Digital Chum - Virtual fish guts and other nonsense

House

The Library

Nov 11th, 2020
by Dan.
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(tl;dr… the finished library pics are at the end)

Bookshelves

When we had our house remodel done back in 2015, there was a room added that was specifically designated as a library… my room. Until January of 2020, that room was basically a big storage room while we finished other rooms and got organized from the chaos of a huge, full-house remodeling project. Then, finally, I started working on it sporadically as time permitted. I had been drawing various plans for months, waffling between building them from scratch and using Ikea Billy Bookcases and tricking them out to look like custom built-ins. I went for the “build them from scratch” option.

Here’s an idea of what the room has looked like for the past few years. The liquor boxes are full of books, not liquor… and no, I did not drink the liquor that WAS in the boxes!

  • Library to be 2
  • Library to be

The goal was to have an “old world traditional” look mixed in with a bit of a “Lord of the Rings” fantasy vibe and maybe just a tiny pinch of Steampunk… so when you walked in, you felt like you were walking into a different world.

So after a lot of measurements and bookcase design and figuring out how wide to make the bookcases on each wall, I got to it with a few sheets of red oak plywood from Home Depot. The bookcases were all 11-1/2 inches deep, but the widths varied a lot. The widest one is 31 inches.

Bookcase sides

I had nineteen bookcases to build, which seemed overwhelming, but I figured “baby steps,” right? I started with enough plywood for the first three bookcases. It was a lot of cutting, an absurd amount of drilling (for the adjustable shelves – 2,052 shelf-pin holes), and a lot of gluing and clamping. I made various jigs to help with streamlining the repetitive process, but I won’t bore you with those here.

Unfinished bookcases

Eventually, I figured I should get them out of the garage and into the library to make sure I’d measured correctly. I put them in more-or-less the correct spots and was mildly surprised that I hadn’t borked that up. Unfortunately, I found the exterior walls were kicked out a bit at the bottom, so the bookcases on those walls wouldn’t be able to get attached flush to the wall, but that was something to deal with later. La! La! La! La!

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Aerial shots of the big catio

Mar 23rd, 2020
by Dan.
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I got an inexpensive little drone a couple months ago (Holy Stone HS165) just for fun and this weekend was my first chance to fly it, so I figured I’d try to get a few aerial shots of the big catio. It was a success, though the photo quality is mediocre (only 1920×1080 resolution and the lens is questionable). It’s super fun to fly, at any rate!

I got fairly close while Melody was in the catio and she was unfazed. She was curious about the weird, buzzing thing, but wasn’t hesitant at all until I got too close, and even then she just backed off a little bit. She’s kind of fearless!

Melody in the catio

Big CatioBig Catio

Big CatioBig Catio

Really… Our cats are not spoiled… Part 4

Feb 15th, 2020
by Dan.
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Back in 2014, we moved and did a huge renovation on the new house (You can see portions in previous posts). Since we were doing some additions, we had the option to install a dedicated cat door into an exterior wall so that I could eventually add a big catio instead of the small, window units that I had made at the old house.

Fast forward 5 years and ta-dah! We have a big catio!

I sort of skipped to the end with that picture, so here’s a summary of the process, along with some tips and strategies that I used while building it.

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Thanksgiving Table

Nov 26th, 2016
by Dan.
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The dining room table all set for Thanksgiving dinner… seating twelve.

Thanksgiving Table

(Lori had to make the table cloth because we couldn’t find one long enough.)

The Dining Room Chairs

Nov 26th, 2016
by Dan.
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Back in August, I finished building our new dining room table. It fit quite nicely in the new dining room, but seemed to lack a certain something… like chairs. We had four chairs from our old dining room table, but that seemed wholly inadequate for a twelve foot long table. Most of the dining table chairs that we found in stores and on websites were at least $100 each, which isn’t all that bad if you only need a couple, but needing twelve chairs… not gonna happen.

Salvation Army ChairsA few months before, I’d seen a picture on Houzz.com (which I can’t seem to find again) that had a long table with chairs of various styles but the same color scheme. Lori and I both thought that would work, so  that began our search. She first found these six chairs at the Salvation Army store for $5.00. Not $5.00 each. $5.00 for all six. They were ugly, but were in not-too-terrible shape structurally.

The Under-CushionI set about fixing any wobbles and Lori ripped out the rest of the broken cane in the backs and un-upholstered the horribly-stained blue cushions. Underneath the blue fabric, she found… plastic-wrapped, mustard-yellow-striped fabric. Classic. No… what’s the opposite of classic?

We decided to go with a black and purple’ish theme for the chairs. The kitchen has some purple in it along with the coffee-colored cabinets and the base of the table is black, so those colors would tie everything in and should work fine.

We got some additional chairs from a friend who was getting rid of them (free!) and Lori set about getting them all painted black.

Painted Chairs Painted Chairs

She found some tie-on cushions for the spindle-back chairs and decided on two different fabrics for the Salvation Army chairs… one purple and cream for the regular chairs and one darker fabric with a mix of the proper colors for the chairs with arms. Like this…

Upholstered Chairs

So when all the painting, upholstering, and cushion-tying was done, this is what we ended up with… an eclectic style with the capacity to seat twelve people at the table with plenty of elbow room.

Dining Room Table with Chairs