Category Archives: Projects

The Pantry Door Project

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I hate bi-fold doors.

Hate. Them.

Any closet that has them I consider wasted space, because I will never open them, because the bi-fold doors will fail in some way and run up my blood pressure and life is too short, no need to make it shorter.

The pantry, former laundry area, had very tall metal bi-fold doors, I believe probably from 1959. The doorway is a non-standard door height, and finding pre-made doors just wasn’t happening. I could get some customs done for $600 a piece, but I wasn’t having much luck otherwise.

So. The plan. Metal frames with fabric stretched inside. I can weld the metal myself. Should be easy.

Ha!

But off I went.

“Temporarily”, I had put a curtain up, to reduce my frustration with the non-functioning bi-folds. The original:

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First step, purchase some 3/4″ x 3/4″ x 1/8″ steel angle from Metal Superstore (the only place I’ve found locally to get this stuff).

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Cut 45 degree angles using a newly purchased, really cheap chop saw. I wish I had splurged on a nicer one.

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I built a simple fixture to try and get the pieces to connect at a 90 degree angle. It worked… okay.

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Welding the corners together, one by one.

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Some welds aren’t as nice as the rest, because I am not proficient yet.

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For a little decoration, I got some scrap metal tube and rods. I chopped the tubes to make little circles, and connected them to the frames with the rods. Going for “funky”.

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Now the frustrating part: The fitting. My math was wrong, and my doors were too wide to put a substantial center post for the inner of the four doors.  Also, the extreme un-rectangularness of the existing frame caused some agita.  Furthermore, my welding caused some warping of the metal.  All in all, this isn’t going to look machine-precise.

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Adding some hinges.

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And making some other hardware: handles, and little brackets (made from more cut up tube) to hang the material on.

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Welding on the handle warped the metal some more. Do I need thicker angle iron? Less heat? Better clamping? Dunno.

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Polishing up the metal with an angle grinder with flap pad sander.

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The metal looks nice sanded. Shame I’m going to paint it. But I need to cover up the sins.

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Painted.

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It’s a Poor Artist Who Blames His Tools

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In an ongoing effort to get back into drawing to fill the void left by a lack of improv, I’ve been looking at good drawing software to use my Wacom Graphire3 with. GiMP is kind of touchy and not great for freehand drawing (IMHO).

I cam across ArtRage, which is a neat little free ($25 for full version) package that’s really well thought out for tablet users, and has neat effects simulating various drawing and painting mediums.

This was done using the colored pencil on a canvas texture background. I like how realistic it looks compared to actual canvas and pencil drawings.

The paint effects are cool, too. If you paint red and then blue on top of it, the colors mix as if the underlying paint is still wet. It’s awesome. The brushes change shape depending on how you move them, as if they were real bristles.

Fun, fun, fun.

Pantry, No Pantry

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Because my company recently added Monday as a company holiday in an attempt to improve morale, for the first time I will have a day off when neither Roan nor Stacey do. And I will use it to remove a source of stress and disgust in my life: namely, the pantry.

I plan on turning 24.25 ft2 of mostly unusable, how-long-has-that-can-of-onion-soup-been-back-there shelf space into an efficent, 27.6 ft2 of pure ergonomic feng shui wonderfullness.

For the mathematically inclined, that’s a better than 13% increase in total shelf space, and probably a 50% increase in easily usable space. Everything will be in plain siight, instead of hidden behind the peanut butter.

Martha Stewart can bite me.

Photogenic

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Back when we lived in the loft, we had great natural lighting, and I could
easily take pictures like this:

But in the new house, there simply isn’t a lot of natural light coming in,
and I take pictures like this:

So, I’m idly looking for inexpensive photography lighting options. I’ve
seen some 100 watts/second monolight kits from B&H Photo Video online for
around $150. Of course, one can quickly drift up into the thousands of
dollars to burn like the sun.

Do any photography buffs out there know how much oomf one needs in strobe
flashes to be able to take nicely lit hobby “portrait” shots?

The End of Fritz

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I just found out that the kids show I’ve been doing for about 3 years has been cancelled. This will be the last season for Uncle Grampa’s Hoo-Dilly Stew and Fritz the Evil Butler.

My son comes to see the show almost every week, but he’s not old enough so that he’d remember it later.

I feel like someone died.

A Rave at the Fool

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I posted a post yesterday in the Hidden Gems Stocks We Like board at the Motley Fool. At the time of this journal, it had received 36 recommendations or “recs”. (For those who aren’t on the Fool boards, anyone who reads a message can recommend it. You can only recommend a post once, and you have a limited number of recs a day. The top rec earners are sometimes featured on the Fool Post of the Day or week or something).

At the bottom, I also tagged Tom Gardner’s response, which was enough to make me walk around this morning feeling full of myself. It’s nice to be shamelessly self-confident now and then.

The Post

FootNotes

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A while back I wrote some php/mysql code to create a relational database I was thinking about. It was just something I did because “wouldn’t it be neat if…”

Basically, you “footnote” (link, really) from a word in an entry in this database, and create another entry based on that word. Then someone else can create an entry based on a word in your entry. And so on, and so on.

Just a simple, silly idea. It’s implemented at:

FootNotes

in case anybody wants to contribute.

ryanj