Having fun leads to time flying.

Hold on.  It's November?!  How did that happen??  The Sandias had their first light dusting of snow a few mornings ago.  Fall is officially over.

I've been lousy at keeping up with my blog.  What can I say... just too much life going on, I guess.  And now it's almost the holidays!  I can't believe this.

Let's see... in the last couple of months we have enjoyed the fall weather, completed a couple of bike races, entertained family visiting from out of town, participated in some classic New Mexico traditions such as Zozobra and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, worked on small projects around the house, been to concerts, cooked a lot of good food, traveled to Vegas for a weekend, celebrated Halloween for a full week... All of these things could have warranted blog updates, but the truth is that I've been having too much fun to bother sitting down and writing about it.  I've also gotten back into Crossfit pretty heavily, and have spent a lot of my time lately either at the box or at home recovering from my workouts.  More on that later (my thoughts on the matter have evolved quite a bit since my first experience).

This year we are sticking around Albuquerque for the holidays.  I'm pretty excited to enjoy this season in our new home with friends and family.  And hopefully lots of snow!  I'm going to blog more often.  And maybe I'll even post some photos and stories from the last few months that somehow blew by too quickly.

Winter is coming!!

Aravaipa Canyon

This Labor Day weekend Josh and I took a trip down to Tucson to see some friends and to do a little backpacking.  I've been hearing about Aravaipa Canyon from my friend Megan for years now, but somehow I managed to never get there while I was living in Arizona.  She organized a trip to the canyon for the holiday weekend, so we decided to pack up and head down south to join her and some friends.  We got in a couple of days of hiking and camping, and also got to visit with a bunch of our old friends in town.  It was pretty great.

Aravaipa is this amazingly gorgeous, riparian desert canyon about 1.5 hours northeast of Tucson.  It's like a different world than Tucson.  There are huge cottonwood trees and cattails, towering stone walls and beautiful side canyons.  We hiked in for a few hours before finding a decent camping spot, then we dropped our packs and continued up canyon and found a really great swimming hole up one of the side canyons.  The night stars were amazing, the water was cool (even though the temps reached 102 while we were there), and the vegetation was lush and green and beautiful.  The entire canyon is about 12 miles from end-to-end, and I think we saw only about half of that.  It's amazing how much slower you hike when you're trudging through the middle of a river and having to find your footing among the river rocks!  This place is definitely on my list of spots I'd like to return and spend more time in the future.

Look, a new project!

Since acquiring the new house in April, I've had a hard time justifying any time spent on non-house projects.  I have a number of furniture projects up my sleeve, both building and refinishing, but until the past few weeks I've not been able to make the time and/or energy to tackling one off my list.

I have been desperately needing a new dresser to replace the crappy particle-board, dorm-room style dresser I bought when I first moved away from home.  Basically, I trolled Craig's List for about a month, checking daily for new dresser listings and trying to find something just right that was also affordable.  I wanted something decently-sized and something I could fix up and make my own.  It took a lot of waiting, but eventually I scored a great deal.

I purchased this dresser for $100.  (The seller and I had originally agreed on $80, but somebody else offered $100 and I was determined to get it.)  It's way bigger than I had originally thought- about 5 feet wide and more than 4 feet tall.  I can't be sure, but I'm guessing it was built sometime in the early 1900's-- the workmanship is very nice and it's heavy, solid wood with nice dovetail joints and wooden drawer slides.  When I bought it, it had been covered in plastic but sitting outside in a yard so that the top panel was pretty badly warped and I knew that I'd have to replace that.  Otherwise, besides the three different kinds of hardware (who does that?) on the thing and a few layers of dirt, it was in good shape.

Josh helped me remove the top panel from the dresser, and the first thing I did was clean it down really well.  I hadn't made a plan on what color to paint it yet, but a quick browse through all of my extra paint cans revealed a pretty blue color that I had sampled for my kitchen cabinets but ended up not using in the end.  I decided to use this blue and save myself the expense of buying more paint.  I knew I was going to rough up the edges after I'd painted it, so I didn't bother to put on a primer or anything- I kind of prefer the rustic look and don't really mind if paints wears off naturally over time.

Because of the random, different pieces of hardware that had been on this dresser originally, all of the spacing for the screws on the drawers were different.  Some of the handles had 3-inch holes, some had 4-inch holes.  Quite inconvenient.  We patched up all of the non-3in holes and I drilled new ones so that everything would be the same size.  Then I ordered some new hardware.  I painted everything blue, added the hardware, and then roughed up the edges of everything a little bit with a hand sander.  Things were looking good!  Now, for the top...

We were unable to find a solid piece of wood that was big enough to cover the top of the dresser for a reasonable price, so I decided to make a large panel out of two boards.  I bought two nice boards of high-grade pine, and Josh helped me join them together.  After cutting them to size, I then drilled holes in both boards, inserted and glued pegs, and set everything up with clamps for 24 hours.  I was happy with the way that everything lined up, but the seam in the middle was slightly offset, so we purchased a hand planer and leveled out the surface of the seam (Hand planers are so easy!  How did I not know about this?).  Then, we finally got a chance to use the new router that Santa Claus bought us for Christmas last year!  It took a few trial runs to get it just right, but wow-- what a handy tool!  I will definitely be using the router more in the future.

Once the top panel was completely done, I gave it a good sanding, stained it with a couple of layers of 'Golden Oak' color, and then sealed it with two layers of polyurethane (you can still see the seam between the two boards because some of the wood glue seeped through and did not soak up the stain... oh well!).  I decided to keep the top a natural wood color rather than painting it, and I'm super happy with how it turned out- the stained wood color is really fantastic.  Josh reattached the top panel for me, and there she is!

One of my favorite quirky aspects of this dresser is that is has this funny little corbel on one side.  The matching corbel on the other side was missing when I purchased the dresser and I definitely was not going to find anything to match it without making up my own, so I decided to leave it as it was and just embrace the lopsidedness.  Sometimes symmetry is overrated.

I'm getting pretty good at this Craig's List thing.  And I'm really getting the hang of this furniture re-doing thing too.  Good thing I still have lots of space to fill in my house.

That one time we made a laundry room...

When we were looking at houses last year, one of the things that Josh and I both agreed we really needed to have in a new house was a laundry room.  The first two houses that we put offers on both had huge, awesome laundry/utility rooms (I'm not dwelling on those anymore, I'm just sayin').  This house, the house we ended up buying and now inhabit, did not have a laundry room.  But structurally, the house was well-suited for some renovation that would allow for the construction of a laundry room.  Plus, Josh would get to tear out a wall and use his demolition skills.  So, hey, what the hell.  Let's build us a laundry room!

This is what the "laundry area" of the house looked like originally:

Basically, there was a small, inset section of wall between the kitchen and the bathroom where the tall, upright water heater and a stacked washer/dryer unit lived (the washer/dryer were no longer in existence when we purchased the house).  And like everything else, it was pink.  And carpeted.

I made a schematic so that this upcoming description won't be too confusing:

First of all, we have a massively huge bathroom in the middle of our house.  This room used to be a bedroom, and at some point somebody decided to make themselves a giant bathroom with two entrances and a walk-in closet.  It's cool to have such a large bathroom, but it's a little odd.  And most importantly, we did not need a large walk-in closet in our bathroom.  We decided to remove the wall of the closet that once created the "laundry nook" (it's the purple wall in my handy little drawing) in the hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen, thus creating an open space that we could use as a laundry room.  We also sealed off the closet door into the bathroom (shown with green dots).

I wrote a post a while back about Josh's demolition skills, and this room really put those skills to the test.  First he tore down the wall to create the open space we needed.  After we had removed the old water heater, Josh noticed that there was a little bit of water damage to some of the floor boards underneath, so he had to cut a chunk of the floor out and replace a number of boards.  This actually proved to be convenient, because we also needed to reroute all of the pipes for the water and gas lines to the back of the new room we'd created in order to hook up the washer, dryer, and new water heater.  So, Josh spent many days under the house, climbing in and out of the giant gaping hole in our floor.  And then he patched the floor!  And then we patched the walls!  And then it was starting to look like a real room!

We decided to install a tankless water heater in place of the old, standard one.  This is great because it's way smaller and we were able to hang it on the wall above the washer, and it's really efficient.  The down side to reorganizing this room and installing a new kind of water heater was that Josh needed to cut new vent holes through the roof of the house, which was a bit of an ordeal.  This ultimately resulted in us having to strip and re-seal the entire roof, but that's a story for another day.  The bottom line is that he did in fact cut holes through the roof of the house, and we now have a nicely-vented water heater as well as a light/fan combo to help ventilate the room.

After we had finished patching up the walls and ceiling, we tiled this room the same pattern as the kitchen and the bathroom on either side of it (these three rooms were all tiled at the same time).  I chose to paint this room a bright golden color because there are no windows nearby and I wanted to be sure that it didn't just feel like a dark closet all of the time.  I like the yellow quite a bit, and it looks really nice when you see the blue kitchen cabinets in the background as well.  I found a good deal on a front loader washer/dryer set on Craig's List, and after a fair bit of spillage we finally managed to get everything connected and in proper functional order.  We turned on the newly-rerouted water and gas pipes, and nothing exploded!

Finally, I bought these cool shelf brackets online and used some of the old boards we salvaged from the office demolition to make some shelves for the wall.  I'm still debating putting more shelves on the opposite side of the room, but haven't decided yet.

We still have a little bit of cleaning up around the edges to do in here, but overall it's in good shape.  I mean, this room didn't even exist before- we made it!  So, finally, your before and after shots: