A little housewarming gift

Hi everyone! I hope you’re having a great holiday season. Ours has been busy with some virtual fun as well as … you guessed it … a couple of projects!

The first project I want to share with you is a housewarming gift we have made for my sister and brother-in-law. They just moved into their “forever” home in Wisner, LA and she wanted a custom table for their dining area. Keith & I quickly volunteered to make one for them and it was a lot of fun to make. We finished up building it last weekend and it’s waiting up at the mountain house for them to come get it! Rather than show a lot of pictures of the construction project, Keith put together a video of the process. To give you a few highlights of the process, Susan and Jeff brought mom up here for some follow up surgery back in August. While they were here, Keith took them to our favorite wood store, Carlton’s Rare Wood & Veneers (https://www.rarewoodsandveneers.com/). There they found some gorgeous quarter sawn white oak for the table. Susan had bought some turned legs at a place she loves in Mobile, AL, so we were able to use those. Keith & I would love to learn how to use a lathe to turn our own legs, but we’re afraid we’d like it too much then want to buy a lathe! 😉 The wood sat in the mountain house garage until October when we ran it through the planer, then it sat another couple of months until Thanksgiving and then last weekend. And here are the results!

If you want a closer look at the final result, here are a couple of pictures of it.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It still needs to be sanded and finished. Susan plans to paint the legs and the skirt and then oil or poly the top somehow. I’m not sure yet but I know it will turn out great! Once it’s finished and in their house, I’ll share a picture with ya’ll!

Now on to our other project which involves our Atlanta basement. For any of you who saw our basement prior to a couple of years ago, you may know that Keith called it a Silence of the Lambs basement. It was dark (1 lightbulb hidden behind duct work), dusty beyond belief and pretty much disgusting. So bad that I really had to force myself down there once when there was a tornado warning!

A couple of years ago, Keith rewired the basement to add 5 more overhead lights and I embarked on a project to paint the brick. Keith thought I was crazy, and for a while I thought I was as well! After about 10 or 12 gallons of paint (no kidding), I finally encapsulated all of the dust from crumbling mortar inside the brick walls.

Fast forward to last year, I figured out we could use our basement for a very small home gym. That motivated me to really organize all of our storage down there and get rid of some stuff. I was able to get rid of several sets of old plastic shelves we had down there and really get it looking good. Prior to covid hitting, we had our friend Mike (Keith’s former Physical Therapist for the big knee replacements) as our personal trainer and we used the basement for training space. Well, then we all know what happened … covid and a mountain house. That space has gone pretty much unused since then. However, in the past few months I’ve really gotten to loving the Peloton Bike Bootcamp classes but with our Peloton in our guest room it’s hard to do. So…I now want to move the Peloton down to the basement and fix things up just a little more. I’ll provide more pictures over the next few weeks, as I have some ideas up my sleeve to make it less gross (because it’s still half crawl space half basement). But in the meantime, I’ll show you what we’re making for down there! It’s a really cool giant pegboard to hold all of our gym and Peloton equipment! Here’s the inspiration picture.

Cool huh? We figured out where we wanted to hang it in the basement and then we cut down a 4×8 piece of nice grade plywood into 42″ x 5′. We will use the extra plywood for shelves.

The next step was to measure out where our pegs would go and drill a BUNCH of holes. I think I counted 70 holes.

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And here’s the final product after all of the holes had been drilled and I had lightly hand sanded it.

Since our chop saw is up at the mountains, we’ll wait til we go back up there to cut the dowels. I may or may not edge band the shelves depending on how they look. I did put a quick coat of polyurethane on the pegboard before we put it down in the basement.

I’ll share more over the next few weeks, but I’m super excited to get this project moving!

Have a wonderful Christmas and a safe and happy New Year. Here’s to 2020 being in our rear view mirror!