1. steven’s birthday is coming up in two weeks but his present came early! we installed step one of it into his car last night and step two will be done later today! satellite radio!
2. steps are being made to figure out how to make the arcade machine for the arcade room!
3. steven’s grandmother is getting her kitchen re-done, which means i got to pick through old kitchen cabinets!

satellite radio everywhere!

so, for steven’s 28th birthday (august 1st, ya’ll!) i got him a satellite radio receiver, a car kit and an at home kit! how does this fit into the grand scheme of things in the house? well, eventually we’re going to wire the whole house with speakers and plug it between satellite radio and a big mp3 player (i have a massive cd collection) instead of keeping the two 300 cd disc changers i have. when i get home tonight i plan on setting up my very very old stereo system (i got it in 10th grade. over 13 years ago. geeze!) and plugging the satellite receiver up to it so that when we’re not in the car, we can listen to commercial free radio through out the house! i’m very excited because i know steven got excited over it. i love the boy and i love making him happy, but please spare me hours of Hair Nation, please…

this set up will be in a room we call a good handful of different names since nothing has stuck yet: arcade room, heart of the house, the middle room. it is a room smack dab in the middle of the house that we’ll be putting an arcade machine in, housing our vast comic library, and the music center. we’re deciding what exactly we want to do in that room, but it seems like it’ll be mostly black washed walls and dark dark hardwood floors. i might be doing comic and gaming murals on the walls in there, which will be kind of cool (if i may say so myself). it currently houses our comic book collection which i will be bagging and boarding every comic and setting them vertical in a nice shelving unit with tabs for easy finding. currently the only thing on the walls in there now is a piece of artwork i bought years ago by Mark Mothersbaugh (lead singer of Devo). it’s a giant black and white print of a crying cyclops and a girl, fricking amazing and huge. also in the room is my giant cd collection. i have over 500 cds. music used to be my life. since being broke for years, i haven’t been able to afford much, sadly. i had a three cds a week habit for a good while there. oh, those were the days…

arcade machine how-to

steven will be building a home made arcade cabinet for our home and putting it in this room. using an old computer and having it run a MAME, we’ll build a cabinet like we used to see in arcades to play different games on at any given time. again, i’ll be doing artwork for this on the sides, hopefully as bad, cheesy, and wonderful of our 80s memories can give me. we’ve begun looking at new monitor prices (flat panels on the cheap? thank you newegg.com!) and lumber prices to build from scratch.

and for me, i would love to have a glass blown anatomical human heart light as the lighting source in that room. no idea where i could find one and if i could, if i could afford it. heck, i don’t think i’ve even sold steven on the idea yet but i think it’s fricking AWESOME.

off of the middle room/heart of the house is what was described as a 1/2 bath in the listing for the home when we were thinking of buying it. it’s also the laundry room. these two rooms combined don’t give me any problems,  but how ugly it is and how nonfunctional it is gives me PLENTY of problems:

• it was never finished.
• they dropped the ceiling about 7 inches in an already low ceiling room.
• it has 4 different kinds of flooring. none match or even look good.
• it doesn’t have ANY storage whatsoever
• there was water damage on the wall that they never fixed
• they painted over perfectly fine paneling and did a shitty job at painting
• they put a random wall up for no reason and did a bad job at that, not even finishing it
• wires are just hanging out an about, there are holes in the walls. some holes attempting to horribly be patched up
• there is a toilet and a sink in there making it a half bath… but they aren’t even hooked up to anything! just sitting in there!

in an attempt to  make some storage for all the cleaning supplies and hardware supplies and the such that people store in laundry and work rooms, i put up boards i found laying around the house up on the walls above the washer and dryer with brackets from various rooms as well (the previous owners seemed fond of horrible ugly shelving and brackets, or nice ones they painted over ghetto style). those small shelves can only hold so much and honestly aren’t appealing. steven’s grandmother (who lives only half a mile away) is getting her kitchen overhauled with new cabinets and the like. she let me pick through what was being taken out and i got to get a nifty old double cabinet dealy that maybe tonight i will be putting up above the washer and dryer for more storage and more APPEALING storage. i am not that fond of the ghetto “let it all hang out” look of stuff on crappy shelves screwed into horribly painted paneling.

this is just a tide over solution until we can afford to fix up that bathroom. the ideas we have for this room will be cheap to do in the majority, but time consuming. if only money fell from the sky and kept it’s value…

i’ll take some before and after pics of everything just to show you guys!

i love wooden shipping pallets. like, i’m crazy about them. i think they are just amazing and they come in so many crazy shapes and sizes. when i see one, i see a million things i can do with them. it starts some tingling in places, some places it’s not polite to discuss in most company so we’ll leave it at that.

i was pursuing some home decorating site (currently i can’t find, remember, or remember where i found it) a idea of turning a pallet into a plate holder in the kitchen. my mind went crazy with “yes! OTHER PEOPLE are using pallets for things!” and my pallet love grew.

i decided then i wish i had my own set of legal wheels and i would go store to store to turn pallets into household objects (baring Steel Rod wouldn’t complain), but mostly yard objects!

i wanted to turn wooden pallets into a sort of patio wall around our side patio so that once we put a fence up around the yard for the dogs to run around in, then won’t go over the side of the patio and out of the fenced in area. i drew up ideas and was ready to go, but had to wheels to go obtain said little wooden gems… so i kept thinking of what else to turn pallets into; so many things came to mind and one of them was even the fencing! but that would be a lot of pallets as we have a fairly large yard and i don’t know just how readily available pallets are and just how many places would actually let me nab them for cheap.

found @backwoodshome.com/articles2/sawyer69.html

because we bought the house this year, the year our president decided to stimulate our economy in various ways, steven and i are supposed to get a stimulus incentive for purchasing a house in this horrible housing market. we know we need a fence, it is of the utmost importance to use and people with two small dogs and also people who want some semblance of privacy. not to mention, some fencing is just adorable! we were going to use our stimulus check to buy fencing but oh how much it costs is insane. if i can convince steven to have us make fencing out of pallets that are being tossed out and are still in good condition, then not only are we sparing the landfills, but being able to use the cash we will be getting in other much needed ares of the house.

above all, we agreed the money being given to us for buying the house is going right back towards the house.

but i got off on a tangent! back to pallets! i want to make a nice wall around the side patio and that will be so wonderfully easy and cheap and we can stain it to match whatever and then seal it to have it last even longer.

this bad boy says it's for composting but i have other plans!

i called my buddy Sarah Meloncon on saturday while i was attempting to paint the interior of my shed studio in 97 degree heat and failing miserably. telling her of my excitement about my ideas and being a horribly resourceful yet gifted artist with a wicked cool imagination, she reminded me of Instructables website. i gave up on painting in the humidity and heat, went inside and looked up the site to see if they did anything with pallets. i found amazing rosalie porn. pallet ideas at every angle!

this badboy [found at Instructables: here] is supposed to be for composting, i have other plans! i want to make it and make it into something more attractive than just our trash can outside, a nice place to put the trashcan in and sort of “hide” it and making it blend more into the rest of the outside pallet use! even if we don’t make a fence out of pallets, we are looking at wooden fencing anyways and staining it. we’ll just stain it all to match. i can even make one for the lawn mower. Instructables has many tutorials on pallet inspired things including planters i had an idea for before seeing them on the site, but now i can alter other people’s ideas using them as a basis. there are plans for different planters and some furniture there as well on that site.

this beautiful bench was made over Holy Scrap Hot Springs and got my hands itching to replicate it so i can sit under one of my many trees in my yard. i’m totally stealing this idea and putting it in my yard. so cheap to make and so lovely to see!

i can keep going on and on, but my lunch hour is almost up. oh, believe me… this won’t be the end of hearing about my pallet love. a co-worker of mine (hi, Nicole!) said she would love to help in me working on stuff for the house this week due to the fact her cute little daughter is spending time at grandma’s and mom wants to create. thank goodness for friends who want to get their hands dirty and make things beautiful!