Day Four-eleven: back in business

We've cruised through the 400-day barrier and there's no stopping us now. We've been busy with a number of smallish projects inside and out.

There are five old (and old looking) lights on the house and garage. They work fine, so there's no pressing need to replace them. Instead we got ourselves a quart of this paint and turned this tired old lamp:

Into something that seems brand new and with much more character. We're not sure what they add to the paint to make it dry with the hammered appearance but it makes a huge difference.

As long as we're outside, we had our favorite concrete company come back to do a few small jobs. One was to dig us a trench from under the deck to the backyard. When we regraded under the deck and funneled all the water to a spot behind the stairs we realized that we needed a way to get it above/past part of the patio. Nothing a concrete saw couldn't fix.

Inside we continued our organizing efforts. We made a closet in the studio much more usable by adding shelves. We had extra wood molding left over from some project and used it as the supports for the solid pine shelves that we sealed with clear stain. The only hiccup was discovering that the drywall on the right side of the closet is right up against an old chimney so we had to use masonry drill bits to install the plastic anchors for the screws.

Back down in the basement we kept on neatening up. Our array of mops and brooms now have a home.

As does the rest of our trim, molding, and other long thin pieces of wood. We attached a couple of 5.5-inch boards, put a third on the front to keep things from rolling off, and hung the whole thing with a couple of metal brackets.

With the wood all snug in its loft we decided to create a place to hang small tools and whatnots, so we took this space...

added this pegboard...

and presto!