Light it up!

At my house, I have a back deck and underneath that is another area that is pretty neat. When I moved in earlier this year I took a day and cleaned the shit out of that area. I mean powered washed all the concrete, put some furniture down there, and made it nice. There is a light down there but definitely not funky enough for this cat.

I then noticed that the length of the "ceiling" was just exposed beams that were the underneath side of the deck above.

The idea came into my head of party lights to put up down there. But not just regular white lights, of course they had to be the multi-colored ones to represent my multi-colored personality.

Luckily enough I had found a good amount of strands in the house where I wouldn't have to go out and buy any. Dope. We are cooking with gas now.

My first attempt was to put them up with little hooks that you screw into the wood. They would make it easy to replace the lights if need be. Now usually I link to things that I use, but I won't this time because they were absolute garbage and not worth the amount of effort.

Now it was onto things that do a lot of work with minimal amount of effort. A staple gun. You use it just like you would with hanging up Christmas lights. Two key things, get staples long enough to where they don't really pinch the wires of the lights. Secondly, when you start stapling try to aim it well enough to where you don't shoot a staple through the wire. Both of these things will minimize the risk of the wires getting messed up and shorting out all of the lights. 

I was all in, stapling like a bat out of hell and thinking about all the shindigs that these bad boys were going to shine light on. But oh was I a naive little soul. Because I didn't do the most basic of things that you do when dealing with any sort of string lights. 

Plug them in first to make sure that they work. 

So after I had got them all hung up, I plugged them in..........only half of them worked, and the strands that didn't were intermittent with the ones that were. 

Shit.

Luckily there were some extra strands. So as a demoralized and broken man, I took them all down and replaced them with the working ones. Afterward I was about two strands short of completing it the ceiling. 

It still worked for the most part though, and I have yet to put up anymore. I will probably wait till it gets warmer outside.

Underneath there when its dark has this really neat reddish glow. With how it's arranged in that area and the lights, my friends and I spent many a good late night hanging out after getting home from wherever we were that particular Friday or Saturday night, and that's what it's all about.

Let's see what's behind (fixing) door number 3

Awhile back I was living in a place where for some reason, for a year straight we had some really wild parties. Why a house full of three guys in their early 20s would live like that is beyond me. Always at the end of night for some reason or another one of the doors in the house would either end up with a massive hole in it or would be completely off the hinges. Now I don't always know how this happened, but I definitely know it was never my fault.

So being the person I am, I would be the roommate who would fix the doors. Now I went into this completely not knowing how to do it, and I messed up a good amount of doors getting it wrong. 

What you want to do first is get a door. Crazy right? Now the right size door is key, as one could imagine. What you can do is either measure the old door or the door frame. There aren't too many crazy custom sizes of doors. They all usually fall into a pre-cut category that you can find at a home improvement store. In addition you want to get a door with a pre-cut knob and latch hole. They usually aren't the easiest to cut and may be beyond the scope of this blog.

Now on to the worst part of this. Hanging the hinges on the new door. You have to cut an indention on the new door so that the hinge plate sits flush inside. This will allow the door to close completely on both sides and have as much seal as a piece of wood up against another piece of wood can have.

To do this you will need a wood chisel. I have this set from Lowe's. Once you have measured the proper distances the hinges need to be apart from each other an away from the top and the bottom of the door, take the hinge plate and place it against the door. Then trace around it to know exactly how it will set against it.

Now that you have your outline, take your wood chisel and make small cuts down about 1/8" apart

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from each other the entire length of your hinge outline. Note the depth of the hinge plate as well. You want to make sure it sits flush and doesn't go below the plane of the door. This will get things all messed up and you will have to put up those retro beads for privacy. Just remember, you can take more off if it doesn't fit, but you can't put more back on. Coincidentally that was also my catch phrase back in the 1974 disco scene.

Now that you have your mortise cut you can put the hinges on the door. You can really use any wood screw longer than an inch and a half to put the hinge on. In my first attempts I was notoriously bad at measuring. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't line up right. All you need to do is take it down and either cut further up or down on one of the hinges, and move it. It may look a little janky, but hey at least you have some privacy.

Veterans Day thoughts

With Veterans Day upon us, I wanted to take some time and talk about something that isn't related to home improvement and probably not as humorous as my normal posts but is a subject pretty close to my heart. I was in the Oklahoma Army National Guard for 6 years and did one deployment to Afghanistan during that period of time. Now I'm not a big rah-rah go Army veteran type.  I only do that on job applications and in crappy pick-up lines. But I did want to write a Veterans Day post like this since I now have this outlet to do it.

A lot of times when I tell people I went to Afghanistan I either get "Oh, how was that" or "What was it like" and I find it difficult to respond. Sometimes it sucked beyond belief, other times I had more fun than I've ever had. I've seen some amazing sights that many people will never get to experience. I have also seen things that I hope no one ever has to see.

The biggest thing I took away from that time was some of the greatest friends/brothers that are still in my life to this day. I am grateful that I have them to lean on and in turn, they lean on me. It's that bond that has kept us going even when times seemed pretty dark.

One of the main things I wanted to address is this- veterans in this country are committing suicide at alarming rates. In a quote from Military Times "In 2014, the latest year available, more than 7,400 veterans took their own lives, accounting for 18 percent of all suicides in America." So a group who accounts for only 7.2% of the US population accounts for 18% of all suicides in the US. That comes out to an average of 20 per day in 2014.

So I don't know exactly how people can help. I have grown very distrusting of non-profit groups that say they support veterans but turns out to not be the case. The Veterans Administration healthcare is an absolute joke. And it's just really hard to tell if former service members are suffering or if you can tell, it's even harder to get them to seek help. But if something crosses your path where you can, or if you see an avenue that would help, I would urge you to consider it.

Furthermore, with this being a Veterans Day post and this is my blog so I can do what I want, here are a couple pictures of me and my friends from the military. Partly to pay homage to our time on deployment together, and partly because I feel like I looked relatively cool back then.

At the bottom is a video that my good friend Dan took during our time in Afghanistan. He had a helmet cam and did an awesome job putting together that video.

Thank you all for reading my blog up until this point. I hope you have enjoyed reading my posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

-Jake