a bed.

We've been on a kick lately, finding cool things at salvage yards, used furniture stores, and the new Habitat For Humanity store in town. In addition to that $18 lamp, we found a bed. It was an old oak bed, similar in style to the bed I built J years ago.

I've never owned a bed, actually.

In fact, there was a time - when K and I actually met in fact - where my 'bed' was (seriously) a pile of sheetrock -

Maybe a little hard to see in that photo (the pile of sheetrock is wrapped in black plastic), but that was a real deal. Also hard to tell in that photo, but my bedroom at the time didn't have any walls. Well, it had walls, but it was bare studs. Pretty awesome.

Fast-forward a few years...

The bed came in pieces, but the gal at Habitat For Humanity was nice and gave me three scraps of 1x lumber to use as cross-braces. I had to rip them all down to 3-5/8" and then cut them to 60-1/2" in length, but that was easy. I also had to find the bolts that fit the nuts that were embedded in the headboard and footboard. That... was not easy. It actually took three trips to the hardware store where - on the third trip - I literally shoved the footboard into the trunk of my car and took it to the flippin' store. I was not going to make a fourth trip.

(Turned out - the bolt was metric, M7 to be exact, of which the store only had about five bolts of various sizes - none that would work with the bedframe as it was so I'd have to get creative... )

So I drilled a second hole on each end of the two side rails -

The longest bolt was maybe 2" in length (it was metric, and I can't recall the length) - and I had to use a couple of washers and a nut as a spacer to fit the bolt and be able to tighten it. Thankfully, it worked - and after an hour or so I had the bed put together -

Then I had to fit the cross-braces I ripped and cut down to length -

I drilled them -

Then screwed them in to help solidify the bed -

On the middle brace I cut a length of scrap 4x4 to use as a support -

And it was finished -

Then it was just a matter of hauling the box frame, mattress, and all our bedding (K had washed and starched the sheets) back in and put it all together -

Finally... I'm a grown-up (K had already owned a bed, although remarked how now our bedroom feels more 'grown-up').

dining table light!

Hmm... I had to dig up this gem, but I knew I had it...

When Jeff came out to visit back in April 2013 he helped me drag up the dining table I had bought cos it was too hard to pass up, but didn't have room for it the way the living room was organized - so I had shoved it down in the basement.

(Jeff relaxing after that bit of hard work... )

Anyway - yeah, that was back in 2013... Since then, the table has stayed. Without light. It was cool in the summer cos it didn't get dark until after nine o'clock. In the winter, we used the living room lamp over by the Bechstein.

Until tonight.

This past weekend, K and I stopped by the new Habitat For Humanity store and - in searching for a desk or table or dresser (something, anything) that we'd turn into a bathroom vanity (we bought a Mid-Century Modern credenza at a different used furniture store for dirt cheap - along with a sink from a salvage yard - but more on that when we get going again on the bathroom... ) - I came across an old lamp for $18.

What the heck, we bought it.

And just to test it out, tonight I bought a $6 hook and a $4 extension cord - of which I cut off the end and wired it to the end of the lamp cable after hanging it above the table.

Turns out... we really, really like it.

It's a gorgeous Tiffany glass shade that, well, just happens to coordinate really well with the beautiful mission lamp K bought me two year's ago for Christmas that's over in the opposite end of the living room -

It'll be downright weird to have, well, actual light over our dining table! Now I'll just need to wire the circuit - which I'll do after I wire the lights in the bathroom (it'll be on the same circuit - all the overhead lights now are run off one circuit - well, they are since I wired the porch light six years ago).

car stereo [2].

Bleh. After I installed the new stereo in Spencer, I realized it could sound even better... with an amp and a subwoofer! The thing is... I already had both, and they'd been taking up space in a basement cupboard ever since Oliver (my previous car, a '95 Toyota Tercel) was totaled - although I ended up selling him to my now father-in-law for him to use as a commuter. He stills drive Oliver... I think.

But anyway - I had an old subwoofer and amp sitting down there, along with all of the necessary cables (power for the battery, ground, turn-on, RCA, and 16-gauge speaker wire) in a plastic bin, also just taking up space. And so I carved out a couple of evenings before Jeff's and my road trip to Glacier National Park to get them installed...

First, I had to get power from the battery through the firewall, which turned out to be pretty easy. I poked a scratch awl through the main rubber grommet where most of the wiring was already being routed -

Then - after taping the 8-gauge power cable to a piece of 12-gauge electrical cable - I stuck them both through the hole, then reached up under the pedals on the driver's side of the firewall and yanked the mess through -

Along with everything else I already had, I installed the battery fuse. It was just a simple matter of connecting the 18" lead from the battery to the fuse box -

So power then was done. Next, the amp (an old Phoenix Gold XS4300) -

came with a potentiometer that adjusts the bass output I needed to install -

I had the perfect spot - right next to the 12V adapter in front of the stick shift. So I just quick drilled it -

When I had yanked the stereo before selling Oliver, I apparently (not sure why?) cut the cable for the pan pot. The thing is, the end is a 4-cable telephone jack. So I had to go get a box of jacks. Thankfully, from all of the structured wiring I've done in the house, I already had the CAT5 and RJ11 crimper. So it was really easy -

Then I plugged it into the amp -

I'd later find out... it didn't work. After double-checking I had crimped the wires correctly in the jack, I inspected the connection at the pan pot side. Yep - only the black wire was hanging on, so I had to break out the soldering iron to reconnect the other three (my wife helped hold the soldering flux) -

And done -

Well, it's backwards - so turning the pot right turns down the volume on the sub, but whatever. Maybe some day I'll fix it. I probably should have read this first... so I'll probably end up rewiring it.

*** UPDATE 10.11.16 - yeah, it bugged me. So I fixed it. (I just reversed the black wire to the other end, then put the green/yellow in the middle, and the red where the black had been) ***

Anyway... next, I had to run a bunch more cabling, which is how I spent the rest of that first night - just pulling cable through the car after removing a bunch of the trim sections. The power turn-on lead went over to run alongside the speaker and power cables under the door trim (you can run power with high-level speaker wire without getting any noise interference, but not with low-level RCA cables - those must be placed away from power cables or engine whine will likely be a problem through the system), and speaker wire went into the trunk for the subwoofer.

I gave it a valiant effort to pull the 16-gauge speaker cable through the factory door boot on the driver's side to connect the component speakers in the doors but... nope, it wasn't happening. So I ended up just splicing the 16-gauge stuff onto the factory wiring harness adapter -

After all was said and done, it kind of looked like a huge mess -

Note: power, ground, and turn-on lead on the left along with the speaker wire (the amp's inputs are arranged intentionally, with power and speaker inputs on one side, and RCA inputs on the other), and the RCA and pan pot on the right. I did some quick level-setting before bolting the seat back in so I could leave the next day to pick up Jeff at Sea-Tac and make the drive across the Pac NW to Glacier...

Just a couple of days after returning though, I was driving home from work and all of a sudden the sub sounded awful - like it was rattling something obnoxious. So I pulled it out of the little enclosure and inspected. Bleh - in the seven years of sitting down in the basement, the foam surround had deteriorated and begun to separate from the speaker cone -

Rather than spend $500 on a new sub (which may or may not fit the same volume box I had), I opted to go the thrifty route and spend a whopping $20... on a replacement foam surround kit from Simply Speakers. Brilliant. Then got to work scraping off the old surround -

The kit comes with the foam surround (duh) and some special glue that works pretty quickly, but still allows time to line up the speaker cone's voice coil in the magnet to make sure it's not rubbing during its length of travel. In a couple hours, I had the new foam all glued (to the cone and the frame) and the gasket reapplied -

Boom. Good as new and reinstalled in the trunk -

And now neither it nor the amp are taking up space in the basement...