Big, Beautiful... Nightmare of a Window

Do you have one of these beauties in your house?  We sure do, and as you can kind of tell it's fairly massive.  I absolutely love the amount of light that it lets in, but it faces directly west, and in the afternoon the sun beams through it making the living room a little too warm (in the summer).  We also have a cut out in the wall opposite this one, so that you can see through from the kitchen to the living room... and a view out to the street.  But in the late afternoon, that sun coming through hits you right in the eye as you're starting to make dinner, forcing one to wear sunglasses while cooking!

So after a few other projects had been wrapped up, my next project was to figure out what to do to cover this window when necessary.  I called up one of those window treatment places - can't remember the name - figuring they would have the biggest assortment of options, even though it might cost us an arm and a leg.

The guy came out, took a few measurements.  I explained to him that I wanted something that wasn't fixed!  I wanted to be able to have light coming in through the windows or have it closed off when the mood struck.  He called back a few days later to inform me that he had 2 options.  Both were fixed!!!!  And the cheapest was going to run a few thousand dollars!!!!  Wha????  If I wanted it permanently closed off I could hang a blue tarp across the thing for a couple bucks, but that wasn't what I wanted!!!  What's the point of having this window if it's never going to let light in?

So, although I tried to unload this project onto someone else, I was back creating something myself.  I dreamed up the idea of creating a shutter.  It would have to fold up some, like an accordion, otherwise the "open window" version would lease a huge shutter extending out over one's head while the sat on the couch, and would also put a lot of strain on a hinge.  Luckily for me the window is a perfect 1/4 circle.  What this means is that I only needed to measure the width of the opening at the bottom to know how to cut the pieces I would use.

This picture shows you how I measured the window.

Then I had to figure out how to cut the pieces I needed with that measurement in mind.  I went down to our Home Depot and picked up 4 sheets of 1/2-inch plywood, measuring 2x4 feet.  I supposed I could have grabbed 2 4x8 sheets, and they probably would have been a little cheaper, but a 4x8 is super hard to fit in a crossover SUV, and a huge pain in the butt to make cuts on.  It's just huge and awkward.  So I picked up the smaller ones.  Then I cut each of them in 1/2 so I now had 4 strips that were 1x4 feet.  You want a really straight cut, so a table saw is the best way to go for that.  At this time I didn't have my table saw yet, so I just marked a straight line, and used my circular saw... and held my breath the whole time I was cutting... because you know you get straighter cuts when you hold your breath and cut off the oxygen supply to your brain.  ;)  

Then I laid out the 4 pieces (per window on the ground).  I left approximately 1/4 inch space between each of them.  You're going to need to attach a hinge between each one.  The hinge will take up some room, so account for this now.  Otherwise you'll end up with a shutter that is too big for you window.  With the pieces laid out, I drove a big nail into the ground at the bottom/inner corner.  In the picture (above), it's kind of hard to see, but on the bottom left corner you can see a red dot.  Imagine that was my nail.  This nail will be in contact with that corner of the wood.  Now take a piece of string, and tie it to the nail, and then tie a pencil to the other end - making sure the length of string between the pencil and the nail is the "x" length of the window.  We've essentially created a large scale compass (remember those from math class?).  Draw a line across each piece of wood to mark where cuts need to be made for this 1/4 circle shutter.

Using a jigsaw I made the cuts.  I then sanded down the edges some, and applied a piece of trim framing each piece.  You don't have to add the trim, but the shutter looked kind of bland without it.  And unless you have some way to steam your wood so it will bend, go grab some of that cheapo rectangular trim that's supposed to look like wood - but is really some plastic composite stuff, because it's nice and bendy.  

With your pieces all ready to go, attach each one together using piano hinges.  I guess these are more properly known as "continuous hinges".  I found that I had to use my hacksaw to cut the hinge for the last piece, because the hinge was simply too long.  Also, make sure that as you attach your hinges, you're alternating the hinge from front to back.  If you put all the hinges on the side facing toward the window, it won't fold up like an accordion, and same is true if you put them all on the side facing into the room.

You can see here, with this back view of mine, that I put the first and last hinges facing towards the window, and the middle hinge faces out into the room.  If you want your shutters to be white and you don't want the hinges to stand out, you'll want to spray them down with some Krylon or Rustoleum first so they match whatever color you're painting the shutter.

With the hinges put together, and your shutter painted, you're ready to install it.  I used 2 of these hinges that look a little like butterflies.  They were plenty strong for this project, and they have the added bonus of folding up tighter than other door hinges would.  They're referred to as "non-mortise hinges" because you haven't used a chisel to hollow out an area (mortise) for the side of the hinge to nestle into.  You may want some help for this part of the project as it's pretty tough to screw these in while also holding up the shutter.  Trust me, I did the first one by myself and then waited around for help with the second one so I didn't grind my teeth off... or burst a blood vessel in my face from frustration.

Now that you've got them up, test them out!!  It's amazing what a difference it makes.  It was certainly a lot cheaper than what that window blind guy wanted to charge me, and I got exactly what I was looking for!

Project Suckage

Working a project involves a lot of long, labor-intensive hours sometimes.  But in the end I usually get to sit back and see this horrible thing that I've revamped into greatness.  It makes me happy and keeps my momentum going for the next project.

This current project is not one of those.  It has had the long hours.  But it's not resulting in greatness - so far.  I had considered not writing about it until it was just the way I wanted it.  Then I realized that a lot of people don't ever attempt a project because they fear it will look hideous.  They think they'll screw it up.  And I realized that a lot of projects I work on don't turn out how I envision them - at first - but then I take a step back, try a different approach, and in the end I get what I want.  So I'm showing you what I did wrong here, so you don't make the same mistakes, and so you can see that it doesn't have to be perfect the first time you try to fix something.  After all, you wouldn't learn anything if everything always turned out spectacular the first time.

I posted a little while back about filling the cracks in the driveway in preparation for resurfacing/resealing it.  The repair of the cracks went great.  But now I needed to push on to resurface the driveway to protect it from the elements and prevent future deterioration.  I went to Home Depot and picked up a 5 gallon bucket of Rustoleum Extreme Concrete Restore - this part I did right.  They have other Restore products, and some are for concrete, but this one you need for the driveway to resist hot tire pick-up.  It says it's 10x thicker than paint.

The first 2 mistakes I made were with the color and then look how I poured it out into a paint roller tray.  Well, I opened the twist cap to pour it out.  Huge mistake.  With this product you really have to pop the whole lid open and mix up the contents.  I figured that since I had just left Home Depot (where this bucket sat for a few minutes in the shaking machine, that I was all set... but that's not the case with something as thick as this.  By the time I got down to the bottom of the bucket I realized what I was pouring off the top was all the liquid and was left with a lot of sludgy stuff that I couldn't seem to roll onto the driveway.  So do yourself a favor and pick up one of those paint stirring paddles - and you'll want the metal one (it's sturdier than the plastic ones).  I just used the mixing paddle I have left over from mixing tile grout, so if you have one of those it works well too.  Put your drill on a low speed (so you don't splatter everywhere) and get that stuff that stuck to the bottom mixing into the more liquid stuff at the top.

This is what they look like.

So I took this fancy picture of my application equipment.  You can see (from left to right) my paint brush, the 9-inch plastic honeycomb-like roller, and the tiny 3-inch roller.  Now looking back, the 3-inch roller will be useless.  I was using it to get the edges better (as shown below) but since I had also poured all the liquidy stuff off the top, this was easy to do.  If you mixed this stuff the right way, this roller is going to be hard pressed to pick up and apply any of that stuff, so don't bother.

You do have to find a way to get the edges well and to also get in around things like where the driveway meets the garage, or the front steps, so use the paint brush for those spots instead of this little roller.

 

 The big roller is what will apply most of the product.  When I went looking for a picture of it I also found that they do offer a smaller one for little rollers... but you won't find it at Home Depot, or at least they didn't offer it at my local one.  Once I had the product thoroughly mixed up, I found it easiest to just dip my roller into the huge bucket, and take that super saturated roller and push it across the driveway.  You won't be going back and worth like when you paint a wall, instead you're just pushing it down into the concrete and moving the product forward until it all leaves the honeycomb roller, and then you go back for more.  Once you do a few lines of it you get a feel for how to push on it and how to keep from having a berm of the product left behind.  You want it smooth and uniform.  If you don't want to break your body, I'd get a good paint roller and an extension pole for it.  These you can find anywhere.  

Go for the simplest set-up.  And the thread on the end of the extension pole meets up universally for the paint rollers... and for brooms, and mop heads, etc.  They do make some [extension poles] that can be adjusted to different lengths.  And they're "oh so easy to adjust", but the one we have sucks something awful and doesn't lock well into position, which means it's constantly coming loose and shortening up when you push on it.  Terrible idea.  I won't buy one of those again.

Okay, so the next way I made a terrible choice was in the color selection.  I didn't want something ridiculous, like bright green or yellow, so I tried to choose a neutral color.  I went for a dark gray - called "Carbon" on the color sheet.  Because we can all tell from a 2x2 cm square how that's going to look on our driveway.  Grrrr.   You can't get a tester of this stuff either, so you really have to bite the bullet and hope you made a good choice.  I didn't.  It was too dark.  It might have looked good if you had a different colored house and front steps.  But next to mine it just looked weird, and had a blue-ish tinge to it.  I knew I was going to need 2 coats anyway, so back to Home Depot I went this morning to collect 2 more of these 5 gallon buckets, which incidentally only claim to hold 4 gallons of material (because the top 4 inches of the bucket is empty) and really their claim for 4 gallons is just them rounding up from 3.75!  

Picked up 2 buckets this time, thinking that would allow me to cover up the carbon color from yesterday, and finish applying the first coat to the untouched side of the driveway.  Wrong again!  You can see in the picture below, that I really only managed to make it back up the one side and part a few passes across the top of the other side.  I can't explain why this was the case.  The bottom portion of the side I covered hadn't received the first color, and was in really bad shape, so I think it was sucking up the product like crazy.  Perhaps that's why it took so much of it to cover approximately the same area.  So keep that in mind when you're trying to estimate how much of it you'll need.  The bucket says it will cover 100-120 sq feet with 2 coats - so that's 200-240 sq ft with 1 coat, and I had 2 buckets... so 400-480.  Ya, that's about right.  My driveway is just shy of 800 sq ft (including the sidewalk).  I think when I first looked into the product I had it in my head that one bucket would cover 400 sq ft, but clearly I was wrong.

So my second color choice was the "Graywash".  I don't know how I feel about it.  I have to let it cure for a while and then step back and look at it.  This is my biggest problem with a project.  I have such a hard time picking colors for things because it never is exactly what I want.  This one just seems a little bright to me, but maybe it will grow on me after a few days.  And if I don't end up liking it, I probably will finish up the other coat and the other side of the driveway in the same color and then look into staining it with something to add some brown/tan hues to it.  Note, the second coat is a necessary step.  I took a picture to show what it looks like in some places after just one coat (as the moisture is getting sucked into the porous concrete) and it develops some crackling (that you want on your shabby chic furniture, not your driveway), but this is smoothed out with the second pass.

 You are supposed to get enough product to do the whole project because you want to keep working off the wet edge of where you had just rolled to.  That just won't be possible for this project.  So I accept the fact that there may be a little ridge down the middle - but it will still look better than the cracked-to-hell falling apart mess that I started with.

I would have gone back to Home Depot again - naturally after changing my clothes and trying to appear different as I don't want them to think I'm stalking them more than once per day - but those massive buckets of goop are going to run you a solid $99 each!  And that's just not in the budget until another payday passes.  Plus, I was about to loose my cool with my 6 and 8 year old boys because they just couldn't manage to understand that I was unable to drop what I was doing to assist them in their projects.  They also kept insisting they should help paint but were already having trouble remembering not to walk on the driveway, so painting tips probably weren't going to be heard either.

So you can see it's been a couple of long days, without any sort of results to pat myself on the back about.  What a bummer.  And now I have to look at this every time I leave or come home until I manage to fix it to my liking.  Don't let the fear of messing something up keep you from trying.  How boring would that be?  And if I never messed something up, my husband wouldn't have any material when it came time to pick on each other.  ;)

Bring on the Scalpel

About a month ago I was talking with a friend about things that bother us about ourselves these days and that we would like to alter.  What struck me as interesting was how this has changed over the years.  Starting around adolescence and all the way up through early adulthood I definitely recall comparing myself to my friends and other girls.  One might have had bigger boobs, and I thought mine were too small.  Another one might have had pretty curly hair, and I was blessed with stick-straight hair.  I couldn't tell you when this changed.  At some point I no longer looked at what physical attributes others had and compared myself.  Instead as I grew more mature I could appreciate beauty in my friends and other women, without feeling like I was lacking just because I was different.  Small boobs?  Who cared anymore.  I mean big boobs just slapped you in the face if you went for a jog, whereas my little mosquito bites weren't likely to get out of control.  Curly hair?  Yes, still beautiful, but the straight mop on my head worked out great for the bedhead look.  So from the conversation with my friend I think we determined that once we hit that level of maturity where we are no longer in some form of competition with those around us, we start looking at changes we want to make to ourselves that are completely personal.  And what did I come up with for myself?  Well... it's something that has weighed on me since I was in 9th grade, and after a movie day with my boys where they asked to watch my wedding DVD over and over again, I decided it was time to do something about it.

When I was in 9th grade I got a couple extra adult teeth that I was not anticipating.  They broke through my gums in the wrong place.  This prompted a trip to the orthodontist for my braces consult.  The orthodontist said that he could correct the teeth but would not be able to fully correct my overbite because it was the result of a retrognathic jaw (upper jaw protrudes out and lower jaw does not come up and meet properly).  So off to the oral surgeon I went.  There I was told that in order to fix the problem, they would remove pieces of the upper jaw and screw it back together so that the lower jaw would meet correctly and if this did not fully correct my ... "abnormal, recessive chin then an implant could be put in."  Really, now what kind of doctor tells a girl in her adolescence that her face is abnormal???  We did not end up proceding with the surgery, but instead found a different orthodontist that used braces to align my teeth and fix the overbite (sort of).  I couldn't honestly tell you if I gave too much thought to the abnormal/recessive chin for a while after that as it was almost 20 years ago and I had a laundry list of other insecurities; but I never forgot those words. 

To this day I have never had anyone make a comment about my facial profile.  In fact everyone I mention my upcoming surgery to says they have never noticed anything or they think I'm crazy.  However, I never knowingly allow a profile picture to be taken of me and my husband constantly asks if everything is okay when my mouth is closed and he's looking at me from the side (because he thinks I'm pouting, when in fact that's just how my face looks) - talk about frustrating.  I don't like driving in the car because I know the passenger will be looking at me from the side if we have a conversation.  In fact, preparing for my wedding was nerve racking, because I knew that as I stood on the alter everyone in attendance would be seeing me from the side.  So this past summer, during our marathon session of watching my wedding DVD I suddenly realized that without him knowing how much my profile bothered me, my brother had managed to catch images of me from the side... repeatedly.  I love my wedding DVD.  It was an amazing day, and beautifully captured by my brother; but having to watch myself from the side with that profile I had loathed for years made my stomach turn.  When my husband returned home from work I was in tears at having to look at what image I was displaying to others routinely.  It didn't project the strong, secure image that I felt I gave from the front.  In fact I didn't feel like that profile fit with my personality at all.  After a long discussion with my husband, who thinks I'm beautiful no matter what, I made an appointment at a local cosmetic center.

So what happens next? Well, next Thursday I go under the knife. I'm beyond excited. They will make an incision in my chin, slide in an implant and stitch me up. My situation is further complicated by the fact that resting over my recessive chin is an overactive muscle. This means that when my mouth is closed, the muscle is active and noticeable. Can they correct this with surgery? Nope. The only fix for that is periodic botox - which I instantly declined. I mean if they make it so that muscle isn't active, then how could I possibly make the ridiculous faces that show up in most of the candid pictures people take of me?? I can't run or exercise for a couple weeks afterwards, which has me bummed because I was finally starting to take that bull by the horns. I also have to avoid full contact sports, or anything where you might get hit by accident - explain that one to my energetic boys. Put those two together - no exercise and no possibly injuring activities - and it looks like my husband who is due home soon from deployment will be sadly disappointed. But I soon will have a facial profile that mirrors the strong/dominant woman I am... no more of that recessive/weak crap. :)

Perfection is unattainable, but . . .

Candy Cane Soy Candle

While I consistently have to remind myself that it's impossible to be perfect or to do something that turns out perfect, it certainly is hard to keep from being disappointed when things don't turn out the way we want.  I had an issue recently with a candle I wanted to pour.  I had ordered a bottle of the new scent and had this vision in my head of what I wanted the final product to look like.  I began pouring, but I was too excited to see the final product, and thus hurried the process along.  This particular candle was going to have 5 different layers.  Each layer had to set up before the next could pour, but still needed to be a little warm so the layers would bind well to each other.  I allowed some cool air to pass through my studio in hopes it would cool the layers faster and let me continue pouring without such a long wait.  Well, it let me pour faster, but the final product had jump lines where the wax cooled too fast, and the binding of the layers was poor.  I was extremely disappointed.  The candle had the layers, and the angles I had dreamt up, but looked nothing like a product I would be proud to offer to customers.  Back to the work table the next day, with a clearer mind and calmer attitude, I began again.  The first day I only poured 2 of the layers and the next day I poured the remaining 3.  I keep the doors closed to keep the air warm, and I patiently waited after each layer to let the wax set up.  I had changed my design for the layers as well after seeing how much I disliked the first attempt.  And the results were... well... not perfect, but certainly as close as is possible.  I almost think that when we fail at first and then reattempt and succeed, it reminds us that we are human - but we sure do come equipped with amazing skills that create perfectly imperfect things.

Perfectionism - Desired trait or curse?

Seeing as though I possess this quality, I can definitely say it is a little of both.  It certainly is my most often used attribute when asked about strengths at an interview.  But at times it can be a bit waring.  Is everything in a perfectionist's world perfect?  No!  I think you'd have to carry some degree of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) for this to be the case.  In a perfectionist's world, your mind simply chooses particular things that it deems important to make perfect.  Do you have control over this?  Maybe, but your mind makes a pretty compelling argument which you can't reason against.

Okay, so why am I rambling on about perfectionism?  Well, because my stupid brain decided that instead of cleaning up the house to prepare for a visit from my sister tomorrow, I should instead mow the lawn.  Oh, but wait... it gets better.  Once the lawn was mowed and I was putting the yard bin back by the driveway, suddenly the perfectionist neuron activated.  For some reason my brain was able to convince me that I could not possibly have company arrive tomorrow and see that I had not properly hosed down the driveway and removed all weeds from any cracks/crevices.  What??  Why did my mind decide this was of vast importance?  That stuff is all covered the moment you park the car!  It took a solid hour just to get it... yup, perfect!!  Imagine all the cleaning inside the house I could have accomplished in that amount of time!  Cleaning that actually needed to be done as opposed to this frivolous crap I just did.  Grrrrrr.

Does it come in handy to have that much attention to detail?  Well... I'm rarely disappointed with projects I complete, my bosses have always given me rave reviews, and now my sister and I can eat our dinner right off the driveway if we wanted to.