pig practice

This weekend we headed up to Tool, Texas to build a roasting pit for our Memorial Day pig roast. Here’s Leslie doing a test fit with “Wilbur”:

leslie with pig

Paper-mâché doesn’t roast up very well, though, so instead we tested with a pork shoulder:

It turned out well! You can see more pics on gallery.

first big house project: new doors!

After 9 months of searching for contractors, picking doors, waiting for doors, waiting for contractors, and monitoring all the work, we’ve finished our first big home improvement project, which was to replace all the interior doors in our house as well as the front door.

Here’s the old front door:

And today, with a few changes to make it more us, most recently our custom designed new front door:

The whole idea started because we were annoyed by the way several of the doors in our house swung, like into the pantry, eating up 30% of its storage space, or into our bedroom so that they blocked the light switches. Also, we had several doors that just didn’t fit in their rooms, swinging way out and blocking access.

It turned out the cost of changing the swing on doors was more in labor than the cost of new doors, so we decided to replace the cheesy molded masonite doors with “Shaker” stile-and-panel doors that were much more our speed. I guess you don’t really take pictures of doors very often, because this was the only one I could find of the old doors:

And here are some pics of the new doors as they arrived:

Being painted:

Finished barn door installation:

Another interior shot:


Comments

Marc2014-05-04 17:53:53

One picture of the old doors justifies the price of sixteen new doors. The new doors look perfect; like they belong. And the use of the sliding rail solves the problem of doors that open awkwardly. Good work Engineer Extraordinaire.

indonesia: borobudur at dawn

Pictures are up from our visit to Borobudur in Java. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and we visited at the recommended time, dawn. This involved a 4am wakeup call but was totally worth it:

indonesia continues: ubud

Pictures fall behind reality: I’ve just finished posting pics from Ubud, Bali while we’ve physically just landed in Sydney.

Ubud is an idyllic paradise in the interior of Bali where we mostly gaped at staggering natural beauty and drank Bintang beer. Many pictures and even a few movies are up on gallery, please to enjoy.