Our new laundry room

Don’t you hate those home renovation shows that make you sit through an hour of home owners arguing and bickering as they work through a project before you ever see the final result? Me too, so let me start with the “after” picture:

The laundry room after

New cabinets and a new paint color add up to a prettier and more useful laundry room.

Roger did most of the work, although I did help bring the ridiculously heavy counter top upstairs…TWICE.  We had to cut the counter to size (go go new circular saw!), which wasn’t a big deal. The huge warp in our front wall, however, was a little challenging to hide.

I’ve had a crazy urge to paint lately, and this project satisfied that craving. Roger and I painted the walls Friday night, and I painted all of the trim Saturday. Then we both painted the mailbox and stair rails outside Saturday morning. It was a beautiful day and we were on a roll, so why not?

Read the rest of the post to see before pictures and how the kitties helped on the project.

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The great office cleanup of 2009

Rachel and I came up with a list of things to do in 2009 while we were in Amsterdam, one of the first on the list was to clean up the office.

Our office was really more of a dungeon, and after picking up a laptop a few months ago I hadn’t really used the room for much more than throwing crap into it which didn’t belong elsewhere. The closet was a dumpster of large bins filled to the brim with random wires, parts, and adapters – many dating back 8 or so years.

The project started with putting out 4 boxes to categorize my wires into – computer wires, video wires, audio wires, and power wires. Only after I sorted through 2 large bins and a duffle bag did I really have an understanding of what wires I actually had. After that I went back through these boxes, tied up the wires with zip ties, and threw outdated cables and cables which I had numerous duplicates of into a donation box. Continue reading