Back Splash

I just want to preface this post with the fact that we have pretty much the best home teacher we could want right now. He is currently an x-ray technician (I think, or something like unto it) but in a previous life was a carpenter for ten years. Last summer he helped us replace our front door, this summer he crawled into our very cramped, very dirty, very inhospitable crawlspace with me on an unsuccessful search for Angel's ring and over the past month or so he helped us replace our kitchen back splash.

Since I don't have much foresight you get this picture of Lincoln making Valentine's cards two years ago as a before picture of the back splash.

Not a great view of it but you get the idea and you can see how cute Lincoln was. If you can't tell, the back splash is the same as the counter. It wasn't that bad but it was a lot of brown and the cabinets, back splash and counters all seems to blend together. That and it was kind of dark. Actually, the kitchen was pretty dark.

We bought some tiles we liked that were on clearance and put them in the garage to age for about a year and a half (in case you didn't know, you're supposed to age tiles for at least a year before you install them...I'm pretty sure anyway). Our home teacher Brother Bryan knew about the tile and must have been itching to do some tiling because he took the initiative to invite himself over to help me tear our kitchen apart the week before Thanksgiving.

We broke out the circular saw, some hammers and pry bars and shortly after, this was the result:

I was going to post some in-progress pictures but, they're actually quite boring so I'm just going to post some final product pictures that I just took.

Lights on, no under-cabinet lighting.

Lights off, under-cabinet on.

Lights on, under-cabinet on.

We're really happy with the results. The LED under-cabinet lighting I did on my own with LED strips that I cut and soldered and wired and whatnot. It brings the kitchen more like our style and adds a nice accent.

Answers to some possible questions you probably don't have:

Q: Did you lay and space each of those 1" tiles by hand?
A: Don't be ridiculous. They come in 12" sheets already spaced 1/8".

Q: Did you have to cut any tiles?
A: Yes.

Q: Um, how did you do that?
A: Poorly, at first. I tried a small hand grinder and got jagged edges that broke of in crooked ways.

Q: Then what did you do?
A: Well, then I tried a wet tile saw. It was freezing cold and got pretty similar results.

Q: Did you give up?
A: Yes... I mean no. I tried various methods like building a little support guide out of scrap tile to keep the glass from breaking in weird ways with the tile saw. The pieces kept freezing to the concrete (it's December) and the glass tiles still broke all broken like.

Q: So, then you gave up?
A: Yes, I then gave up on the tile saw, which is what I assume you meant by your vague question (you're a terrible interviewer). I bought a little glass cutter and after some trial and error figured out a pretty reliable method using the cutter, some rulers and two pairs of pliers to score and break the tiles one at a time.

Q: How many tiles did you have to individually cut?
A: 87 cut tiles made it onto the wall. Then there were a bunch of other tests and failures.

Q: LEDs are expensive.
A: That's not a question, and they are fairly expensive if you buy them as LED lighting from a hardware or department store. However, if you are willing to do a bit of soldering and already have old ac/dc power supplies from old electronics laying around they're much cheaper. I bought a 16.8' strip of LEDs for about $15.00 on Amazon.

Q: Will you come do that to my kitchen?
A: If you're willing to pay me twice as much as you would a professional and won't complain when you get results half to a quarter as good then, yes, yes I will (and you'll need to pay travel expenses).

(confession: all three of those pictures are with lights and under-cabinet on. The first was taken with a flash, the second with no flash and too fast of a shutter speed and the third with no flash and normal settings. They just happened to all look pretty close to how I described them above.)

Arcade Shelves

I have an old Asteroids arcade cabinet that I started to build on this last summer. That's a different story entirely and it's nowhere near done. In the process of working on that I bought three more arcade cabinets for parts. And this, is their story.

This one was a Golden Tee '98 and was a lot more complete than it looks in this picture. I forgot to take any pictures of it before I started tearing it down. And these are the only pictures you'll see of it because shortly afterward it was totally torn down and cannibalized for parts.

This if Frogger. If you don't know Frogger then I can't believe you'll be very interested in this post.

This is Tutankham. If you don't know Tutankham then you're pretty normal.

I got all three of them for $50. Which is pretty good considering the coin door (not pictured) from the Golden Tee game is worth $50-60 by itself (it's going in the asteroids machine). 

Angel was super excited about having four arcade cabinets in the garage. So much so that she said to me, "You could probably make some pretty cool book shelves out of these. And if you did then I bet they would stay in the garage a lot longer...which would be nice." (If you were paying attention you probably noticed a bit of a lie in that last quote. Angel didn't really have much confidence in my ability to make anything 'pretty cool')

So, with the support, trust, faith and great idea of my wonderful, beautiful, amazing wife I set off on an adventure to turn some crappy hammered old arcade cabinets into some relatively neat storage units.

I don't think anyone is really that interested in a full play by play of the whole process (and I'm not that interested in writing it) so I'm just going to post some of the in-progress pictures for your perusal.

So, these are all pictures of the Frogger cabinet but the Tutankham was pretty much the same except that the front doesn't swing open, it's only accessible through the coin door. Since I'm terrible at remembering to take pictures along the way there are no pictures of the shelves in the screen opening...

Once I got enough done on them Angel reluctantly agreed to help me move them out of the garage and into the basement.

I'm pretty happy with them so far but I'm not actually completely done with them. If you'll notice they don't have their coin doors on them. I haven't gotten around to that and I need to figure out how I want to light up the ones on Tutankham. Also, I have a whole other project to work on the Frogger one involving lighting and my Christmas present:

Stay tuned for that one.

Trip to Mackay

Lincoln and I got a chance to take a road trip with Uncle Jaron and Aunt Kelsey to Mackay. Although a funeral doesn't make for the circumstances, it was a rather pleasant trip. This is the first time the three siblings have been together Angel and I got married, almost 5 1/2 years. We met Grandma and Grandpa there and stayed in a graciously donated strange house that was very 60's up with a fairly newly remodeled basement. It was actually pretty nice. We took this picture in the bathroom downstairs to make Angel jealous that she wasn't there:

Since this was Mackay, the house was surrounded by farm land and farm equipment. So, we went out to take some pictures on some tractors.

 Lots of tractor noises.

 Trying to get it started.

 More tractor noises.

 He wasn't too happy when he had to share a seat with Dad.

This is just like the tractor I got to drive back in my pipe moving days. I started it up for him but decided not to take him for a ride because who knows what the tractor's owner and country laws would have done to me.

This is a picture of the sweet satellite dish installation on the house we stayed at:

If you can see there, the dish is mounted on a pole (and surrounded by chicken wire) and the cable is loosely on some tree branches over to the house. I just thought it was funny and then I started thinking about how the lumber yard sold satellite dishes and started wondering if Grandpa had anything to do with this...

While he was there Lincoln consoled and comforted Grandma and performed a waltz with Barbie for the amusement of everyone:

This may be the best picture I've ever seen of Grandpa. Also, Aunt Ann gave me an awesome hat.

 This is more typical.

I have better picture of this group but they aren't as embarrassing for Jaron.

I like to see Lincoln play with things I played with as a kid.

Eden Highlights

For Angel's family's annual summer vacation we all headed up to Eden, UT to occupy a large rented house for about a week. There was lots of fun that happened but I only took pictures of a couple things so that's all you get.
Doug, Ken and I led an expedition to help all the kids learn a thing or two (probably just one) about repelling. As a primer, Doug rigged up a practice station on a column around the back of the house. Lincoln had been watching the other kids and wanted his turn to practice:

He did pretty good. Although he is stepping on the rope in that last one.

Lincoln didn't go for the real repelling though, maybe next year.  He did however take a pretty serious hike with us up to a waterfall.

Getting psyched (and hugged) at the trailhead.

 The goal.

The hike wasn't too long but it was pretty steep and rocky. Lincoln made it all the way to the top by himself. He likes hiking but he did need a bit of help on the way down.

Lincoln spent a lot of his time there just running around the house being happy and playing with cousins.

Also, my wife is beautiful.