Have wanted to . . .

. . . create a blog entry for several days. I really feel like I have a lot to write about, but we have had some technical difficulties. Our desktop computer still isn't working all that well. It's really sick apparently. We took it back to the computer "doctor" but it's still not working great. It's better, but sometimes slower than I have patience for, which admitedly doesn't take much. So, then there was this weird thing going on where Neil created a GMAIL account for his iPhone and linked it to my hotmail account which is what I use to login to blogger, well not sure exactly all the details, but I was very close to loosing access to this blog. It's a long complicated story. I remembered that I had set Neil up as a blogger on here, so luckily I was able to login as him and get in. It was ALMOST tragic. I was mulling over how I would let everyone know I had to start a new blog and why the other one wasn't being updated. Wow that would have not been fun. So, luckily, I found a way back in!

So, we've had some home projects that I have wanted to post just for the hay of it. We moved into our new house the first weekend of December and have continually been unpacking, buying new stuff, fixing stuff up, etc. It's been quite busy really. The house was/is in excellent condition for its age (like 20 years or so). So, we are quite happy with it. The colors are a little bland, so we have wanted to paint, which I'll get to that part here shortly. We needed to buy some new furniture because we just didn't have enough to fill the house. We kept our old couch, which is quite comfy, but not much bigger than love seat size, for the family room where the TV is. We found a great slip cover for it at Bed, Bath & Beyond on our anniversary trip to Portland, so it's looking better than the dingy beige it was pre-slip cover. We have purchased a nice couch for teh living room, along with a chair. But, before we even moved, we knew we were moving and we knew we wanted a new dining table. The one we had was pretty old. I got it from my grandparents when I was in college (which is getting to be quite a while back now). We had a cat once that scratched all the bases of all the legs of all the chairs. The chairs were kind of falling apart in other places. The table was still pretty solid, but it's small. So we found a nice table at our new favorite store, Furniture Row Outlet. It was $450 - yikes - that's just for the table. It's a tall gathering table with slate tiles inset in it. The chairs, $119 each, have the microfiber suade stuff on them, which my sis-in-law (Susan) swears don't stain. So, we kept looking around and went into the clearance area browing for some good deals. Amazingly, there was the table - marked $75! Yea!! Yeah, there's a catch. It's broken. Some of the slate tiles were broken. Here's a picture (didn't save too many before pictures of this project). Neil some how talked them down to $50, originally with the stipulation that we had to take it that day. Well, of course we didn't drive the truck so we couldn't take it. Well, after all was said and done they gave us 48 hours to come pick it. So, we picked up this great table for $50. Now, if you don't know us well, I should tell you that we aren't really great at home projects. We can do some stuff, but we aren't really good carpenters or anything. We didn't think this would be out of our ability, so we took a chance.

So, once we got to our new house and got much stuff unpacked and put away, we cleared out a spot in the garage around this table big enough to work on it. By we, I mean my wonderful husband. I really had not a lot to do with this at all, actually. We bought a wet tile saw because it's just the best thing to do. Gotta love Harbor Freight Tools - inexpensive tools just right for those who don't use them a lot! OK, so long story short, we (again, not really me) got the table fixed in time for Christmas. We did have to buy the chairs which weren't on clearnance. Luckily they had them in stock - sometimes they don't have stuff in stock - like an ottoman that we ordered two weeks ago that is backordered until April. So, here's the pictures of the fixed beautiful table. It's fabulous and the workmanship is pretty darn good for us (again, I'm not really part of the equation).

I think that it turned out quite well and we enjoy eating dinner as a family at it. We have the lazy susan in the middle and it doesn't match (wood color wise), but it's necessary because you really can't reach much past the middle of the table. We enjoyed a very nice prime rib Christmas Eve dinner as one of the first meals. I think we ate one before the prime rib, but it obviously wasn't very memorable. Plus it sounds better to say that our first meal was prime rib! :)

So, next project for us (meaning my husband) was a fish tank. So, Neil's always really enjoyed having fish and so do I. They are easy pets and they don't stink like our stinkin' dog (topic of another day). So, the latest purchase was a 90 gallon fish tank. So, I don't know if you can imagine how big that is, but it's HUGENORMOUS! My mom used to have one that big (or maybe slightly bigger) and it was pretty cool. I think back then Neil thought it would be fabulous to have one that big. So, we went from 20 gallon to 30 or so gallon to 90 gallon. Well, it was a screaming deal off Craig's List and it came with pretty much everything including the stand. So, I have no "before" pics of the stand, so you will need to imagine a plain wood, unstained and worn. You know how wood gets if you don't stain it - it starts looking dingy and yuck. So, this is what the stand looks like. We were hoping for a nice new looking stand - like the store-bought look. You never know exactly what you are going to get when you are shopping the classifieds, so you win some, you lose some. So, Neil comes home from Kennewick with this GIGANTIC tank and stand. We are living in a rental at the time piled with boxes and furniture everywhere waiting to get into our new house. It was a little crammed! Once we got settled and again cleared enough space to work on it in the garage, Neil started working on making this stand look nicer. We decided to cover it with lamianate stuff (like you'd put on countertops). We went with a dark slate color and stained the trim black. Here's the final product.

We (meaning Neil) still has some work to do on it. He's going to build a hood for it and we need to put a background. We also want to find some decorative items to put on the bottom of the stand. We also realized that we should probably paint the brown trim to black to match the rest of it. But, again, overall this project turned out quite well!

We have a couple of other projects going right now (painting and extending the walls to our laundry area), which I can post another day. This post is getting quite lenghty. I guess that's what happens when it's been nearly 2 weeks since the last post. So, I won't wait two weeks until the next post! I have many topics to get out of my head.

TTFN!