Category: Projects

Project: Gonna Need New Shorts

It appears the teeming millions are getting restless and have moved on to outright taunting and casting disparaging remarks on the lack of output this month.  Normally I would give some elaborate excuse as to why I’ve been negligent from my duties all in an effort to mask likely pure laziness.  Fortunately, in this particular case I’ve just been really busy.  The first part of this month was dedicated to the Annual Halloween Party and the days since them has been either spent on my day (often leaking into nights as of late) job or processing hundreds of photos for this and upcoming posts.  In an effort to prevent burning effigies figured it was time to get something out…I don’t want to here anything about nightmares out there.. you demanded a post.. I picked this one!
2014 Halloween Decoration - Killer Clown

If you are like me, you are probably looking for another pair of shorts about now.  Before you grab your AR’s and head into the woods, I should assure you this menace is just a decoration.  Anyone that has been a reader of this blog in the month of October know I enjoy Halloween even more than Christmas.  Each year we have our Annual Halloween Party and along with it usually comes a homemade decoration to add to the collection.  A popular part of our party is the Haunted Trail (link here).  Each year it gets bigger and bigger and each year my additions get more elaborate.  This year was a big year for new designs.  This killer clown was one of two for this year – yes, you will get to see the other one in an upcoming post. Here’s a night shot from the trail .. damn, this thing still scares me every time I look at it.  Thought it would provide some therapy to get over my phobia .. failed

2014 Halloween Decoration - Killer Clown

Hit the jump if you want to see how I went about making this decoration.  The best part of this is that it gives me an easy platform to produce new additions for years to come.  There were three goals going in – “scare-ability”, “pose-ability” and  “storage-ability”.  Think I hit this one out of the park!

Continue reading Project: Gonna Need New Shorts

Project: Losing My Mancard

Still trying to get the body regulated after yesterday’s race so figured it was a good time to ummm how should I put it … put myself up for public shaming.  At least some major chastising from my male friends thanks to a little project I completed last weekend.  I was going to hold off on this until I could get it buried in a high output blog month but Linda has already announced the end product to the world thanks to Facebook and who knows when there will ever be a high output blog month – this is in light of the very apparent issue of it being near the end of the month and light on the entries so far this month.  Using the band-aid principle, best to just get this over with and feel the heat (which technically brings us full circle since that is exactly what I did yesterday).

So, not a new revelation that I will often try to make something for Linda on special occasions.  Not so much that I’m creative or really gifted at it as much as Linda rarely provides me any ideas on what to get her on these occasions.  She’ll point to her Amazon Wish List as a source only to find out there isn’t really anything there that costs more than $2.50.  She should really rename that to the I Wish Brian Total Frustration List.  Knowing this is always an issue I swallowed my pride and looked to better resources for ideas.  I had read about Pinterest and was aware that was predominantly a female hangout.  If you want to take pictures of exotic animals you go to the zoo so it seemed logical if you want craft ideas for women.. go to the zoo.. I mean where the crafty women are.  I won’t go into the long drawn out story of getting into that site and sifting through way to much content to finally find the craft sources.  What I did easily find is a storm of references to a craft idea related to Nail Polish Flowers.  There were hundreds of links that eventually all ended up at a non-English site called guang.taobao.com (link here).   Clearly there was nothing on this site I could actually interpret and it essentially just had a set of pictures somewhat outlining how to do it.  Intrigued, I “pinned” it for future reference not expecting to have to use it less than a week later.  Sure enough the calendar gods tricked me into thinking there was plenty of time before our anniversary (funny how that is becoming a general theme across all aspects of my life).  When realization set in it was too late to pry out any suggestions from Linda so went with the standard mega-flowers option and set to work on something more creative as icing on the cake.  Still being fresh in memory, the recent pin came to mind and plans were set in motion.

The project seemed relatively simple – raid you wife’s vanity for nail polish, run to Menards for some wire, grab a  few basic tools and 10 minutes later have a cool gift she will forever cherish.   This early assessment turned out to be a completely WRONG.  I did find some nail polish without Linda finding out (that would have been a difficult discussion) and even found some thin gauge wire at Menards – silver as well as green figuring it would work well for the stem.  Grabbed some pliers,  a drumstick, a piece of wax paper and went to work.

Note, the three to the far right were the items I procured from Linda’s vanity, the three on the left were future purchases as a result of wanting to try out some additional ideas to put my stamp on the idea.  Linda found it quite amusing helping me pick out some options at the local drugstore.

Hit the jump to read about how to make them and some shots of the finished product

Continue reading Project: Losing My Mancard

EddieSoft Photography Website Released

It’s kind of a big day around here and not just because we can see the sun and it isn’t snowing for a change.  Why are the corks popping about the house and the party favors distributed?  This is the answer!

The new EddieSoft Photography site (link here) is now finished and released to the world.  For the last 6 months at least, SmugMug (our chosen photography website provider)  has been urging us to switch to their new framework.  It took me awhile to get the first version up and running so going through that again didn’t really excite me.  Kudos to their marketing team who managed to get a banner on my management portal nagging every day to get converted.  This is the same banner that overrode my exit button whenever I looked at an image forcing me to use the back button on the browser – uber annoying but at least there was a workaround.  The plan was to take on this project during the Christmas holidays but Project Chekov consumed all my free time instead.  I put web work right up there with plumbing – only start when you have plenty of time and during Menards business hours.  No matter how much you prepare, not matter how much you test and validate, Murphy is going to happen!  Unlike plumbing, SmugMug did something quite awesome by allowing us to work on the new site without impacting the legacy site so our customers were not impacted in the least.  Kudos for that feature but this did have an interesting side effect.  If you wanted to have the legacy users see new content before the modified website was released, you had to be sure and use the legacy tools.  This bit us when we created a new folder for a Dog Show Linda shot and it took us awhile to figure out why our customers couldn’t see it.  Beyond that, the dual sites worked out quite well.  For those not familiar with our legacy site, here is a screen cap of that.

That version also took awhile to get right but Linda wanted a more professional look to our business presence now that is getting orders on a regular basis.  The main issue is that our legacy site was multi-purpose providing the engine behind this blog and any of our personal and family shots we wanted to share.  We certainly didn’t want customers stumbling on these – ESPECIALLY the shots that enrich my non-photography blog entries since those can get a little edgy.  Because of the heavy use of the site to host most of the 6+ years of blogging the biggest concern was breaking the links when we reorganized our galleries.  Hat tip to SmugMug again for implementing a master identifier for the images.  Even though the initial folder location is built into the external link, the image identifier is key into their database so as long as we used the proper link (which I did), any movement was transparent to the published link or in this case to anything referenced in the blog.

With that concern out of the way, it was on to figuring out the look and feel of the new site.  Credit goes to Linda on this one.  She scoured the internet and would send me samples of things she liked from the various templates she found.  I just needed to figure out a way to implement that in the new SmugMug customization tools.  Having done web programming in a former life, I can appreciate the difficulty in providing a flexible set of tools and templates that meets the needs of all their customers.  Because of that experience, I am pretty accommodating of glitches and nuances encountered when trying to realize Linda’s concepts.  For the most part everything went pretty easy.  The master template was created with the preferred coloring and fonts and then started building all the individual links and required pages.  The Home page was a piece of cake as well as the About, Pricing pages once the create pages feature was figured out – had to go into the organize area to make those new custom pages.  The folder areas like the Browse, Portfolio, Dog Events, Portrait sessions etc. were slightly more difficult since I wanted a different look and feel beyond the standard template as well as hiding some of the folders.  Once I broke them into separate customized folders instead of trying to use the master folder layout it went a lot better.  Main problem was getting the thumbnails to look right and the order.  After a bit of work those were all manipulated into a very close approximation of the original vision.   All that was left was to figure out how to do the Blogging capabilities.  Having used WordPress for a looong time I have expectations on how a blog toolset should work (LifeIntrigued is a breeze to manage thanks to that software).   This is the area that SmugMug needs the most work.  They really do not have a blog solution but rather a toolset to create pages that you can cobble into a blog.  You literally have to create each blog entry from scratch – and an image section, add a text section, and this block and that block and eventually you have a page put together you can write your blog on.  Hopefully they will improve this functionality in the future but with that said, let’s all welcome Linda to the wonderful world of blogging (link here).

I guess the biggest disappointment was the pre-built Contact page.  Way too much time was spent trying to get that page to look right.  Their pre-built page can be quickly added to your homepage link but it refused to inherit the overall site design master template.  This prompted an online chat with the SmugMug Heroes who quickly informed me that page wasn’t customizable and recommended I build my own custom page – they confirmed my response that I was unable to make a page with the standard submit buttons and pre-filling of the user’s email address – why in the hell would they not allow you to do that!?!  Who would want a contact page that didn’t match the rest of the site?  Needless to say I left them with an enhancement request.  The new contact page was created but forced to just give them the addresses to reach us rather than the customary email page.

Linda released the new website this morning!  Take a look and let us know what you think.  Best news of all is the LifeIntrigued blog had zero impact.  Another project in the books.

Operation: Special Delivery

It is nearing a month now of not being out pounding the pavement and I’m going bat shit crazy.  Doctors and therapists want some badly needed healing to occur before the running resumes.  Sounds easy, but this is killing me.  The time on the road has been replaced with core and flexibility work which makes hill repeats seem like a trip to Disneyland.  A week or two more and the shoes will be laced up and training for next year’s running circuit will be back on track… fingers crossed.  Until then, might as well leverage the extra time and chip away at this month’s quota.

… and the theme lately appears to be PROJECTS – well, BIRDS and PROJECTS.  This month saw the completion of a pretty involved effort focused on one key goal – taking my revenge on the snow plow guy.  Now that may seem a little harsh, but this has been an ongoing battle for like the last three years.  Pretty sure this is a game for him – “how fast can I go to knock over all the mailboxes on this rural road?”  The sense of dread every time it snows is overpowering – reluctantly the boots are pulled on, the coat is dragged over and the cap slid on before plodding down the driveway to experience the carnage.  Inevitably, the box will be hanging by a thread or sitting off in a distant snowbank – lid open and the mail looking like the litter after a “Greener Tomorrow” benefit concert.  A few choice words and some fetching of powertools limps the box along until the next snow.  Linda was at her end with this issue and was stepping up her “awareness campaign”.

I refuse to be beaten by this devious plowman and committed to doing something about it.  Truth be told, this has been on my mind for some time – every time that beaten down mailbox came into view, the mind wind would start running down design options.  It was really just a matter of finding a couple of weekends to devote to getting my hands dusty.  That time finally came a few weeks ago and here is the end product – standing proudly waiting for the first test of the Winter.

One of the inhibitors is I wanted to get familiar with some new tools and try my hand at some new (to me) carpenter techniques.  When doing new things with tools that can cause serious maiming, you do not want to be rushed and/or distracted.  The fingies are important to me and the months working vertical steel lathes and gear cutters has taught me to respect the sharps (and you probably thought I just sat in a cozy office all these years).

Might as well take you through a quick breakdown of the process.  Clearly the first thing was to finalize the design.  A big thanks goes to my neighbor who came up with the original concept.  He is a big wood worker and made his mailbox when he moved in a few years back.  Every time I picked up the mailbox out of the snow I’d glance over at his driveway to see his mailbox standing proud above all the downed mailboxes.  No reason to ignore a working model – just needed to extend the concept a little bit to put the Bri touch on it.  His was made out of at least 6x6s posts he salvaged from the house clearing.  4x4s had to do for my project.  After the materials were acquired, the next step was to learn how to mortise and tenon (confession .. thought it was actually tendon which shows you what a rookie I am).  Neighbor’s was just bolted flat – figured this would compensate for the smaller lumber size and be a vehicle for getting familiar with my plunge router.  Starting with the tenon I used a straight router bit to cut a valley in the 4×4.  The depth was set to produce the desired final width after shaving off all four sides of the 4×4.  This was a pretty big cut which is where the plunge router came into play allowing for multiple passes of increasing depth.  Now, the first attempt failed miserably – not thinking I started by shaving off the very end using a pencil line to follow.  Not only is the pencil line dumb since once slip will effectively erase it, but more stupid is the fact it shaves off all the support for the router base as you move out to the end! dumb dumb dumb.  After some pondering the answer was pretty simple – there was plenty of length in the lumber so bringing the cut in more was not an issue.  Also added a wood guide to prevent any drift.

Just need to make sure the piece of wood was lined up on each turn of the 4×4.  It didn’t even matter how big the cut was, all that was needed was for it to be long enough to fit nicely into a mortise – guessing around a depth of 2 inches and the rest could be cut off with the chop saw.  To speed up the process, went ahead and cut all the tenons at once – the white tape was a short lived idea since the router base simply scraped it off and only caused the bottom to gum up.

Hit the jump to read about all the other details involved with this project

Continue reading Operation: Special Delivery

Operation: A Well Hung Peter Redux

First off, I just want to extend our best wishes for the speedy recovery of our surrounding communities as they were hit by a horrific F4 tornado over the weekend.  Fortunately, no one we know was injured – it is still unclear at this point whether others in those communities suffered losses but our hearts and prayers go out to everyone impacted by this tragedy.  Many of our friends have lost their homes and I can only imagine what they must be feeling at this point.  Keep your heads up and we are all here to help wherever we can.

I had some downtime so figured it was good time to crank out a quick post.  Project Auuuunnnnooold has entered another phase and that is taking a huge amount of my days/nights, so I need to get these out when I can.  If you recall, Linda’s favorite photographer is Peter Lik.  Clearly an unfortunate name to carry through the early school years.  If you are an avid reader of this blog you might also remember a trip to Vegas a couple of years ago netted us our great room centerpiece (link here).  Earlier this year we made our annual trek out to the desert.  Our new tradition is to visit the Peter Lik Galleries to see what is new in the collection.  We should probably reconsider that new tradition since we now have a new piece for our guest room.

These are cell phone pictures so don’t take this as an indicative shot.  The captivating component of Peter’s work is how it reacts to light.  Again, you really need to experience it in person, but imagine the shot above as the “low” light state.  It essentially darkens and the vibrance in the sky kicks in as if the storm is in full force – this is the reason I thought of this post topic based on the recent events in Washington).  When the lights are on it, the pictures brightens and the lone tree becomes the focus of attention.  The storm then looks like it is just building in the distance.  Quite amazing really and dramatic change is what captivated Linda enough to want to add it to her collection (she may claim it was I who wanted it, but that’s probably just crazy talk).  They added an Elements pack of our choosing so we technically came back with FIVE Liks.  Of course, the minute we signed on the dotted line the thoughts switched to the work to hang it.  The last one took everything I had, but the guest room would not require any stress with the cultured stone that the great room had.  There was one MAJOR concern that kept swirling around the head – it had to be hung in a manner that provided confidence it would not fall.  This condition is not so much a concern for the replacement cost, but rather due to where it was going – essentially directly over our sleeper couch which means directly over the heads of our guests.  This was not something to take risks on.

The picture needed to be centered on the wall or I would soon end up in a psych ward somewhere – Linda often points out my small amount  of OCD when it comes to symmetry.  Non centered or worse yet crooked pictures will slowly grate on me until I can’t take it anymore and have to do something about it or vacate the room – and no, this is not just in my house so my apologies ahead of time if I happen to tweak a picture when no one is looking hehehe.  Having help build our home, we have the luxury of knowing exactly what the interior of the walls look like.  This provides direct access to where the studs are and any interferences that might be in the area.  The first concern was the plumbing for the master bath on the other side of the wall, but that turned out to be lower than the hanging point.  The stud locations were the problem.  Unless there was some way of knowing ahead of time what you are going to put on the walls, just assume you will NEVER have a stud where you need it.  I knew this going in so spent the flight home trying to think of a way to address this problem and still allow for the picture to be perfectly centered.  The graphic scene of this picture hitting someone sleeping under it kept popping into my head.  The standard answer is to use drywall anchors but history has shown those can pop out if they do not get a good hold or if too much weight is applied.  This picture is heavy so wanted to leverage studs … if I wanted any sleep when we had guests.  After significant noodling this solution evolved.

Hit the jump to read details on the hanging process

Continue reading Operation: A Well Hung Peter Redux

Operation: Something To Crow About

Ever have one of those days when you look back and wonder how you got everything done on the must do list?  How about two days in a row of that?  Three?  Well, I can honestly say the last FOUR days have been one for the ages.  It is fairly late on Sunday and about the first time I’ve been able to sit for a few minutes not to mention reliving my college years sleep cycle.  I’ll leave out the details for now since the last four days have been filled with upcoming blog topics, but for a short summary the real journey began after work on Thursday with hauling water and working on decorations.  Friday morning began with decorations and doing my best to get stuff ready for Saturday without tiring myself too much and avoiding injury at all cost.  Friday night was spent running a half marathon in a cemetery (until midnight)  followed by Saturday morning early rise to spend ALL day setting up the haunted trail for the cookout that night.  Up early again to haul everything back out of the woods during the day and then finding out Project Auuuunnold was going to go into a new phase tomorrow morning requiring me to spend all night prepping for that.  Of course, a big thanks goes to Linda as well otherwise this would have been pretty much a non-starter.  The good news is it’s done and there’s plenty of time for sleep and recovery!

Since Halloween is officially coming up later this week, figured I’d pay tribute to one of my favorite past times – that’s right, the annual pumpkin carving (and the images were already processed which helps out when trying to get a quick post out).  Thought you might be interested in the process I use for my pumpkin carvings.  I tried to take a number of pictures during the process to help show the different stages.  In fact, there are so many pictures in this post I’ll likely let them do the talking and go light on the text. … and we’re off..

The first step in the process is to figure out the theme.  Every once in awhile I have a subject already picked out, but more often it is usually a night spent parading through pages after pages of Google Images.  This process can get a little dark and be warned you might stumble upon some images that just might be emotionally scarring.  Search terms such as demon, haunted, warlock, devil, gothic, horror, vampire and … ummm yea, I’ve taken “terror” off my search list for obvious reasons.  Each one of those words will produce a very healthy (err. better word..  large) collection of images.  Your goal is to find one with a lot of contrast that works in a 3 color palette.  I usually download a number of images and then proceed to do test palette reductions to see which one works the best.

This year’s winner was…

I actually found it under the gothic category.  As a big fan of The Crow this seemed like a perfect fit.  Before going further, always heed any copyright issues.  The site AllBackgrounds.com listed these images as free but just in case, all rights to this images remain with the original owner – my use is personal only and no revenue is generated off the resultant pattern or carved pumpkin.  With that out of the way, the next phase is to convert the image down to a 3 color palette.  This takes a lot of trial and error and recommend only reducing the colors a little at a time to make sure the conversion thresholds work with the image you are trying to produce.  Paint Shop Pro is my go to tool due to the relatively simple menus (still using version 7 before they went off and tried to compete with Adobe).  Save often and be prepared to backtrack if you lose a feature.  The following shot was pretty far along in the reduction process.  Notice how crisp the lines ended up (thanks to  some quick zooming in and pixel correcting where necessary) which is perfect for the end pattern which maintains the desired effect.

At this point I start the more creative aspect of the project.  Basically you have to zoom in and hand correct any dithering that still remains and add any “pumpkin nuances” that are required.  These little features are needed to generate a pattern that can actually be carved and once cut will help extend the life of the end product.  I am absolutely fed up with all the sites on the internet offering up free patterns that DO NOT WORK!   These fakes are easily noticed once you know what to look for ..and/or if you’ve blown a few pumpkins like I have in the past.  Look for areas that are not cut out – if you see a cut that make their way all the way around it .. bad pattern!  Trust me, you will start noticing the fakes now – they are generally produced on a graphics program, converted to the proper colors and slapped up on the website as a freebie patter (really irks me).  Do you notice any of the features I added below….

Hit the Jump to see how the pattern turns out!

Continue reading Operation: Something To Crow About

Project Sesame Street

It has been a whirlwind the last two weeks, but now I’m pleased to say we finally made it back home.  Linda and I were actually off on vacation to Yellowstone and the Grand Teton areas and caught a number of entertaining places on our drive out there and on the way back.  This is the main reason last month’s posts were a little more burden than usual.  In fact, the last 5 posts for that month were all done on the road (literally) or late nights in hotel rooms.  Luckily I was able to get all the pre-work done on the images and then uploaded before heading out – no trivial matter since the bit into the packing time and prepping for the Chase Race.  All is good now, the kids are back and finally getting some sleep thanks to being through with crappy hotel beds.  The next couple of posts are actually cleanup from last month’s prep work.  Not knowing what mood I’d be in for posting topics, I worked up a few extras.  Tonight’s had a slight time lag since the trip also involved delivering a project to our friends Dr. G and David.  We had the pleasure of meeting up with them on our way out to Yellowstone and were able to spend a few days catching up and checking out all the animals in the park.  (By the way, thanks again for letting us stay over at your house)

Turns out we were able to explore Yellowstone with David and Dr. Giselle a few years back (link here).   To complete a project idea, we gave ourselves a mission – Seek out and photograph naturally (er or in some cases man made) occurrences of the letters W Y S T O L E N. When I chose to accept this mission I didn’t have very high hopes of actually being able to pull it off but this kid is no stranger to a challenge.  It took some effort, but with the help of the team we located every one of those letters somewhere in the park (er.. at least close to it if not in it).  Each was expertly photographed, transferred in triplicate to the storage drives and then … left to wallow in the darkness until there was enough time to kick-start the official project.  That point in time did not make itself available until last December – just before Christmas to be exact.  When possible I like to give Linda creative gifts for special occasions .. something she can’t just go out and buy which directly translates to something handmade.  To be honest, she probably could go out and buy much better versions of the stuff I give her, but part of the gift is really the blood sweat, tears and too often frustration that go into making it.  Good thing I waited until nearly Christmas Eve to working on this project ’cause nothing like putting yourself in a corner to keep you focused.

I’m going to skip ahead a bit on the project since the real meat of any photography project is the matte creation.  So just assume the all the typical effort of pouring through thousands of photographs to find the best letter composition, post processing those, sending them out to get printed in both color and black and white and locating a frame and corresponding matte blank were tediously completed.  with that out of the way, the matte cutter was dragged out along with the tools that would be needed.

We do a LOT of photography framing etc. so we opted to purchase our own matte cutter (on the left of the image).  Based on the prices local framing retailers charge this has more than paid for itself over the years.  After an extended period of time in Jeffery Alans I decided on the choice of mattes – a textured white front with a black backing.  This would give a nice black border on the images with the bevel cuts.  The shot above was taken a little late in the process since you can see the layout had already been drawn out on the backing of the frame I purchased.  Let’s go a little closer on that since this is the loooongest part of the process.

Hit the jump to see how this project turns out

Continue reading Project Sesame Street

Operation M O Y

No time to lose, some time freed up so back on the posts.  Tonight’s topic brings yet another project.  Unlike most of my projects, this one had a short execution time.  Not by choice mind you, this was a direct result of losing track of the time.  You would think with the relatively low amount of sleep these days I would be on top of things a little better but alas, not the case.  To give myself a little credit I had been thinking about it for a couple of months trying to figure out the right medium to use for the build.  Options included wood, plexiglass, patio bricks, drywall (trust me, I have PLENTY of that laying around these days), but all of those had an extended prep time.  Time that was not in the budget.  Then the shower moment hit me – matting would be perfect and provide an additional compositional element to the project.   With that big decision over, all I needed to do was get the shampoo out of the hair and get to work… well later that day after work while Linda was at the dog club.  That was actually another factor in the delay – she needed to be gone for awhile and I needed access to her boys.

The best part of this is I already had the materials.  With all the photography projects over the years we have a good stock of mattes.  A quick rifle through the pile found the perfect sheet.  Linda was suppose to be gone for about 1.5 hrs which forced some design decisions on its own.  I needed some letters I could freehand cut on the board.  10 minutes on Paint Shop Pro found a smooth cornered font that would do the trick.  A few prints and the patterns were ready.  For ease I just cut the letters out and traced them on the the back of the matte.  With my favorite knife in hand I spent the next 20 minutes slicing through the matte.

There was also a need to have the letters stand on their own.  A lunch brainstorming session came to the conclusion that electrical wiring would do the trick.. and yes, there just happens to be plenty of that laying around the house as well.  The window of opportunity was slipping away, so a quick cut of the wire and some duct tape would have to do.

Hit the jump to see where this is all going

Continue reading Operation M O Y

Serenity Survives, Long Live Serenity

It’s day two of groundhog day err agility showing.  More dogs, more jumping and a lot  more sitting around.  None the less, yesterday actually turned out fairly productive with each of our dogs going 4 for 4, made a blog post and even got some photo shoots in at Chain O Lakes and Lake of Geneva.  Regarding the latter, it is now very obvious where the Chicago discretionary money is heading – straight to Wisconsin.  Good lord those houses around that lake are HUGE.  Also had an entertaining conversation with a Spring Grove Dairy Queen employee who thought the green Arctic Rush flavor jar was apple and not lemon lime.  DQ probably owes me a free blizzard for training their staff.

While digging around the Internet for some details for this post I stumbled on this quote.

Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.. anonymous

This seemed a perfect intro to today’s post.  This is actually a pretty popular quote on the net but none of the references attributed it to anyone in particular.  A shame since it is a pretty insightful quote – ESPECIALLY if you own a bridge named Serenity.  Note, I was really looking for relevant quotes from the movie Serenity when the one above came up.  If you recall, Serenity was a project to give access to the back of our lot (link here).  When it was designed consideration was given to how high to make it to account for the seasonal flooding that had occurred in the past.  Since building it, our Springs were pretty tame and as far as recollection serves, the stream stayed in the banks.  That was then.. this is now!

Welcome to the record flood of 2013.  The shot above is actually a few days after the water started to recede.  Still high, still displaying the awesome power associated with unbridled water.  The weather heads were calling for flash flood warnings but based on their accuracy over the last couple of years there was not a lot of concern given.  Well, at least until I headed off to work that morning and saw the massive flooding – Peoria was under attack by the Kracken.  All I could think of is whether Serenity was going to survive or not.  It was engineered for the worst… but maybe not for record amounts of waterfall.

Eventually Linda and I headed down to assess the situation.  Apprehension abounds.  Feelings were not getting any better at the first view of the stream.  What you couldn’t tell from that shot is the missing trees that used to be along the banks (now middle of the water path).  A quick look to the left revealed that my “debris” buffer was GONE.  There was a tangle of trees that was serving as insurance if anything decided to break away upstream.  It had already caught some large branches etc. during the smaller expansions.  That area was now free of all tangles – hell, even the bank had eroded significantly.

One of the trees was found shortly after…

SAVED.  the roots were tangled up in another bank tree which prevented it from harming Serenity.  Hopes were building especially when a hesitant glance downstream revealed she still standing tall.

Hit the jump to see more details of Serenity’s battle

Continue reading Serenity Survives, Long Live Serenity

Operation: Those F’n Shoe Racks and Operation: Greenie

And now for the third installment in Project March – and it’s a two-for!  There are a couple of difference with this one than the last two.  First of all, it didn’t require any 2×4’s – my project medium of choice.  Secondly, it required me to spend far less time on the design than on the implementation phase.  The reason for the latter difference is we actually bought this project to REPLACE an earlier project that I did design (and labored with blood sweat and tears to get through).  When we built out house about 7 years ago, we decided to go with a wire rack organizer for the master closets.  There was just too much going on then to spend a lot of time dealing with anything too fancy – beside the great room bookcases still needed to be built.  Instead, I quickly planned out a useful design that addressed the storage needs of Linda’s huge collection and my paltry set of clothes.  Apparently I failed to properly address the thousands of pairs of shoes Linda had, because soon after laboring for days with her walk in closet I had to add in more racks.  That lasted a couple of years until she bought another thousand pairs of shoes that easily overran the augmented design.  Unfortunately for me, Linda knows exactly how to motivate me to tackle a “Honey Do” list item.  What is that trick?  Continually bring it up until I relent and agree.  So, for the last couple of years, every time there was a gift giving event she responded to me request for ideas with “build me shoe racks”.  Christmas.. shoe racks, Valentine’s Day .. shoe racks, Wedding Anniversary … shoe racks, Dating Anniversary .. shoe racks, Birthday .. shoe racks.   This might have ended sooner, but every time she responded I looked up at the fireplace and reminded myself the bookshelves were STILL NOT DONE.  Somewhere she got the idea to look into options on the Internet.  A few days later she had found a company called Easy Closets that allowed you to design a system through an online application that was tailored to your closet dimensions.  Normally I would be offended by purchasing a system that I could likely tackle myself, but there were other projects in flight and another year of hearing about it from Linda would make my hair turn grey.   Instead, I was all for the idea and even helped her with the online design – caution is in the air when Linda has her purple tape measure out – she tends to follow the “close enough” rule of design and it looked like this was going to be configured to perfectly match whatever dimensions we gave it.   We did take them up on their free service to validate the design – they added a small connecting piece at the corners of the top shelves to make it one continuous shelf, but other than that, the design was fine.  Words of caution though… if you have ideas of doing this be prepared for the sticker shock ..eesh!

About three days later our UPS man was put to the test delivering something like 14 boxes:

Linda wasn’t about to let these sit around, so as soon as I got home Project Those F’n Shoe Racks was on.  For the record, she came up with the project title based on my standard response to her gift request.  I was going to go with Project Going INTO the Closet but her’s seemed more fitting in the end.. I crack myself up.

I think I was busy saving kids from burning houses or building homes for the less fortunate at the time, but the impatient one took it upon herself to move all her clothes out of the closet and completely dismantle the wire rack organizer.  Something tells me she enjoyed that a little too much.  Now there were no more excuses but to get started on the replacement organizer.  I have to give Easy Closets major kudos for their directions.  They were awesome!  Not only did they have a pretty clear process outlined for installing them, they even had them customized for our specific dimension making it very easy to see which pieces went where.  Par for course, there was a small glitch.  With the wire rack out of the way, we were reminded that we had outlets put in our master closets.  No, I can’t remember why anymore but I am sure it was for a damn good reason (can you tell, I designed all the electrical in our house).  The problem this posed is the outlet was going to be in the way of the drawer section.  The resolution was to push the top of the organizer up a few inches – not a big issue, we just needed to make sure we carried that across all the relevant parts of the installation.  With all the issues addressed, we could start hanging the core supports.  These were solid pieces of steel with the top half bent out at 45 degrees.  All we had to do was draw a level line a set number of inches from the top (plus the outlet modification) on both sides and back wall.  They provided three steel pieces that needed to be cut to fit the wall dimensions – being careful to end on studs.

Tool Count:

  • Utility knife – to attack the 14 boxes
  • Pencil
  • Long level
  • Stud finder
  • Cordless drill 1 for pilot holes
  • Cordless drill 2 for screws

With the steel bars in place, we could hang the end supports which had a matching 45 degree notch in them. Here is the left side.

here is the left side of the back wall

and the right side.

Hit the jump to see how this organizer project worked out

Continue reading Operation: Those F’n Shoe Racks and Operation: Greenie