Kellie and I just returned from a fantastic weekend in North Carolina with her extended family. Her cousin Trista was a gorgeous bride and all the festivities were magnificent. My personal highlight of the trip was creating a dance routine to Thriller with two other guys, teaching it to 20 of the family, and then dancing for the bride and groom in wolfpack masks. It was a blast!
I’m enclosing the word finished in quotation simply because I still would like to put some trim up around the garage and I still need to install a gable vent and create an attic hole covering. Aside from that though, the Gladiator gear arrived a day or two before we left for Puerto Vallarta and I had most of it up before we left. I finished up some last steps Sunday after we returned and snapped these pictures. (Yes, I drilled into the new cabinets to install the under cabinet lighting courtesy of Steelcase.. well Details actually. It was horrifying to drill into brand new cabinets but my measurements were precise..)
Kellie and I just got back from a wonderful week in sunny Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We went Saturday to Saturday covering the week of labor day and stayed at the Riu Palace right on the beach. We enjoyed a couple outings to Las Caletas (Rhythm of the Nights sunset cruise and dinner/show) and Swim Life Park (think Michigan’s Adventure water park plus swimming with the dolphins) and of course, lots of Tequila! I’ll post pictures sometime over the next few days.
I took Friday off from work and did the prep work in the garage. This involved triple-sweeping out the whole floor and getting rid of every last bit of dust and debris. Next was washing, degreasing, and etching the floor. I donned some rubber boots, gloves, and safety glasses and got to scrubbing the entire floor and hosing it down afterward until “the water flowed clean.” Dry out took overnight.
Saturday morning finally arrived and it was time to paint. It went on pretty easy other than the fact that the paint/epoxy doesn’t have a lot of life.. it thickens and is impossible to apply after about two hours. Work quickly is what I learned.. I just barely finished the garage. I even broke a paint roller halfway through trying to apply the last bit of the first can of paint (it was like mud). All in all though, it turned out beautifully! Here are pictures from this morning.
The floor will take a few more days to dry and then we can park the cars in the garage again. The remaining gladiator pieces are coming on Thursday (bench, gear locker, two cabinets, and a tool drawer). The garage could be back together as soon as next weekend!
Found some time last week to install the Gladiator GearTrack on the walls. I’m really happy with how it turned out. In addition to a wide assortment of hooks, I ordered a ball caddy, clean up caddy, and a storage tub holder (used for recyclables).
This past weekend I mustered up the courage to attack the floor. I rented a walk behind cutter for making grooves and a hammer drill with 3/4″ drill bit for the holes. The channels guide the water to the holes, where the water drains down into the ground. This should make this coming winter much more bearable. Thanks Derek for your help!
Next weekend I hope to apply the epoxy floor coating, order the remaining Gladiator items, and finally check the garage project off as done.
I started playing my Simon & Patrick acoustic guitar a little more frequently lately and I got to wondering why I ever stopped playing in the first place. There’s something about playing beautiful music that seems to drown out everything else…. all the stress and problems of life melt away when I get into a groove playing a favorite song.
Since I haven’t changed out the strings or done any maintenance work on the guitar in six years, I decided to do just that by bringing it to Guitar Center and having a setup and restring done. The setup is necessary because over time the stress created by the string tension can cause the neck to bow and thus the section of the strings closer to the guitar body elevate further from the neck.. making those notes much more difficult to play. A setup puts the guitar back into alignment.
I made the mistake of having this work done at a really nice guitar (and band) shop (as opposed to a someone who does this on the side). Walking into the store has a way of sucking me in as I look at all the guitars, drums, keyboards, and other instruments sitting out ready to play. They beckon, and I submit.. and wind up spending a few hours playing around. This isn’t always a bad thing, but when I found out I’d need to drop the guitar off and would be without it (gasp!) for a week, that didn’t set well.
You see, even if I didn’t play the guitar every night (or even every month), knowing that I could play it if I wanted to kept me happy. Now I was without any guitar to play… and that first night was very hard. Of course it didn’t help that I was reading through guitar tutorials and beginner riffs (such as Layla by Derek and the Diminos). Without thinking about it, I went back to Guitar Center the next day and while I was playing around, I noticed several value packs. The value packs include everything you need to get going with an electric guitar – something I’ve always wanted to do someday. I thought about it for a while and asked one of the employees how they rate… they said you could do much better quality-wise by spending just a little more and skipping all the extras like a tuner that are included in the pack. I headed back to work.
After work I went… where else but Guitar Center. I spent another few hours playing and fell in love with an amplifier by Fender in the G-DEC line (G-DEC stands for Guitar Digital Entertainment Center). It’s basically an amplifier with lots of special effects processing and sound loops for both drums and bass so that the guitarist using the amp will never be “alone.” Turn on one of the many drum beats and add a bass progression and you have an instant support group to play with. That sold me since I don’t have anyone else to jam with most of the time. Now I just needed a guitar.
Since I was looking at Fender amplifiers, I gravitated toward the Fender guitars. I’m a brand guy – I’ll admit it. I like getting caught up in the whole brand loyalty thing even if thorough research points out that it’s a marketing trap. Looking at the Fenders, I knew I didn’t want to get the Squire line but rather the full-fledged Fender line. To me, that’s like getting the Volkswagen instead of the Audi (sorry Kellie!). The skill level I’m at doesn’t afford me the knowledge to know the difference between one guitar and another so I got some advice from the employees again and then chose a color and pattern I liked.
Now I’ve picked out the two main components… wait, how did I get from just playing to picking out components? I’m still not totally sure… but I ended up getting the Fender G-DEC 30 and a Fender Standard Stratocaster HSS in Brown Sunburst. It is as beautiful as it sounds.
So anyway, now I have something to play while I wait for the acoustic. And for reading all that, I present to you a video of Henrik Berger playing an older Stratocaster on the smaller G-DEC amplifier model. I hope that I can play even 10% as well as him someday…
Just in the off chance that you haven’t yet heard, the Millennium Triathlon set to take place this past Saturday was canceled due to severe weather. It was the right call to make – especially given the strong line of thunderstorms that rolled through shortly after the event would have started – but it’s still frustrating none-the-less. Kellie and I were both really looking forward to this event and since we hadn’t signed up for any other triathlons this year, this was going to be our only one of 2009.
We briefly entertained the idea of entering the the Three Rivers Triathlon south of Kalamazoo in two weeks, but given the short time allotted for planning and Kellie’s hesitation of the course difficulty, we’ve decided to pass on that one too. The rest of the weekends this year are already booked so it looks that 2009 will go down as a tri-less year. Bummer.
I took the afternoon off and finished putting up the last two Hyloft 3ft x 3ft hanging storage units. This brings the total up to 4 in the garage: 3 on the north side and 1 on the south side. I’m quite pleased with how they turned out and I still have plenty of space left for future use. In these pictures, I have everything up there that I had planned to store on them.
I also snapped a picture of the two bike lifts I installed a little while back. They are the pulley-type that allow you to raise and lower heavier bikes (which the cruisers definitely are..).
The garage is really starting to come together now. I’ve given in to Kellie’s wish that we not take on priming and painting the garage this year. I fear that we won’t ever get back to doing it but alas, it is only a garage and while paint would add that extra splash of style and finish, it is definitely not necessary.
I spec’ed out the two remaining tools I need to rent to groove and drain the garage floor and now that I have a hitch on the TT, I just need a free day to head over to Home Depot and pick them up. Then I’ll epoxy the garage floor and it’ll pretty much be done!
