ellaluna: Improving Home Improvement

Goddess forbid I ever live anywhere without trying to muscle my way in and change things around!

So I'm living with my friend J for a bit, and decided that her closets needed some sprucing up. I think you can see why. Here's the closet before:

Well, that's not so much a "before" as it is a "right after I knocked out the useless shelf and clothes rod." But you get the idea.

One of J's big complaints was that 30% of the closet is essentially inaccessible, because it's behind a wall. So we designed some narrow shelving that allows a person to step inside and turn to the deeper shelving behind the wall. Maybe a pic would explain that better!

In this pic I'm experimenting with supports for the narrow shelving. I wasn't too happy with the supports you see running down the center, at the corner where the narrow shelves meet the deeper shelves, because it doesn't really allow access to the deeper shelves. I ended up running a support along the wall, under the deep shelves, that extends out to the narrow shelves, and then putting supports at the front on the right of the narrow shelves and in the center along the wall.

Again, that doesn't make a lot of sense, so let's see if I have a picture:

All righty, so this is before I added the narrow shelves, but you can see the support that juts out from the deeper shelves. The reason I didn't want to put a support running the entire length of the narrow shelves is that they are pretty shallow, designed primarily for CD's and DVD's, so we didn't want to take up space with a long, fat, 1x4 support.

On the other side of the closet, I built a double clothes rod, a shorter length of clothes rod for hanging long stuff (there is another closet, so hanging longer things isn't really a priority in this one) and a few extra shelves above. Like this:

Gee, to look at this picture you would think I was photographing all the junk ON the shelf. I think I know someone who needs to learn how to take a picture. (That would be ME)

When I look at this, I think two things. 1) I can't believe I did it! 2) I can't believe it took me the better part of a week to do it! We did have to borrow a circular saw for the weekend to cut everything, but once the weekend was over the saw went back, and any additional cute I had to make (primarily for supports) I had to do by hand with a hacksaw or coping saw. I had a reciprocating saw as well but those things are monsters, not so great for precision cutting as I discovered to my dismay.

All in all I was pretty happy with the finished product. Now if only I could get her to put things away in it...

lightboxing

I'm very focused on listing more frequently on etsy, and to that end I decided to make a ghetto lightbox to make my photography easier.

I used a ruler to draw a line one inch in corners of the box on two sides and the top, then I cut out the areas of the box on the inside of the line where the muslin filter was going to go.

I then reinforced all of the corners with leftover pieces of cardboard because, of course, anytime I can use glue and cardboard I'm like a terrier with a stuffed bunny.


After that I glued muslin to the inside of the box and cut some pieces of posterboard to slide into it to use as an infinity backdrop. Hmm, some pictures of that step would be helpful, wouldn't they?

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the lightbox. Now I seem to be fixated on making little "lifts" covered in the same paper as my backdrop. God forbid I use this lightbox to actually, you know, PHOTOGRAPH anything.

Sometimes I'm just more interested in the process than I am in the result.

Haunted Kensington Manor

Halloween for my roommate is like Easter for Christians. He kept saying he wanted to do a haunted house, but he's kind of in
a slump and I didn't really see it happening. But the day before Halloween, he sprung into action, and I found myself carried along by his enthusiasm.

He carved 4 pumpkins in one day and we hit the dollar store for supplies on the 30th. I didn't think he had any idea what he was doing, but he had the entire thing planned out in his head.

Halloween day was madness getting ready for it and roping our other roommates into it. (There was some serious arm-twisting going on there, too!)

By 8:00, we had a line of kids from our front door to the street. We took a group of 4-6 kids through about every 5 minutes for two hours. There is math involved and my head isn't doing math today, but that's a lot of kids.



I hadn't planned on dressing up, but at the last minute I gypsi-fied myself. The lovely Justine came over and we held a fake seance (A feance?) in the dining room. She was AWESOME! And damn cute. Her fiance Ryan was in the living room playing creepy organ music on the electronic piano thingy.

Chris was hiding in the bathroom with monster hands on, and would reach out and attack Andy when Andy said "This is where we keep the beast. We haven't fed him yet today."

Bay and Scott hung out in the kitchen blending carrots with cranberry sauce. (I'm still not entirely sure why they had to actually put something in the blender, because the kids never went in the kitchen, and the mess I had to clean up the next day was vile, but ok.) Scott was wearing a chef's coat and a bloody apron and Bay was wearing a shirt smeared with blood(cranberry sauce) and carrying a bowl full of bloody fingers (cranberry sauce and carrots) They would pop out of the transclucent plastic sheeting screaming "more fingers! more fingers!" and Bay would chase the kids out the door. It was pretty awesome.

As the night wore on, the kids got older, and we finally cut them off. By 10pm we were done. And then we drank. And drank.
And drank some more.

Then we got to wake up the next morning and clean. And by "we" I mean Andy and me.

I think I'm still hungover.