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Sarah is probably going to post these in her journal as well, so I’ll cut for those who aren’t interested, or aren’t interested in seeing them twice.
Anyway, this weekend we decorated the baby room. I may be biased but I think it looks fantastic.
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So, as mentioned earlier, I spent part of this weekend building myself the mother of all benches in my garage. I love this stuff. It’s like lego for adults. The construction necessitated the purchase of numerous highly dangerous power tools, such as a circular saw, which is almost guaranteed to cause death/dismemberment and is therefore highly desirable.
I’m very pleased with the end result. It’s 12 feet long, 36 inches high and about 32 inches deep. It’s constructed entirely with 2×2s, 2×4s and one 4′x8′ sheet of 3/4″ ply for the surface. The back is screwed into the studs in the wall. It’s entirely held together with screws, for strength.
Some photos:
Couple of jobs remain – need to fix the legs to the ground with some metal brackets and of course finish the wood surface (undecided on the finish as yet), but structurally, it’s looking good. Not sure how much weight it will take, but it supports me sitting on it (250lbs+) without so much as a squeek, so it should be pretty damn strong.
So, today I started working on my project to build a bench in the garage. It’s coming along quite nicely (will post photos soon).
One of the challenges I faced was that the legs need to be fixed to the ground (the ground being a concrete slab). I assumed that my only option for this would be to drill, insert rawplugs (or “anchors”, if you’re a yank), and then use screws.
Not so. Enter the Remington 496 semi-automatic. I kid you not. After asking the advice of one of the orange attired chaps at Home Depot, he suggested this device, into which you load a nail, and a .27 cartridge, point it at the ground and pull the trigger. The resulting explosion fires the nail (up to 3 inches in length) into solid concrete. No license needed, anyone can go pick one of these suckers off the shelf.
If that’s not the coolest thing ever, I don’t know what is. If it hadn’t been for the fact that it cost $200, and my actual need for this stretched to a total of 8 nails, I’d be holding one right now trying to think of things to test it on.
