Saturday, May 16, 2009

New Project

In the interest of cleaning up my drafts folder, I am completing them, or deleting them. This post was started early in June. Boy, am I behind. Italics following will be updates on this post.

Hubby has this idea that I should do a podcast. Not we but I. I have no qualifications. I talk so fast sometimes I stumble over my own tongue. Reading my blog it should be obvious I have interruptions so frequently that the only coherent posts are the ones I write either at work during my break or late at night when the kids are sleeping and the husband is distracted by Battlefield, in any of its many forms.

So, he has decided that we need a place to escape the interruptions(speaking of interruptions, I just left the keyboard for twenty minutes to yell at the kids and clean up cereal my 3 year old helped herself to). We have a place, but it needs some work. It's a bomb shelter, probably built during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's not huge, probably about the same size as my smallest bedroom. It has a weird door on it, made of plywood covered with tin. It won't shut all the way, and the hasp to lock it is on the outside. Kinda inconvenient and scary at the same time. When I moved in to the house 4 years ago, it had twinkle lights strung in an "x" across the ceiling, a velvet poster on one wall, a nasty mattress on the floor, and indoor-outdoor carpet on the ground. My sister helped me gut it, and now it is just plain concrete floor, with a light plugged into the one socket. Is it time to fix it up into a hide away? Definitely!


A problem we have is the way the entryway works. The door opens, and there is this narrow entry that goes down into a small corner of the shelter. Husband believes this was put in place as a blast wall. Who am I to argue? After all, he is the expert when it comes to all things apocalyptic in this house. Anyhow, this makes it hard to get any furniture that isn't made of small parts into the interior. I'm hoping we can get the two office chairs and all the desk parts in there. For floor covering, I have a bunch of scatter rugs I think would do fine until we find a good area rug. He managed to escape the major spring cleaning going on in the house to go shopping at Home Depot with his dad, and picked up a few fluorescent lights to hang from the ceiling, and some paint to paint the walls white(they are currently brick red). He also has plans to run a cable out to the shelter for internet access. The wireless works well outside the shelter, but the signal isn't strong enough to get inside.

I'd like to get a couch and some shelving in there, so there is a good place to stretch out with a book, and store some canned goods, water, and other supplies.

Here is where the updates start. It is now mid July, and we have some furniture in there, some throw rugs I had from the last place I lived (no bare floors here to use them on!), the walls have a base coat applied, and hubby strung up some fluorescent lighting. He also added a "light switch" to the socket, with a remote, so we can turn the lights on and off without unplugging them. Cable for internet is still in the works, but we have a source for it that won't cost us anything but the labor to dig the trench and the pvc pipe to protect it with. Perhaps by Christmas I'll have a cozy hideaway/disaster supplies storage facility to run to! Please enjoy our short film of our progress, starring Sammy, with the breathy Shawndra as narrator. :)

No comments: