Handy-Woman?!?!

I have been busy lately. Between work and hockey I stay fairly occupied, but then I added in a few projects....

So, remember the whole Craigslist deal on the table and chairs? Well, I started refinishing the table. Here it is before (well, sort of... I started sanding it and then remembered to take a picture, so I wiped the sawdust off with a damp cloth and this is pretty much how it looked when I got it).

Here is the sanded table (just the top right now, I will work on the base after the top is stained).

And...after the first coat of stain (it was getting a little dark at this point, I started this project at about 5pm someday last week...I'm not done yet, needs at least 2 more coats of stain)





Our neighbor stopped by today while I was putting on a second coat of stain (sorry no pics, it was cold out) and gave good reviews! It is amazing how much better the table looks without the "factory clear-coat" on it! I am very excited to get it done so we can use it, I just need a little warmer and non-windy weather.

So the next project (also not finished) is the dog-run. We had nice weather this weekend and James was working, so I decided to use our Home Depot gift cards to get the stuff to start building the dog-run. I helped a friend move on Saturday and then stopped to pick up the materials from Home Depot. I spent all of Sunday doing this:




See the area to the right of the wood posts? That is the dog run! Yes, our dogs are spoiled. Yes the dog-run is bigger (or as big as) many people's yard; they have 3 full size pine trees in it! We cut the lower branches off of the pine trees so they have more room and shade.

I dug eight post holes (with a manual post-hole digger) and cemented them in. We are going to hang chain link (one of the Craigslist deals) and have wood crossbeams on the top and bottom. You can see some of the upper beams in the pic, I used them for spacing and leveling while the posts where setting. The chain link we got didn't have all of the support poles and they are expensive to buy new; so we are going with wood, which is about one third of the price). I only got half of the area raked out...all the stuff on the left of the posts used to be in the dog run area. Once it's all done, we can keep their toys in the dog-run and clean up the rest of the yard. I was hoping to do some more work on it this evening...but it snowed last night and was cold today, so.....


I built this:

We tore down the wall in our kitchen and built an island last year, but don't have cabinets yet. Well, we have one that my parents had removed from their kitchen, you can see the edge of it on the left. We've had TV trays to the right of the cabinet to try to make the space usable, but it didn't work so well. Since I couldn't (didn't want to freeze my butt off) work on the dog-run I decided to build a shelf under the island so we could store stuff. I added a small shelf at the top to hold foil, plastic bags, etc...

I think this will help until we have time/money to build cabinets for the whole space. I am happy with it :) James just smiles and says "nice" I'm not sure he knows what to do with me sometimes.