Friday night when Elizabeth got home from studying at Michael's house, she sent an email to her professor requesting that he drop her from the computer class she was taking. She was due to take her mid-term Saturday morning, but thankfully his email granting her request arrived before she had to leave. With all the other things going on in her life, she was not assigning the coursework enough time to do well with it. At any rate, she withdrew while passing, so it won't affect her GPA and she now has several more hours a week in which to accomplish the myriad items on her to-do list.
Ornery went in to work Saturday morning, and while he was gone, Elizabeth ran over to Hobby Lobby to get some artwork framed. Then she came back and started working on a shawl for a Christmas gift while I worked on Christmas cards. At about 10:30 we both went out to the garage and began painting the aforementioned shoe chest. We finished with the final coat of paint on all the parts at about 2:00. At some point she bought peel-and-stick floor tiles to put on the shelves inside, and door pulls for it. She left for the evening at about 4:00 to go to a concert downtown where a friend of hers was playing in the first act.
Meanwhile, Ornery spent the first part of the afternoon emptying the gladiator and paint shelf to switch places with each other, then putting everything back. The paint stuff was always hidden by the saws or some other pile of stuff, and it was making me frustrated. It is much better now.
Sunday morning she left early to go to Michael's and we finished off the chest. I put the tiles in, Ornery re-attached the hinges and installed the door pulls, then put the whole thing together. It is nice, although the paint seems to attract smudges and smears pretty badly. Hopefully after it dries more thoroughly it will be better.
Next we cleaned out a tool chest we had bought last spring at a garage sale. There were lots of things in it that we were unfamiliar with, some things that were just junk, and other things that might be useful. We sorted, cleaned and redistributed and got it ready to give to Michael. Then Ornery attached the seats to the little kid chairs he made several months ago, and I fixed lunch.
Here is the shoe chest in the back of Big Red ready to go across town... the harsh sunlight makes the paint color look funny, but it is really dark brown.
We loaded up the shoe chest, Elizabeth's china, and several other things in the afternoon, and took them all over to Michael's house. We had been invited to dinner, and we couldn't go empty handed, now could we?
When we got there to unload, I saw this on the wall (which made me very happy.)
The picture is blurry, but you can see the colors a lot better in this light. The fretwork box on the top shelf below the picture was one Ornery made for Elizabeth as a very late Christmas gift. As I sat there I looked around at all the things we had made or given to Elizabeth through the years and thought, "No wonder I like it so well, I picked it out!" :)
Ornery was quite disappointed to discover that his base was 1/4 inch too wide, and offered to take it back home to fix it, but they said they could just put some shims underneath and it would work fine. I am sure he will take it back and fix it... it just isn't in his nature to let something like that go. Elizabeth was absolutely delighted with it.
Anyway, here are some pictures of it in place.
They will need to do something different with the curtains, but that was already planned--these were leftover from another place and were hung to help cut down the light at night.
Now that Ornery has finished that project, he can get back to painting the house. He is pretty close to being finished, then I think he is going to get back to the scroll saw for some ornaments. The weather this week is forecast to be sunny and much warmer than over the weekend, so I think he will be able to get it done by the end of the week.
Meanwhile, I am finishing off the Christmas cards so I can get back to doing some other crafts and art. Elizabeth asked for a companion piece to the one they hung in the living room to go on the other side of the fireplace and I have some ideas percolating, now I just need to clear off the table so I can play around with them. I am also expecting a shipment of poppy seed pods which I will be using in some sort of craft (or more) to do a review post on my design blog.
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