Construction Projects

 

Life's gotten nothing but busier. Good thing the house is done... well, mostly. I suppose no house is truly done if you truly live in it. We're missing lots of little things and a few big things, like landscaping (as evidenced by the picture at the top of the page). I have a spreadsheet to track those odds and ends--things like "strip and repaint pantry doors", "hang artwork in gallery/loft", and "install cedar flooring in master closet"--so I know what to do next. Over 300 odds and ends when I first compiled the spreadshet. I've slowly been chipping away at that list, but I had a couple of other things to attend to prior to competing it. As if it will every be truly completed.

Since the weather was changing, such that it is in southern California, I had to address the growing quantity of beer in the cellar again. Essentially, my goal is to get all my beer* into either a refrigerator or a temperature controlled space so the various brews can age gracefully. However, cool winter weather was giving way to spring a little early, with temperatures already picking up above 80F in my town. This meant to me that I needed to insulate my beer. As some of you know, the cellar was originally "just" a converted closet, which after insulation, measures 7'h x 3'd x 2.5'w. Not bad for a start. Then my membership to the Reserve Society at The Bruery, as well as beer from work, started adding bottles faster than I was drinking them, so I built a second insulated space. This second space occupied a good portion of the garage until recently, measuring roughly 6'h x 5'w x 4'd and getting jammed full of wonderful bottled beers. This leads us to present day. I built a walk-in beer cellar. Yep, those are the pictures of it to the right.


Speaking of other things, I was feeling increasingly cramped while working up here in the studio. The floor space allocated to the cellar had taken a noticeable amount of space away from the already lacking free space. You know the sliding tile puzzles where you try to put the picture back together by moving individual tiles around countless times? That is how our life has been since October of 2012, and the last vestige of that problem was piled across the studio and mocking me every time I tried to do anything. So, I started looking around for ways to remedy the situation. It didn't take long, as my eyes almost immediately landed on the stack of surplus oak flooring left over from the house remodel that I intended to use the studio. Behold, the next project was before me. I needed to install the flooring to gain back a 5' x 10' space in the room. As of this writing, I'm nearly done. I have about 4' x 24' left before sanding and sealing.

That's enough right? Oh, but there's more! My brother, who's a huge Star Wars fan, asked me to help him build a Pre Vizsla costume. "Sure," I said, "that sounds fun and interesting." While we didn't finish the build by Star Wars Celebration last week, it's still moving along and will be ready for the next major Star Wars event (note the newly installed hardwood he's standing on).

That's not even counting all the stuff going on at work!


* while I say "all my beer" in the link, the inventory reflected on CellarHQ is actually out of date and in need of updating by a couple hundred bottles.