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Years ago I made a headboard, one of those padded types, for when my office was my bedroom. My improvised french cleat system didn’t quite work as well as hoped, so I just applied a bead of liquid nails to hold them together. At the time it seemed like a reasonable solution to the problem.

I removed the headboard lastnight… along with a few square feet of the drywall outer paper. Removing the paper was, of course, not intended.

I’ve only done minor drywall repairs, with the exception of that awful spot where the lounge door knob breaks through the wall… that spot looks pretty awful too, heh, but it was years and years ago that I fixed that.

My little “oh I’ll use liquid nails” idea has resulted in a pretty costly repair job. I needed to buy some tools, since this is much more of little putty knife and spackle sort of fix, this special “Gardz” sealer to keep the kraft paper stuff from blistering the joint compound. The Gardz might not be needed, but all the places online suggested it, fortunately Franklin Hardware carries nearly the complete line of Zinsser products, but unfortunately they only had a single gallon of it, no quarts, etc… so that alone was $25 of the cost. The paint will be another $20 (thankfully I already have one of the colours, otherwise it’d be $40!), the spackle and joint compound comes to about $10, the knives and mud box comes to $20… I couldn’t find my hand sander and the drywall screens that go along with it… so that’d be yet another $10. Ugh… at least I have most everything needed to fix any other drywall problem that might pop up, heh.

I’ve finally decided that I will indeed be putting down laminate floor in the office. I’ve flipped back and forth about it quite a bit, but I found a style at Lowe’s that fit into my nearly non-existant budget that was also nicely attractive. I absolutely adore this Pergo “global passage” one, Malaysian Kempas. It’s $3 a square foot… given the ~100 square feet of office, and the very low price of the alternative… the Pergo is just about thrice the price. I don’t think it’s worth it. Perhaps this weekend the budget will yield enough and I’ll be able to purchase it, but this drywall repair really bit into the funds, of course.

I think I want to extend the shelving along the wall in the office too, I have short two foot shelves on the wall, but I think going to full length would be a good idea. I need that sort of space for just random crap that seems to always build up on my side desk. That’ll be $100… roughly, probably ought to do it before I get the aquarium too; don’t want a shelving bracket to fall and crack it. .. or drywall dust to get into it. I’ll probably use the same heavy duty dual track standards and brackets like the shelving over my desk… being adjustable is rather nice. It isn’t horribly ugly either, but also not the most beautiful, heh.

I, of course, have plenty of projects, they’re mostly all held up due to lack of money – as always. I did say that I’d finally replace the wobbly metal railing in the foyer. It’s that same another $100 figure type project, heh… this time it’ll be a nice wood newel, railing, and all the jazz that goes with that. I don’t think that’ll be happening this month as planned though. Getting the floor in the office started is pretty important, because that must be done before I get the aquarium.

I did end up getting a pancake compressor, but one capable of delivering the cfm I need for painting, and oil lubed so it won’t poop out so quickly. I also bought a cheaper brad nailer last month, on sale even, whee! They seem to work quite nicely, so all good there, thus far.

One of these days I’ll feel like I’m actually making some progress on the mighty “to-do” list.

I’m not sure about the door hardware, part of me thinks it looks better without any knobs; I’ve not drilled the holes yet because I need another opinion.

I hate the doors. That whole idea that I could make the doors as “fancy” as I wanted without investing in the right tool was somewhat misguided. While I did managed to accomplish that task, it didn’t turn out as up to par as I’d hoped. That was okay though, because I didn’t particular feel like investing even more money into that part of the project.

Unfortunately I managed to screw up pretty heavily on the finishing. I did check the entire project for glue residue with denatured alchohol and mineral spirits before I applied stain. I must not know what I’m doing when it comes to that, because I definitely had glue residue. In the future I’ll switch to the glue that glows under blacklight. This was also the first time using my random orbit sander, and I have swirl marks all over the corners of the doors… granted I checked for those too, again must not know what I’m looking for.

So the doors are splotchy… must not have sanded the interiors correctly either… I managed to glop the finish at the panel edges too. I really should have pre-finished the panel before putting the door together… I thought it’d be okay.

All told this makes me want to trash those doors and start over. I could probably live with them, and granted I’ve not see the stand in the room yet, but… ugh, I think they detract from the overall look of the piece.

It actually looks better in person than in the photo, all those reflections don’t quite look right to the camera.