happy that I did the in-wall speakers.




We're still adjusting to having all this extra room and storage, and I have to admit it is nice. Hey we even have the makings of library. Yes all the books have been in boxes for the last 5 years.





We went and carpeted the floor in the basement with wool. Oh so nice to walk on and hopefully warm in the winter, and made our selves a low maintenance floor of slate off the back door.

Built-in.......Part #2

So I made an early morning run to actual lumber yard and not a big box store. These guys have some great stuff. So walking out of there with a little less of my hard earned money, but happy that I didn't have to sort through piles of crap to find a few good boards and them having what I wanted is worth it. Since I constructed the built-in out of birch plywood, I figured just keep going with the birch theme for trimming it out. I'll get it stained up cherry to match some other wood work I've previously done in the basement. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Notice the yellow tools in the pictures. I especially like the little finish nailer.

Built-in

Ok, my previous foray into finish carpentry went well with the new tools, so I stepped it up a notch over the weekend and decided to do a little rabbiting with the router table and make myself a built-in entertainment center/bookshelf. That was the plan all along, but I'm learning a bit as I go along, and reading up on this stuff as much as possible to get it right. I'm still in the process of finishing off this piece--need to pick up the solid birch stock for the top and the plywood edges and then stain. But you get the idea. Actual book shelves are next.

Spring in the NW

Psyche! Actually, this weekend was pretty spring like. But only one day was playtime, and just part of it at that. So lets back up to Friday. I picked up one of these, because I found out how easy this makes the job. Then I took some black walnut that I picked up from my buddy Brian over to my buddy Doug's shop to get planed and jointed. Did I mention I really wish I had the space for a shop? After which I did some kayaking here, and then used this, from this guy through which I've acquired most of my tools. And the result is this ledge. There's more walnut pieces to come, but I really like the character of this piece. I'll be finishing this with urethane over the next week. So how many links did I throw into this post? Too many.

Lighting up......

...the stairwell.

A couple weeks ago we get a card in the mail from many old house dwellers' favorite lighting store, Rejuvenation. Well they were having a sale, and a big one at that. So we made plans, actual plans, to go down there the first day of the sale. It turns out we got there shortly after the store opened, along with a lot of other folks, and the hunting for our light began. We knew what shade we wanted it was just a matter of the method to hang it from the sloped ceiling. Rod or chain? We wanted rod, but chain trumps rod in this case. Thanks to one of their employees we got something unique for our place (that computer mockup program is waaaayyy cool).

I have to say it's great to work with a company that is so customer oriented. So with the light up and the final coat of paint on, we are done with the major work downstairs and now it's on to the finish work. This could take bit.

Progress



Well after priming last week, I lazed around all week and basked in the "almost doneness" of the basement until about 6:15 this morning. At that time I decided I'd start putting the color up on the hallway. We went with the classic, and neutral, taupe. Much like the beige that so many of us cube denizens have become desensitized to, but just edgy enough to be something different and therefore nothing like beige. Besides it's a color we have elsewhere in the house and ties the other colors together nicely and it isn't white. In addition to the painting, I also put up the wall sconces in the hallway, which match those in the "man room", which is also almost done, just starting in on the built-ins thanks to my friend over at OldStoneHouse sending me something to cut wood with. We wanted to go with movie house/deco style for the sconces and found these lights at a showroom in Seattle. This outfit definitely had items that you would not normally find at your big box and their prices were great. So here are some pics of the setup including the 100 inch screen. Very nice to watch movies on!