Thursday 24 April 2008

Nothing As It Seems


Well, the snow continued to come down in the city until Tuesday and we probably received about 30 or 40 cm through the whole weekend. The weather is supposed to get better by Saturday when it hits the 10 to 15 celcius range. Hopefully, the big giant drifts that keep forming against every entrance of my garage will begin to melt. I gave up trying to shovel them out after the first attempt on Sunday.

I continued mudding the family room and realized that the 30 year old walls were in much worse shape than I had originally thought. Even though I am making progress on my room every time I do anything in it, to the bystander, it might look like I have done nothing. Hopefully the mudding and sanding will be over soon and Chris and I can get to the good stuff (the face of the fireplace). My wife plans to tackle the painting when we finally get the mudding done.

Sunday 20 April 2008

NO MORE SNOW!

WINTER STORM WARNING ISSUED For Edmonton City BY ENVIRONMENT CANADA
BULLETIN ISSUED AT: 11:10 AM MDT SUNDAY 20 APRIL 2008
HEAVY SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW DEVELOPING OVERNIGHT INTO MONDAY. THIS IS A WARNING THAT DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE IMMINENT OR OCCURRING IN THESE REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS...LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.

Copyright © 2008 Environment Canada

So, whoopee! More snow is on the way. Last week we hit a whopping 24 celcius and then it dropped back down to -10 celcius by Friday. And it's been snowing ever since. In the last 24 hours, we have probably received about 10 centimeters and now we are expecting another 30 or 40 centimeters overnight. The snow is actually not expected to let up entirely until Tuesday and the temperature is not expected to get above zero until Thursday.

But enough about the weather even though it directly affects construction on my family room. I did manage to fix the wiring, electrical and insulation problems in that room and now I am back to the fireplace project and stereo cabinet. Chris and I got most of the new drywall face up on the fireplace on Saturday and I have been mudding the project most of today (although I ran out of mud and have no desire to venture out in the blizzard to buy more). The good news is that I still have plenty of other work down there to keep me busy. At least I bought new supplies before the weather turned ugly. Chris and I will start to tackle the cosmetic aspects of the fireplace face this week and the room may be ready for painting by Wednesday or Thursday if I'm lucky.

Sunday 13 April 2008

Our Flagship is Ready!

Our first publicly available product is now ready for ordering. Chris and I have decided to make the units available as they are requested.

Basically, what this means is that we will build our items 'On Demand' instead of having a bunch of units sitting around that nobody is interested in or that could be damaged in storage. With a deposit of $50.00 Canadian, we will build the unit in the colours that are requested and the customer can pay the rest of the money when it is delivered to their home.

We will start these units at an introductory price of only $200.00 total (including initial deposit).

We will have pictures posted up here shortly.

Hooray for Spring!

FINALLY! It almost hit 20 c this weekend. It's amazing how fast the weather can change your overall attitude.

I managed to start cleaning out the garage to move our workshop out there and get my stuff out of that little room in the basement. My wife is happy because she wants to make a scrapbook room out of it. I also managed to work out some plans for my family room disaster that is finally starting to come together.

For the family room, I will be building a wall unit to hold books and DVD's and other assorted knick-knacks, an in-wall stereo cabinet for my components and a new face for the fireplace. It will be excellent practice for building wood furniture for the public and a good way to showcase what Chris and I can really do.

No pictures today worthy of posting. Hopefully I will get started on some of these projects in the next few weeks.

Tuesday 8 April 2008

Sometimes it Snows in April

Part of the family room renovations at my house involved a little rewiring. Unfortunately, once I pulled down all the ceiling tiles and got a good look at the actual wiring, I realized that it looked like the last person to do ANY wiring on this house was probably a gang of chimpanzees (I almost sound like Mike Holmes).

There were junction boxes in three different locations, all loaded needlessly with about seven or eight splices in each one. I'm not a certified electrician, but I do know a few things about it. And I know that having that many splices would get any real electrician fired. So, I set out on a quest to trace all the wires going to these boxes and discovered quite a few lines that didn't need to be there. After completely replacing a few circuits and rendering some others non-existent, I'm happy to say that I managed to get the circuit disaster under control. Now I'm almost ready to go back to the original fireplace project.

I had also planned to start getting the workshop set up in the garage being that the weather had actually improved and things were looking up, and surprise, we had a blizzard on Saturday that dumped another 20 cm on the city. The temperature is supposed to climb back up again this week so I may actually get my tools in the garage yet. I also noticed that local markets and so forth are starting to advertise for the summer season so 'RC' needs to get things back on track so we don't miss out on our summer.

Incidentally, with all this talk about being busy and so forth, if someone DID order a project of some sort (like a playhouse), we would have no problem putting one together in about two or three days because we planned ahead and built the parts to make a few more.