The Holtonian

More boring Dribble about my life, don't feel obligated to read it

The wife and I had a busy day today. We made a birthday run down to my grandfather in law's in Atlanta to celebrate his big 80th birthday. It was a nice little surprise for him and it was great to see his smiling face to see all his friends turn up to wish him a happy 80. It was sort of awkward for me as I know just my wife's imediate family and a lot of the neighbors and out of town friends of Papa I had no clue who they were. Also its sort of weird because you're like, "Hey nice to meet you, though I'll never see you after today, its nice to meet you." But I tried my best to be the good little grandsoninlaw i could.

We got back around 9ish and we had made a short stop at Wallyworld in Ft O. See the thing is, we sort of sold one of our TVs without having a replacement for it. We took our old TV in our bedroom (a 19inch that I bought my freshman year off a friend who won it as a door prize--it was a rather lame sort of tv nothing special about it). Well we had noticed the picture had started to go and we'd be watching basketball or baseball games in bed and couldn't even tell what the score was. So we picked up the cheapest flat screen we could find for a 100 bucks. It looked nice, I set it up and we also bought the cheapest DVD player we could find (about 40 bucks for a magnavox progressive scan). So for a 140 bucks we got a 19inch flat screen and a dvd player, not a bad deal. The wife asks me to go get something to prop the TV up so we can have the TV on top of the DVD player, basically two 2x4s so the TV wasn't resting on the DVD player. I do her one better and go down and start to make a little shelf type thing.

I find some good pine boards down in the basement, who knows where they came from, and cut two pieces at equal length 20 inchs, that'll be the top. Then I decided to try out our stain that we bought for the Armoire, just to get some practice. Now mind you I have no clue what I'm doing, wifey was going to do the staining on the Armoire since she watched the instructional how to video at the store. But I proceed to stain and notice the stain is rather darker than anticipated. I figure oh well, its still a decent color. I call the wife to the basement and ask her to see if she likes the tint of the stain and she remarks, "Have you wiped it off yet?" I didn't know you were supposed to wipe off the stain after you applied a coat on it. So I wiped it off with a T shirt and to my astonishment it looked pretty good. So I got a nice little practice with the stain, a nice little project I should wrap up tomorrow, and got the satisfaction of building something with my barehands. Hopefully the assembly will go well. My previous attempt at building furniture didn't turn out pretty.

But here's the before picture of the Armoire, hopefully by the end of the week I'll have an after picture, if the weather clears up enough to stain it outside at least. I may do some of it in the basement if its raining, but the big piece will have to be done outside due to the sheer size of the armoire and fumes of the stain.

I've also updates some side blog stuff, pics and other info