How To Build a Workshop With Seven Telephone Poles and An Old Boot

After our son Allen used telephone poles to support the lean-to  part of his new shed last year, 2011, my husband put out the word that he would be interested in acquiring some old telephone poles. We soon had  seven telephone poles laying on our driveway......

Now all we had to do was find a way to use them, right? 

We decided to build a stand-alone workshop at the end of the driveway. Excavation for the new building was soon under way. 

Before long we had a sort of telephone forest in our yard!

We set the telephone poles in concrete, plumbed them and supported them in position until the cement dried. 

Then the floor joists went in.

And a building started to take shape.

Note: The walls were constructed with pallet wood; we had to make the side units in two parts so as to use those short pallet boards.

The roof went up next....

Ah! With a roof over our heads we could now turn our attention to finishing the inside of the new workshop.

Note: The pink post-its on the walls mark where the electrical wires traversed the room.

I installed every bit of the insulation in the walls; Will helped me insulate the ceiling.

There's Will, helping his dad cover the ceiling with particle board.

We covered the insulation with plywood - another recycled part of our new building.

For the walls, I mixed several buckets of paint that we had left over from other projects, and then we trimmed the walls with beautiful wood. 

One of the boards we used to cover the walls had a smooth surface, to I marked off an area to use as a chalkboard. A little chalkboard paint and the thing was ready to use.

We were running in front of winter the whole time we worked on this new building. We managed to get the workshop under cover before the worst of winter hit. We had a very mild fall - this was fall of 2011 - and I tell people that the weather was nice through December of that year . . . . because of my prayers, 'Lord, please please help us get this building done before the snow hits' 

We built a 16-foot-long workbench, and hung tools and added shelving, etc, to the new building.

The wood for the top of the workbench came from pallets. We don't know what kind of wood it is; all we know is that it's hard wood, and that it's beautiful. 

In an effort to integrate the new building into the landscape, we added two trellises to the north side of the workshop. 

The window went in last; we chose to add the window after the building was done. Did I mention we were in a rush to erect this building before winter set in?!

Oh, oh! I almost forgot to explain how we used an old boot in this project. Well . . . .

When it came time to run the electrical wiring through the walls, we had to find a way to route the wires around the telephone poles. Right? Son Bob came up with a solution: He grabbed the router and dug holes across the fronts of the poles, creating deep ditches in the wood. It was my job, after all was said and done, to come up with a way to hide those ugly scars. 

So I thunk and thunk on this, and I finally hit upon an idea: Why not cover those ditches with felt . . . . from an old boot. And while I was at it, I decided to encrust the felt with beads. 

The felt that lines boots is very thick - perfect for my needs. I spread hot glue onto the felt and sunk the glue-laden felt in piles of beads. I then hot-glued the felt to the channels in the telephone poles. Phew! It worked. 

The End

Er, should I say, instead, The Beginning - the beginning, that is, of many more project to come.....

Have you done anything creative lately?

The Dining Room Gets Smaller with Each New Coat of Paint!

I mentioned, in an earlier post, that our dining room has been through a lot of changes. So I decided to chronicle some of those changes this morning. 

We bought this house in late 2004.

The color of the wall . . . . changed and then changed again!

The table changed, too....

The art on the wall changed over the years....

And the curtains went through several changes.....

The fan light will be gone in subsequent shots; watch for it!

I eventually tacked one of my quilt creations onto a huge cork board, surrounded by striped wall paper and trimmed with cording we made with a drill.....

 Ah! The ceiling fan disappeared! This was a recent addition: track lighting with pendant lights.

And of course the most important part of any decorating scheme is the people who grace the rooms....

Why, there's Ed, my dear daddio. ,making our dining room especially good! Love you, Dad.

I quit! I have had a lot of fun this morning, reliving the passage of time through our dining room.

Susan

A New Door? No Problem!!!

Our dining room has gone through a lot of changes in the past seven years. 

After we built a deck just off the dining room, I started to look for a door to replace the dining room window. 

I published an ad for the door on a local radio program, Tradio - a format that allows folks in our area to buy and sell things. I got a call from a man who had a door for sale and we went to check it out. We brought the door home and put it in the garage.

We took a break from big projects and did a smaller one: We shortened the dining room table; we would need the extra room a shorter table would provide, to get to the anticipated new door. We found a pedestal-style base at a yard sale, brought it home and painted it black. Then we removed the center insert of the old table and covered the old table [top] with barn wood, center. Voila! We now had a nice table - shorter, yes, but wider. 

Shortly after we got the door home and the table shortened, someone loaned us a masonry saw. That thing was HUGE! We picked a day to cut the hole in the house, and we were ready to go. 

After the window was removed, it was time to enlarge the hole to accommodate the new door. 

It was a very scary thing, watching the beautiful sandstone of this house being assaulted by a saw. I would have taken pictures but I couldn't muster the courage to watch the actual cutting!

The actual installation of the door straddled two days. 

Bright and early the second day of the installation, we removed the tarp we'd put over the hole the night before and got busy building a frame for the new door. We rallied the troops: our sons came by to lend a hand off and on throughout the day. 

By the end of that second day, we were able to start enjoying the newly-expanded view. 

Thj

The finish work would take another week - dry-walling, painting, re-installing the cornice and curtains, etc. 

In retrospect, I think it's a good thing I didn't know all the ins and outs of what this sort of project entails. I was, like, 'Hey! Let's put a door there!' It wasn't until after the thing was installed that I thought, 'This could have been a disaster!'