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Brad’s Room – check

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Brad, your room is ready. Well, it’s not vacuumed yet but we’re pretty sure you won’t care if that doesn’t get done. Right?

The drawers from our old bed now have a home, too. Remember when they looked like this?

Back in the olden days. Like....Sunday.

Well, they live in Brad’s room now as a ‘dresser’. I stacked them, put on a top that has non-matching fake veneer, and tacked it all together. (First with tape, then with screws after I realized I was an idiot.)

Lloyd thinks these items look photoshopped.

The bottom drawers have sweaters and junk inside, but the top ones are ready to hold Royuk property. The cat night light on top is so you won’t be scared of the dark.

The Lauren Made Me Do It.

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We were watching a movie on the new monitor a few weeks ago and it was skipping frames. Lauren asked why it was doing that and I said my computer was too slow for the fantastically amazing resolution of the new monitor. She said I should get a new computer.

I actually just changed the resolution on the monitor to something a mere mortal might use, and the movie was fine, but she did say I could get a new computer.

The next day I spent about, no kidding, six hours figuring out what parts to buy. I’m pretty computer geeky, so you might think that I would be up on all that stuff, but the tightwad in me knows that if I start looking at new computer things, I’ll realize how slow mine is and want to buy something new. So I don’t ever look at computer parts unless I’m ready to buy something.

All the little boxes came in a bigger box.

Here’s what I came up with:

  • Motherboard: ASUS M4A78T-E $114 (nice enough)
  • Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz $104 (overclocked to 3.4GHz)
  • Video Card: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1GB $114 (4 times faster than my old one)
  • Case: Antec Three Hundred $28 ($54 discount on this & power supply)
  • hec Raptor500 $17 (cables are almost too short)
  • Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 250GB $53 (I don’t need this much space)
  • Memory: Crucial 4GB $58 (about what I was using before)
  • DVD Writer: SAMSUNG SH-S223L $28 (I needed a black one)

Total cost was $517 after shipping (which was only $10) and rebates. If you’re interested in this sort of thing you can read all of the details on the various parts. Most of the parts arrived in a few days, but I had to wait on the stupid DVD burner. I didn’t wait, I started putting it together right away.

Before

After

Ready for inspection.

The old computer would get incredibly dirty inside (this happens with all computers that sit on the floor unless your house looks like Annette’s house). We decided to raise it up a few inches to keep that from happening so quickly. Lauren thought a basket would look good. I was really pulling for turtles to support it. Since it was about 4 inches higher, the cooling system had to be re-engineered as well.

At first, I thought I would cut a hole in the bottom.

A step backwards, I think.

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Brad is coming to town Thursday, and ever since Lloyd’s brothers visited, we’ve been sleeping in Brad’s room. Now it’s time for us to move back to our own bed. (I haven’t slept in our bed since before Christmas.)

We’ve been toying with several methods of how to achieve slantiness – diagrams have been drawn, prototypes have been considered, and bed frames have been window-shopped. On Saturday we were determined to just get this done. After Brighton’s birthday party we went to a couple of furniture stores.

Lloyd thought we could just get a basic under-bed frame, but those don’t have a way to hold onto the box spring so it wouldn’t slide off. Also, we have the complication of having a split box-spring. When we first moved into this house, the box spring to our full-size bed had to be dismantled to get it up the narrow stair opening. When we bought a queen-sized bed, we had to order a split box-spring. That’s more than you wanted to know, isn’t it?

When I make the bed, I MAKE the bed.

Anyway, after much hemming and hawing, we decided to go the cheap-o route and just attach the two box springs together (boards screwed into the bottom) and prop one end up on cinder blocks. Personally, I don’t like how it looks AT ALL, but it’s good enough until we can figure out something two years from now later.

Serviceable, but not attractive.

We had to remove the captain’s bed drawers and move them into Brad’s room. Their configuration is still in flux, but that’s a post for another day.

Stolen ideas

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I haven’t told you about the chickens in the kitchen yet.

I really love the site Neatorama, and often they feature these amazing cut-paper sculptures like this, but I’m not brave enough to attempt it. A while ago they had an artist who cut out around pictures in old books, but I can’t find that link.

I couldn’t make art with books, but I could ruin them forever cut out some pictures and frame them. I had some old frames lying around and thought about cutting up some of Lloyd’s old books, but they don’t have many interesting pictures in chess books. So, I dug into some of the ancient children’s books that are gathering dust in the basement. I cut up one that isn’t a good story, but had sweet pictures.

Everything is cooler framed.

The logical place for chicken pictures was by the deviled egg plate. (I’ve only made deviled eggs five times in my life, but I love that plate.)

This picture was taken in a hurry.

I realize that the frames are too high on the wall, but honestly – when is an art critic going to walk through our house?

Someone’s in the basement with Dinah…..

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Remember how I bought that roaster last summer to bake bread in and only used it once? That was stupid.

Well, I’m giving it another go this summer. In the interest of cheap heat management (i.e. ‘I’m not cooling this house down only to have a giant box of heat in the kitchen ruin everything’-craziness), I’m going to see how many things can be successfully baked downstairs….. right alongside the tools and spare lumber.

Not quite brown enough.

Enchiladas were a success, as were brownies.

Breakfast bars were so-so – the first batch was overdone and the second was underdone. (I blame poor basement lighting for that. “Is it brown or just shady?”)

A frozen pizza took forever. (I blame operator error for that – I didn’t have the heat turned up high enough.) I even had a preheated flowerpot saucer turned over on it for it’s thermal mass, but something went wrong. I’ll have to try it again sometime.

See, the problem with this system is that every time you lift the lid to check on your food, the heat goes right out of the thing. Oh well – a whole summer of dinners will work out the kinks.

Sorry, Lloyd.

Bye-bye, bruised thigh.

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Done!

We went back to Omaha (after a very nice visit with the Kolliparas) to get the tabletop this afternoon. It went as smooth as silk. They loaded ‘er up, we brought it home, and then proceeded to argue about the best way to attach the new top to the old bottom. Luckily Annette and the Pesters stopped by before I got too angry. It’s not that Lloyd’s wrong – he just doesn’t think like I do. He’s all “Take your time and do it right” and I’m all “Just let me slap it together so I can watch t.v.” – and those don’t mix very well. Plus, I had already assembled this thing three times in my head during church, so it was practically a done deal.

As I said, it was a good thing we had company. We used our nice words from then on.

Good-bye, wicked corners. No more crashing into you once a week.

A good size, I think.

Lloyd helped with the centering of the two pieces. He seems to like math, so I said, “It’s all you.”

The tape was my idea. His was better.

When it was all attached, we took off the plastic around the edge. It has eight supports inside that slide out to hold the leaves – the marvelous leaves that hook around the edge! (Thank you, Harold, for helping.)

Like reverse Maypole dancing.

Without the leaves, it is 52″ in diameter. With the leaves on, it’s six feet. The old table was 5 feet square. So here’s the math problem for the day – which one has the larger area? How did you arrive at your answer? (Show your work.)

It's huge!

So, it’s done. It’s a pretty good match for the base, though the top is a tad darker. I’ll just have to dirty up the bottom, and all will be well. If you’d like to see what the real thing is supposed to look like, click here.

Who's that laser cat back there?