Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Brass Removal At The Bamboo Lagoon

We are making headway in getting rid of the brass in the master bedroom/bath at the Bamboo Lagoon.

Nothing major just yet since getting rid of the plumbing and the shower stall door are down the road, but for now, all lightswitch and socket covers have been replaced as well as the toilet paper dispenser, hardware on the cabinets (even though the cabinets themselves will at least be refaced at some point in the future), and the towel racks....and it looks so much better, even without floors.



The towel rack took more work than anything but that is how things go. The sheetrock anchors that were used previously were not only the strongest I have ever seen, they were stripped and of course the new rack needed a different bracket than the one there so the brackets had to be removed. There was no way to get them out without just grabbing them with pliers and pulling them out, which means another sheetrock patch to be done and the rack had to be moved just a couple inches higher than it was. I'll post a pic when the patch is done since it looks pretty crappy right now.



It is coming together. Yeah!

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Beginning Of The End

Gotcha...I am referring to the eventual end of brass in this house. It will take some time, and money we don't have handy right now but since I had a lightswitch plate to change out, I thought I would at least get rid of one thing. In the masterbath, everything, I mean EVERYTHING is brass and it is all going...but not yet.

Against my nature, I am having to just take my time and not try to do everything all at once. So changing this one thing was a step in the right direction for me. I have taken down some things that we can either live without or that we have replacements for from the other bathroom (since it is still in disrepair). I removed the toilet paper dispenser and a couple of towel racks...all three of these, I have extras from the other bathroom.

So this one, obviously is smaller than the one I took down, but the bathrooms are eventually going to get painted so it will get fixed eventually. And I would like at some point to change out some of the outlets themselves (those that need it, and if we do, we'll do white ones to match). That is the word of the day it seems...eventually.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Leaf Bins At The Bamboo Lagoon

I saw this idea on a snippet during the news a few months ago and thought I would give it a whirl. It involved making a cylinder shape out of some fencing and putting leaves in it and kind of composing/mulching them. I knew we were going to get a lot of leaves (we are not done yet), and we have some areas in the back yard that really need something added to the soil to make it better, so I thought this might be a good way to recycle the leaves.

I ended up using hardware wire instead of fencing because I couldn't get the fencing in a 10 foot piece and I really didn't need 50 ft of it. I actually bought a 10 foot piece and cut into two pieces and made two cylinders from it. I use tinsnips and pliers to cut pieces of wire to fasten the ends of the roll together.

I stood them up on one end in our driveway (which I thought would be a good place to have it so I could turn them easily when I need to later on), and started filling them with the leaves I raked up. This one is almost full and the second one is sitting in the garage for the next raking. This one is only about 2 feet across and it is holding almost three trashcans of leaves in it after compression. I put a piece of cardboard on top with a rock just to keep the leaves from blowing out.

Now we get to just see how it works!