About a month ago a couple of friends came over and helped me remove the hedges along the border of our front yard. I never liked these hedges. They were overgrown boxwood full of vines and mulberry trees. They looked like crap when I let them grow wild, they looked like crap when they were well-pruned. And because they were situated in a north-south row while the wind typically blows from the west, they collected garbage – lots of garbage. Well, now they’re gone. See?

Removing the hedges was kind of fun. We used tow straps looped around the tow hooks on the front of our jeep to yank them out. Once we had them all out, my friends took off and I got to do the sucky part alone – raking all the loose soil back into the holes once occupied by roots and planting grass seed.

This last picture was taken today. As you can see, the grass hasn’t grown in too well, likely due to it being the hottest time of the year. I’m just going to leave it like this for now, then I’ll re-seed in early September. Next year it should be well-blended-in.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

I finished building these night stands tonight. They’re for our friends, Ryan and Heather. I guessed it would take me a weekend, maybe two. It ended up taking me parts of four weekends and an evening or two. They’re done now, but they’re not finished. Ryan gets to do that.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

I’ve been working on finishing the basement. Let me rephrase that… A year ago, I started working on finishing the basement. I quit sometime around last April as summer arrived and I needed to build a shed to make room for a lot of the stuff that was in the way in the basement.

This past weekend I got back into it by replacing the rickety old cleat-style stairs with some new notched-stringer ones. Thanks to my dad for digging his trailer out of the snow to help me get lumber for the stringers and thanks to Jamie for helping to put them up.

Before:

After:

Click here for some more pictures.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

OK. Here are the pictures I promised of the shed being built. Most of the work was done back in July, with plenty of help from Cindy, Jesse, and Jamie. You’ll see them show up in the pictures.

Click here or on either of the pictures below to see how we turned this:

into this:

What’s left to do? You can see that there is no fascia yet. Also, I need to wrap the soffit, fascia, eaves, and rake in flashing. The support pillars need to be painted, but that has to wait until next year because it’s best to let pressure-treated lumber dry for a year before you paint it to ensure the paint doesn’t peel as the moisture from the treatment escapes from the wood. Also, we plan to put a little patio under the overhang. We’ll do that next year.

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Home Improvement, News, Pictures by Jack

I haven’t updated this site in a while because I wanted to complete my current project quickly and post a complete pictorial of the process. We’re building a garden shed. We started it over the Independence Day weekend and I hoped to have it done in a few weeks. But, unfortunately, as it neared the home stretch so did the project we’re working on at work. This means I’ve spent all of my free time working and the shed project has gone on hold.

I’ll be able to get back to it soon to finish it up, but for now here’s a picture of it almost as it sits now:

In the picture you can see through the front door and out the other side. That’s not the case now because I’ve installed homemade barn doors on the end wall, but I don’t have a picture with those installed.

What’s left to do?

• Hang the door on the front wall. We saved our old kitchen entry door and I’ll be using it here.
• Trim the corners, around the doors and window, and along any seams in the siding.
• Paint.
• Install a vented soffit underneath the overhang.
• Install aluminum fascia on exposed fascia and along rake soffits.
• “Prop up” the overhang with vertical 4x4s. This will be decorative, but will give the shed a more substantial look.
• Landscape, including installing a small patio under the overhang.
• Build a ramp to the barn doors on the far end.
• Come up with a way to hide the foundation blocks and keep animals from creating a den underneath.
• Put stuff in it so that stuff is no longer in the basement, thus allowing me to get back to work on the basement.

Oh yeah, in case you don’t know, I’m finishing the basement. It’s nearly fully framed. Once the shed’s done I can finish the framing and start wiring. I’m looking forward to getting back into that project.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

We’ve been busy tending to our gardens and planting some new trees this spring.

They’re sort of in between things right now, so there’s not much color besides the various shades of green. The spring flowers have mostly faded and the summer flowers haven’t really come out yet. But they still look pretty nice.

(more…)

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

You may have heard me mention that I recently made a built-in bookcase in my office room. I hadn’t put up any pictures of it because when I built it, I made one shelf too few. I thought four shelves would suffice, but I discovered that five would be better. I wanted to wait until I made the fifth shelf before taking pics of it.

The carcass and shelves are made of MDF while the face frame and shelf-edges are made from poplar. The whole thing is painted in flat white latex enamel and coated in satin water-based polyurethane. I finished it this way because latex enamel never cures to a truly hard finish and I knew that books would stick to it. They won’t stick to cured polyurethane.

I think it came out OK. It’s not the greatest piece I’ve made, but I wasn’t as precise as I’ve been on other projects. Here are a few pics:

The room is tight – it’s hard to get a picture of the whole piece from a decent angle.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

Update! It’s done! I’ve replaced the picture below with one of the finished product. Also, you can now click here for more pictures.

I’ve been working on building this sideboard buffet thingy with a built-in twenty bottle wine rack for the past month or so. Tonight I finished building it. Now it just needs a bit of finish sanding on the doors & drawers, then it’s ready for staining and a clear coat. After that, it’ll be ready to move in.

I originally intended to build this last fall around the time that I build the rocking chair and ottoman. I didn’t get it done before the holidays and then we got Cookie in January, so I put it off for a while until we could be somewhat sure that the new dog wouldn’t eat it. It will be ready to have it’s débutante ball on Thanksgiving.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

Ok, so, over the summer we helped Jess’s family build a little hunting cabin on their property. I’ve had the pictures that Cindy took in my possession for some time now but have been too lazy busy to put them online. Well, here they are.

I think we helped for four weekends or so, and in all they have a couple of months invested in the building of this thing. It’s pretty impressive. It was built completely from scratch. We built the walls and trusses – nothing was pre-fabricated.

Click here for all the pictures.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack

Jess’s parents decided to build a tree stand for hunting. And when they decide to do something, the decide to do something. Look at this thing!

Tom built it as a ‘kit’ so it could just be put together on site for the most part. He, Jess, and I got it together one muddy morning a few weeks back. Since then, he, Cindy, and Diane have added steps, a bigger platform, and a railing.

Click here for a few more pictures.

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Home Improvement, Pictures by Jack