tomcook.net » Family

We are still alive…

Thomas Cook — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:15:30 +0000

…despite the thunderous silence from my blog the past couple months. It has been a crazy new year so far at home/school/work. I started and finished a project over this past weekend I thought I would share.

The basement stairs had one side open. The only railing was a 2×4 handrail, and we were worried about kids falling out the side. I will add a more detailed post later (hopefully). I also still need to paint.

I tallied the total cost last night.

Tools: $49
Materials: $89

That is what I bought. I ended up a bunch of cable and Spax screws left over for future projects. The bolts you see are elevator bolts that I had left over from another project.

As you can see there is still some organization yet to do. That is a future project.

It’s been a long time

Thomas Cook — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:37:24 +0000

I realized I hadn’t posted anything in a while. Turns out it has been a couple days short of two months. I blame school!

September hit us like a hurricane. New childcare, Eli is in school all day now. Every night we all all beat when it’s time to hit the sack. I hope to get some posts going in the next week or so. I have a few drafts I need to get finished up and out.

Preparing for Zombies….or just life.

Thomas Cook — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:21:18 +0000

Laundry and freezer on left, new shelves on right, old shelves center

As part of our basement remodel that took place over the winter we also redid the laundry room. It wasn’t a total remodel just a wall where there wasn’t one before and some new storage.

We used to have shelves under the stairs that stored all the junk we never use, but I took those out. To shelve all exiled kitchen and pantry stuff I put up some BRODER shelves from IKEA. I had looked for something similar, but couldn’t find anything at a price I liked and then found them on the Ikea web site. Total cost was about $100 since I reused 1×12 boards that were part of the old shelves. After purging everything we haven’t used since we moved in the rest went on the new shelves. Now we can actually see what we have and get to it easily.

The metal shelves along the far wall came with our house and used to hold paint cans, old light fixtures, and other miscellaneous stuff in another part of the basement. Now they hold lots of food. The wood wine racks hold about 50 bottles and are pretty full now. Along the floor are 5 gallon buckets of grains (oats, rice, lentils, etc.) and milk crates of potatoes and squash from the garden (empty now). Notice all the Jars? They are mostly empty now, but canning season is almost here. We used to store empty jars in boxes, but I got tired of storing them. This year they are going back on the shelf empty. Then we fill them and put them back on the shelf. That way I don’t need to store them in two locations.

As you have probably figured out we buy a bit of bulk