Friday, October 16, 2009

Paint it black, frost, and tubing it


Last weekend was a busy one that I am just now getting around to documenting. We will start with The Boy's Jeep.

As I mentioned previously, The Boy hated the carpeting and had pretty much gutted the inside of the Jeep with the intent of painting it with this black rubberized stuff normally used on truck beds.

There was much prep work to do to protect the bits and pieces that he didn't want to end up with this black stuff on it. Finally, on Saturday afternoon he was able to apply the first coat. This stuff, called Grizzly Grip, is very different to work with. And it laughs at paint thinner if you need to remove some of the paint from, say, a bumper that wasn't supposed to get any of it. We found that acetone worked pretty good for that, but that has its own issues.

The second coat had to be put on in the dark. And then it was left alone to dry. The next day The Boy started putting the seats and such back into the Jeep. Since we had the Storm of the Century bearing down on us, on Monday we put the top and doors back on the thing.

In the mean time, I was finishing up work on the garage door project.

I demolished the old door, with the intent of reusing the wood to build a tree house of sorts in the back yard.

Then I trimmed and painted the new door. This new door really looks nice and I guess it was worth all the trouble of installing it. I'll probably appreciate it more later, but for now, I still have some scars that are healing.

My next task was to try to restore the deck to normalcy before the Storm of the Century hit. I hung all the strawberry baskets and moved around some other planters and such.

Since Mrs Notthat was still in St Louis on Monday, I took the day off and watched the grandkids. They liked being under the awning, they liked that this meant the rest of the deck was wide open for scooter riding, but they really liked playing with the tubes the awning was shipped in.

Much time was spent yelling scary sounding things down them and rolling Hot Wheels and tennis balls in them.

Darci was determined to make a seesaw out of one and ending up damaging it. Riley was just determined to scare the heck out of me - there is no way this is safe or makes sense to anyone not three-years-old.

But we all survived, the Storm of the Century arrived and left (it was actually rated as the 7th worst storm in the last 50 years), the awning performed very well and kept the pool table (and tubes) dry, and best of all, Mrs Notthat came home Tuesday night.

So all is back to normal here, no more storms or weddings to go to, no more garage doors to put up, no more Jeeps to fool with.

Well, I'm not so sure about the Jeep thing. The Boy has his eyes on additional improvements. Of course.

That's it - move along...

PS: By the way, the "frost" in the title is from the color of the garage door trim. Since the Storm of the Century was tropical, it has been warm and humid here. Very odd for us.

3 comments:

DAK said...

Why is it that every time Jesse needs to do a car improvement, the pronoun is "we?" Was Ms. That in St. Louis to mourn for the Cardinals? Am I already in mourning for the Dodgers?

Mrs. Notthat said...

You are always so busy when I leave. It's ok to take it easy you know. You're always telling me to.

mary ann said...

Great post ~ you are all so talented and I love the kids 'n tubes part! The garage door is beautiful, really.