We have practically completed all of our remodeling projects. After about 22 years of living in the country on 3.3 acres, we have decided to sell it and find a nice Garden House in San Antonio, or a nearby county. Look at some of the photos in the Links below. We have done a lot of remodeling on this 1930's era farmhouse. Several stories relating to remodeling are available for reading too. We have learned many things the hard way (several times), and enjoy a lot of satisfaction in what has been accomplished here
Some hobbies, we have been involved in for a long time, like remodeling. Almost 20 years ago we bought this little farm house, and it has been an on-going project ever since.
There are so many stories that could be passed on, we may make individual links to each of them later on. A lot of them are very amusing and funny, AND lengthy. We have made practically every mistake possible, and learned from them. I dropped a bucket full of water on the bedroom oak floor, while trying to wash the ceiling, prior to applying a stucco coating - it was preceeded by an argument by the participants - we had a small fight! While cleaning it up, we made up, and all went well. On the same project, I mixed about 5 gallons of paint with stucco (apply all at the same time) mixture (according to the instructions) and it turned into pea soup! Builder's Square was very understanding, and supplied us with a fresh supply of materials, AND current instructions.
Last Christmas ('97), Linda and I bought a new Sears table saw, with the big $ rip fence (Exact-I-Cut). We are now finished building our corner oriented desk, that wraps around onto each wall, with wall-mounted cabinets, and a two drawer filing cabinet that supports the right hand end of the desk. We need a lot of free desk-top space for laying out documents and manuals - you know how crowded it gets, with all the goodies laying around!
The desk working space is 6' x 7', constructed of cabinet grade birch plywood, as are the wall mounted cabinets. Linda designed all of the plans in Corel Draw and we worked right off of the graphic printout (approx 8 pages). A lot of the things we did were first experiences, like applying laminate covering on the desk top. It was a little scary, because the one piece we had, cost $70, and it had to be fitted onto two separate sections of desk top. We have tackled some wild things before, but this project was the most taxing of all. It took about 4 months to complete, just working on the weekends. Linda worked during the week, sanding and applying veneer to the exposed edges of the cabinets and desk top/filing cabinet. The wood grain finish is actually a painted design known as "faux finish." A base coat is applied (red, in this case), and then sections are taped off, and then a black glaze is brushed on and then brushed off to create a wood grain effect. All brass hardware was used, and recently we added under-cabinet "hockey-puck" lights. They afford a great deal of illumination, for a fair price, but a lot of heat is generated. The good thing about them is that they are 'out of sight.'
The pictures we have do not really do the desk justice. I figure we saved around 4 thousand dollars. Take a look at fine desk furniture ... you can't buy much for less than $4,000. We wanted a LARGE desk top, so there was only one way to go ... do it yourself. We spent around $1,000 for materials, and feel it was worth every cent of it! This thing didn't put itself together, and I'm not saying that we didn't make some stupid mistakes ... it would take too long to tell you of all the little things that went wrong (but came out okay in the end)!
If you are at all interested in Linda's design, you can probably get information on the plans.
UPDATE 17 December, 2002: After having moved (we sold our old country house, and moved into a retirement community), we reinstalled the complete desk & cabinets (we told the buyer of our old house, that we were planning on taking it with us). Well, the corner we had to install it in was about 8 inches too close to a window opening. I had to remove about 8 inches from the joint that connects the two desk top pieces. It worked okay, and we are enjoying it again!
Graphics courtesy of:
Graphics made by Bimsan
Updated Dec 2, 2006 : 9:21 AM