Less basement, more garage and yard

I tried for, like, a half-hour to come up with a pun that covered blog post vs. fence post, but they all sucked, so I didn't.

You're welcome.

Anyway, there's not a lot of basement left to cover, to be honest. I know the War Department had said something about cutting down an existing closet door to cover up the closet under the stairs, but that thing just wasn't going to cut it, so we've contracted my mom to sew us a nice curtain, which I will post pictures of just as soon as we've got it up.

Other than that, the only things left to do downstairs are the thresholds for the doors, which will be somewhat complicated to make, and will require the use of a decent workshop. And that, of course, would require moving all that crap out of the garage, covering the walls, building work benches, finding storage, and all that other stuff.

As it just so happens, that's just what we've been working on...

We started the process of finishing the garage by moving the bare minimum (in case it started raining) of stuff out of the garage and into the driveway, so we could access the back wall:





And then... well, there are a few steps missing in terms of photographic evidence, but we hung 1/2-inch plywood on all the walls (that took two weekends) and built the first of two workbenches (that took another weekend), hung the old white cabinet from my office on the rear wall, and started work on the second bench... which is proving to be something of a bugbear as we need to mount the radial arm saw in it, and trying to figure out how to align the fence is driving us nuts. When I have a picture of that, I'll post it, but for now:



Anyway, seeing as how we were so close to finishing the garage, we figured it was a GREAT time to start a new project!

Er... no, wait a minute. That's not how it happened at all. See, we knew we had a long weekend coming up, and what better way to while away the May Two-Four than to spend the whole weekend busting our butts erecting a fence!

Okay, so the neighbours approached us, and offered to split the cost and labour of replacing the rotting piece of crap that passed for a fence between our backyards. It's hard to get a sense of the utter crapitude from just the one picture, but you can see the ramshackle old piece of shit here:



Anyway, we were quite happy to have a go at it, so our neighbour ordered the fence panels and materials last Friday. Of course, that meant that, bright and early Saturday morning, I headed down to the tool rental place to get a clamshell digger, an eight-inch auger bit, and this bad boy right here:



Oh, yeah. We doing this thing with POWER tools, baby.

Ahem.

Right, so, the first order of business, take down the old fence. Here's 360 kilos of the crappiest old fence that ever fit in the back of a pickup all ready for a trip down to Ellice:



Here's what it looked like when we stopped for lunch:







Once again, I didn't (or couldn't) document all the between stages and whatnot, but suffice to say that between the time I picked up the auger and about 7:30 on Sunday evening, we done erected a fence:







We couldn't have done it without our neighbour, Cory, who spent all day Saturday working his butt off while suffering from the mother of all hangovers, and the neighbour on the far side of Cory, who had put up his own fence not that long ago, and not only showed us how to properly plumb and set a fence post, but stuck around long enough to put up all nine posts. (And drink three of our beers, but that's why we bought them, after all...)

Phew. So, time to finish the second work bench, make some thresholds, design a bulkhead/drop ceiling solution for the laundry room, and we can call this damn thing DONE.













Heh, like that's EVER going to happen...