I’ve been pretty prolific lately, if I don’t say so myself :) One of my current projects is removing as much of my kitchen wall as possible.  This takes me back to my construction days … oh, the simpler times, when my tools were a skilsaw, a FatMax ruler, a carpenter’s square, a hammer and a nail pouch, a sawzall, and a sandwich for lunch.  As opposed to now — a laptop, a messenger-style bag, a CAT5 cable, and a generic Starbucks Americano … ew.

It’s a rewarding experience for me to be creating something useful and meaningful from base components.  Even in my current job, my team actually creates software products or processes that benefit all, very much like building a structure.  I never understood people who spend their careers creating nothing, or just moving things around — like the brokers who made a killing infinitely repackaging mortgage derivatives.

Before:

After:

It’s going to be pretty awesome when I finish — we’ll extend the bar, hide all little overhangs, put up recessed lights, and install a Red Bull + Vodka fountain.

The approach was pretty common sense — I suspected the wall was non-load-bearing, but I needed to be absolutely sure.  I invited a friend who runs a stuctural engineering business … we had some beers, busted out the skilsaw set to the depth of 5/8 in, and a sawzall with my trusty demolition blade, and went to town.  Turned out, all the studs that needed to come out were cosmetic.  I guess, the builders were going for that 50′s windowed look, when Grandmother would bake an apple pie and set it on the window sill to cool, and then smack anyone who’d try to steal a bite prematurely … or whatever.

I like the bar idea much better — fuck the apple pie on the window sill — I’ll take my mixed vodka drinks.  By the way, I had a guy come in and estimate what it would cost to do it professionally.  Looks like I am going to save about $1,300.

Hey … I wasn’t happy with prices or setups of office desks I found in stores, so I decided to build my own.  It’s an eHow article that I wrote, so read it here.

I built it out of some project board, and a closet door :) Also, since I got hungry with all this “building stuff”, I got a pizza, and it came with this Papa John’s coupon code:

The code is “PJLARGE”.

What’s up … I decided to get a little hands-on and make a shelf for above the door in my office.  You can’t see it from the main entry way, which is good, and it expands my office storage quite nicely.  Of course, no Ikea or Crate and Barrel would have the shelf that fits precisely above the door between the top door molding and the ceiling, AND also happens to be like 53 1/8 in. long to be exactly flush with the left and right moldings … so I built one.

I’ve been kind of into making things again because the work let up and we got a house, so there’s plenty of stuff to build for real cheap.

Custom Office Shelf

Required materials:

• Common sense — this thing is hanging above the entry way, so it probably makes sense to do stuff like, oh, I don’t know, find where the header ends so that your anchors are in the wood, not just in the drywall.  Stuff like that.
• A few of Lowe’s white project boards with moldings — I used two 8 footers for my project.
• Little stuff — cordless drill, bits, putty, hardware (I used ‘keyholes’ to hang this and corner braces to reinforce), particle board screws, etc.
• A friend with a table saw.  Don’t cut it manually or with a skilsaw.

Mark, cut, put together to fit.  Don’t do what I did and instead overlap the two outsides on top of the two horizontal boards … instead of cutting the two ousides the same length as the other divisors and then having the unfinished butt ends of the long horizontal boards face the world.  Other that that, it was an easy project … and now I have even more room to store full works of the best writer and dramaturg ever … Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

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Last night I had a couple of hours to kill, and I decided to check out the documentary called I.O.U.S.A.  The bottom line: you should probably see it, especially if your’e a personal finance blogger :) And if not, it’s not the worst eight bucks you’ll ever spend.

I’m not going to bedazzle you with facts and figures, but the summary goes as follows:

• Whether you like George Bush, or hate him, you cannot possibly disagree with the facts — the man did more to increase our national debt than any other executive in history … and he’s done it in something like six years.
• Most people don’t get the concept of “sticking future generations with the deficit bill“, but the concept is simple — say, your Mom and Dad opened a credit card with unlimited credit limit when they were both freshmen in college, and charged everything they needed (or thought they needed) without any restraint.  Twenty years later, when they are in their fourties, you turn 18 and instead of you opening your own line of credit, you inhert their gargantuan debt, even though you’ve done nothing wrong.  Would you like something like that?
• Don’t believe the political hype.  Most people are unwilling to understand that you can’t BOTH cut the taxes AND expand entitlement programs the same way you CAN’T quit your job AND also travel to Hawaii every month.

Not exactly an eye-opener, but a good flick overall.  Nothing you Dave Ramsey freaks didn’t know anyway …