Written by I’m going to skip the obligatory “sorry I haven’t posted since 2016” preamble, and just say that it’s been a long five years. Things happen, things change, people get closer, people get further apart, and we become more aware of the things we care about and the things we don’t. So let’s just move on to the part where I catch you all up on life here at the Warren homestead. Assuming, of course, that anyone is still checking this blog from time to time.
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Posts in category Projects / DIY
Hab Life, and Catching Up
Thrift Store
So today we’re having another high wind day, which is driving the dog insane. The windows are open, and every time a strong gust blows in and bangs a bedroom door shut, he panics. Every time the wind blows something around outside, he panics. Sam’s on edge and has just been freaking the hell out all day today, which has been driving me mental.
Kristi’s up in Sacramento with her mom today to visit her sister and our niece, and I’m here at home with the animals trying to get some work done. A bit of client work, a lot of trying to finish up Kristi’s new travel writing portfolio. Not easy to do when the menagerie (particularly the 140lb part of it) is so wound up. So rather than barricade myself in the office, I closed the bedroom windows – cutting down on the door-bang-panic factor – grabbed the car keys and got out of the house for a while.
I’d been meaning to go visit the local thrift stores for a while now, just to check them out. And lately I’ve been in a project sort of mood. There’s a Hope Chest Thrift Store around the corner from us on McHenry Avenue, run by the local hospice center, and so I drove down there to browse a bit and take a needed breather from OHMYGODITSWINDYEVERYBODYPANIC.
Hope Chest is a really nice thrift, much better than the places I remember in Orlando and Tampa. I’m guessing that’s probably because there are many more older established families here than in Central Florida, and so the items you find include many more older pieces. Go into the average Tampa thrift, and you’ll mainly find a bunch of cheap garage sale junk from the 70s and 80s. Here, you’ll also find a light scattering of items dating back to the 40s and 50s.
They have an exceptional bookstore. I found a woodworking textbook from 1950, in good condition, on sale for a dollar and picked it up; they also had a pile of books on home maintenance, gardening, things like that. One encyclopedia of handy home projects, dated 1966, included complete instructions on building an “atomic fallout shelter”.
When I wasn’t rummaging through fifty-year-old books, I was scoping out items for spare part potential. Scrap brass, chrome, wood, machined elements, that sort of things. Plenty there, and you can sure buy project materials cheaper this way than as new and raw metal or wood that then has to be machined. Like I said, been in a mood lately.
In the end, I walked out with that woodworking book for a buck and a determination to come back for more later.
DIY Nirvana, aka Instructables.com
Have I ever mentioned how much I love Instructables.com? Every time I go browsing over there, I get the urge to start messing with stuff.
Lots of people out there doing a lot of really cool things with stuff that’s just sitting around. If you ever wondered how to make a nifty rubber band powered cat feeder out of basically stuff you were throwing away anyway, or how to build a fairly detailed and complete Ghostbuster costume for Halloween.. or hell, just about how to do anything, Instructables has an article for you.
There are two things though I really love about this site. Even if none of the projects happen to strike your fancy (and if so – keep looking, there’s a lot there!), the tricks and tips and ideas that come up in them are pretty useful in their own right. Instructables is where I learned about Rub-n-Buff, for instance. If you have any inclination at all to build, shape, arrange, construct or design things yourself, you’re guaranteed to find something interesting every time you check in.
The other thing I love is that the site is sort of a jumping off point for finding people around the Internet who are doing REALLY cool things. Like making steampunk keyboards:
Or how about a complete, working steampunk laptop?
Now that is some hard core cool computing, folks.
Dresser Detective
Now that the dresser is home and finished and looking good and everything, I’ve been meaning to do some detective work. I kinda dig on history – particularly digging into the small nooks and crevices in between the history everyone knows – so I took some time this afternoon to see what I could find out about this dresser’s origins.
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