Currently putting the finishing touches on a wall-mounted chest of drawers for the workshop, which is holding everything from screws to scrap metal to machinist vices. It’s made of scrap pallet wood and ply and totally hand-tooled (planes/chisels/saws). My workshop is very very small (under 8ft by 9ft) and doubles as my home office, so this baby really frees up major space.
Just the rest of the drawer labels left to do. Not sure if these photos will work, but here goes:
It’s not much honestly, but in order to make both kids fit in one room I’m making all their furniture from sheets of MDF. This was my very first project, and likely a mistake, but good progress has been made.
Oooh, this is a post for me. I have a handful of projects going.
I have a network room that needs a fan installed where the window used to be, I have the fan, just need to cut open the board covering what used to be the window, install the fan, and wire it up to exhaust hot air out of the room directly outside. Non time critical, I have the door to that room open for now, it used to be a root cellar in the basement.
I also need to fix the insane electrical work for the basement lighting that the former owner of this house put in. He put in one of those light socket to plug things, then wired together all the new lights in the basement with Romex (all fluorescent) and finished it to a plug that connects to that light socket. I want to pull apart this hot garbage and wire it correctly, and replace the light switches box in the process (some of the threading in the electrical box is stripped, so the switch doesn’t mount correctly), and move it to a different circuit, because it’s currently sharing a circuit with the recreation room, and a couple of bedrooms for seemingly no good reason.
I also have to replace all the magnetic ballasts in the basement light fixtures with electronic ballasts because we have fluorescent replacement LED bulbs, which only work on electronic ballasts. Yay. I have to check the garage and at least one other room with fluorescent fixtures to see if they’re on magnetic ballasts and replace them too so we can finally have all LED lighting in the house.
Going with lighting here: I have to find my multimeter to test and hopefully fix a lamp my brother purchased that doesn’t work that will go in the living room, and replace all the lightbulbs in the living room with smart bulbs, then have them controlled by an in-wall smart light switch (which is already in place), via home assistant. I also need to do smart bulbs in the recreation room, I also have new light fixtures for the rec room to replace some that had loose bulbs (the bulb base was loose in the fixture), and replace the light switches in there with in wall smart switches.
A whole room is lacking power, it was split between different circuits, one was the basement lights/rec room, the other was to the bathroom, I managed to rewire the room to a single point, and I’m trying to pull a new circuit to the room with 12/2 Romex. Holes are drilled, just need to feed the cable along side another run of Romex, and likely pull one more circuit to separate the bathrooms (which are on different floors above/below eachother), from the fridge in the kitchen. Two new circuits, woo. Need breakers for them.
My brother also bought a gazebo from the hardware store that needs to be built and set up in the back yard, and my father in law bought us some pathway lights that I have yet to unpack.
The back yard garden is overgrown with weeds, and I need to deal with that. We didn’t do any gardening this year so nature took over… I don’t really have many if any tools to deal with it, so I need to do some garden supply shopping.
I’m also prepping to install ethernet throughout the house, I have two boxes of category 6 cable, 1000 ft each (2000 ft total), including wiring going up into the attic for access points.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot, but that’s the projects that are foremost on my mind… Some are pretty easy (like the rec room fixtures, I have them, I just need to hang them, or the new wire pull from the power-less room, I have the cable partly run, just need to pull it the rest of the way).
Longer term, I want to build raised boxes in the garden, plus renovate to add a kitchen and another bathroom (with a shower)… Build a new shed, and replace the old antenna tower with something less rusted and perhaps taller, plus run coax from the antenna tower to my office for my ham radio hobby.
Maybe eventually put solar panels on the roof and perhaps a battery system so we can produce and store our own power…
I also have to replace all the magnetic ballasts in the basement light fixtures with electronic ballasts because we have fluorescent replacement LED bulbs, which only work on electronic ballasts.
Chiming in because I just finished swapping over 15+ fixtures. You can get LED replacement bulbs that do away with the ballasts entirely. At first I went with the LED retrofit lights that used the existing ballasts but I still had issues with the ballasts failing (because they were all 20-30 years old). Found the “ballast bypass” replacements and swapped everything over.
The back yard garden is overgrown with weeds, and I need to deal with that. We didn’t do any gardening this year so nature took over… I don’t really have many if any tools to deal with it, so I need to do some garden supply shopping.
I’m embarrassed how much time and money I put into my garden this spring just to let the weeds take over. It’s so hot out there.
Thanks! I think in the short term we’re going to try to make the electronic ballast lamps we already purchased work… If we hit any issues, I’ll look around for the bypass.
We only have 10? Bulbs, I think, and we have at least 8 fixtures, each taking two bulbs. So we’ll have to buy more anyways, I’ll probably get what you suggest for the remainder, and test them along side the direct ballast driven ones… Either way, thanks
They both work fine. I mainly meant if you were having to buy electronic ballasts to make the bulbs you have work, it may be cheaper to buy the bypass bulbs and do away with the ballasts. Same amount of work.
I strongly recommend Bully Tools for shovels and other garden tools. I bought the most heavy duty shovel home depot had on the shelf and broke it two hours into my project. The bully tools shovel handled the same work no problem. I have two shovels, a rake, and a hoe from them.
I finally managed to make my coffee table into an usable state but it still needs a bit more wood to become stable and then it needs to be waxed/oiled.
Got a cabinet in similar state: got the doors cut, fitted and filled, just need the hinges. But the doors will stay if you lean them and maybe a little wedge. They’ve been like that since July. 2002.
though not as home oriented as most posters here, i have a denim jacket i’ve been working on for the past couple months. have been making and sewing my own patches on, and am currently looking at dyeing the sleeves, though i’ve been procrastinating from that a bit ;)
Currently stripping popcorn ceiling on entire first floor, shoring and patching dry wall on all walls and ceiling, painting entire first floor, and replacing most fixtures and rugs. May not sound like much, but it’s full time. First spruce up place has had in 21 years. Also replacing pads and rotors on car when I need to take a brake (intended) from the dust and endless sanding.
These are mutually exclusive. The best case scenario for popcorn ceiling is that it’s a tedious pain to remove, and it only gets worse from there (painted, asbestos, etc.)
Bring the drill press inside and see if I can get the rust off the base. Like the crappy hand plane I derusted a couple of weeks ago, it’s been sitting in an unheated shed through several Canadian winters and attracted condensation. It’s functional, but the table is a mess.
Do Something with the red oak left over from the desk chair repair (since I had to buy a much longer piece than I needed for that). It will likely be combined with a piece of leftover birch plywood to become a tray, and the leftovers from that will become a wooden mallet.
Attempt to 3D print a fairly complex router base for my Dremel, which is going to be interesting because the available instructions are 1. scant and 2. in German.
We are renovating our Atelier to be a temporary house while we strip and redo the main house. My girlfriend’s parents have done a full renovation, he is an industrial electrician, her brother is a woodworker just out of school and a modular house designer. They are all super helpful and I am so grateful and learning a lot.
During the 2 weeks I worked only 2 days per week and a few weekends before we have:
trash removal of previous owner
ripped out electrical in the main house
tore down the gyprock in one room and found that the main house and atelier both have a moisture blocking barrier after the first brick layer
washed away the gritty loam paint that the previous owner had used over much of the house
primed and painted the entire 44m^2 atelier stone walls
placed 6cm cheaper insulation in the storage area since there it was only 1 brick thick instead of 2 bricks plus a space.
cut a hole in the brick wall for the gas heater stove
got a quote for switching to 3-phase 25A, 400V and prepared the site
made a temporary fence to keep our dog in the first piece of our garden that is closed on the sides
cut and dug trenches inside for gas, water, electric and internet
broke up and hauled away 6cm thick concrete slab where we had to route things under
placed and hooked up electrical in the atelier loft, storage room, and the outdoor storage shelter behind it
made technical drawings for electrical, gas, sewer, and water
found a quality 2nd hand gas stove to heat during our mild winters
dug out and mapped sewer and gas lines through the property
dug a 24 meter trench 70cm deep and laid water, gas, and 3-phase electric (in a flexible pipe) in that layer, and laid internet and sewer at ~40cm deep with a measured 1cm per meter “afwatering.”
Quotes for redoing the asbestos filled roof in the main house and currently setting up asbestos testing for the slanted wall since the attestation documentation seemed to be wrong and there is asbestos-based insulation according to a roofer + asbestos remover we got a quote from
temporarily rennovated the small bathroom, repainted, replaced the broken toilet, removed the leaky sink, and re-silicones the tiny sitting bath/shower and replaced the shower head
Found 30m^2 of click laminate for 40€. Proud of that find. Good condition too.
Next up is hooking up the gas and water fittings fully inside, getting a plumber to come test and hook us up to the main 22mm line to the boiler in the house, place and hook up the electrical in the kitchen/living room and for the appliances, find a 2nd hand oven, stove, and fume hood, and fill in the inside trenches and re-pour the concrete, place the floors and finish up for the year in the next month.
Complete window / frame restauration underway at the country house built in the fifties, I scraped all the original paint off by hand and now I’m waiting for drier days to finish the painting.
Fixing the terrace at the country house, I laid the first new layer of concrete to fix the corroded parts just last Thursday. When it dries I’ll see if an entire additional layer is required. Next summer I’ll also rebuild the terrace fence and install growth lines for vines over the terrace.
Acoustic Research AR-7x speaker restauration. I installed the new woofer surrounds few weeks ago, now I’m waiting for the ferrofluid for the tweeters to arrive by mail. Just yesterday I found suitable and cheap linen cloth for the new covers in a nearby cloth shop.
Fixing the rain gutters at home, the weight of last winter’s snow and ice pulled some if the screws off. This is a priority.
Yard fence repainting, I rebuilt a large part of the fence in June but the weather has been too hot / humid to paint the old parts.
New ceiling curtain rail installation at home. Would be easy per se, but it’s a two man job and the ceiling is high…
Motorcycle needs a new heat resistant paint job for the exhaust.
Two sets of new custom speaker stand parts are cut and ready for welding, just haven’t had the time to start it yet.
Thank you! The surfacing part was actually done mostly by hand because if a chicken and egg situation of making the inside components and adding the hinge, without throwing things off balance on the lathe. But after four prototypes, I definitely learned a lot!
We celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary yesterday, easy peasy 👍 The trick is simple, don’t marry someone who is an asshole. I certainly didn’t, and hope my wife feels the same way 😅
I just installed 12" exhaust fan in my garage because my car refuses to charge it’s so hot. 15 minutes to install and wire the fan. 2 days to frame and finish both sides. I fucking hate stucco.
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