Quite a productive weekend...

I took a few days vacation from work - had a nice long weekend - and got several projects that I've been meaning to do for a while taken care of. There are actually a few other small things finished, but I haven't had a chance to take pictures yet so that will have to wait.

We installed a pet door leading into our garage. We never really had a good place to put the cat litter boxes and we really don't park in the garage very often, so we decided to move the litter boxes out to the garage and install the kitty door. The younger cats are already in and out of it, but we're still working with 14 year old Custer. Dean was pretty fascinated with it as well...

If you haven't heard of Ana White and Knock Off Wood then you need to go check our her site NOW. I believe her inspiration was furniture from places like Pottery Barn and Land of Nod but the prices are insane. She figured she could build it herself and she did just that. She's since posted plans for many woodworking projects, using standard and easily attainable materials, and she's inspired a lot of people (like me) that were intimidated with building anything... to give it a try.

We have a long, narrow kitchen table in the long, narrow breakfast area of our kitchen. It does fit, but it can sometimes be hard to maneuver around especially when people are seated and their chairs are pushed out. Also, when we inherited the table... it only had 2 surviving chairs so we've been dealing with mismatched Craigslist chairs for a while now. We've been wanting benches for the long sides of the table for a while, but I wasn't finding anything within our budget. So, with Ana's plans for Modern Farmhouse Table Benches I made the first of two benches:

I'm pretty happy with it. It's way far from perfect, but I'm proud of it as my first (of hopefully many) furniture project and it will definitely serve it's purpose well. The kids like it and it's very handy to just slide it under the side of the table and get it out of the way.

The other major project was painting our front door. It was stained but had weathered quite a bit, so first we talked about sanding it down and just re-staining it. I'm sure that would have looked nice, but I've always wanted a red front door. Isn't is supposed to bring fortune or prosperity, too?

I'll post the rest of the weekends' projects tomorrow... I made some curtains for my step-daughter's room (she recently moved in with us) as well as painted/recovered two chairs. Oh, and maybe I'll also post some pictures of the other kids. It's not that I take more pictures of Dean, it's just that pictures of Paige and Blake usually look like this:

That's cousin Jayson with her feet. What happened to my sweet little kids?