The biggest thing I did this year was buying a house. We bought a house in Fairfax in January 2011. I really love it, but having a mortgage really makes you grow up fast. The house was already renovated when we moved in, so there wasn’t many big house projects to take care of. So I built a bar instead.

There were concerts and birthdays and trips to NYC/Georgia/Tampa/Niagara Falls, We hosted Easter and Thanksgiving at our house, I grew a beard, another Cardboard boat race, 2 weddings, and we ran our first adventure race (the warrior dash).

It was a pretty great year in the Schumaker’s life, But without our friends and family there to share in our adventures it wouldn’t have been as fun.

I give it 5 Schu’s.

I got the posters printed on winkflash.com. I’ve used them for a bunch of other printing projects and I’m happy with them like always. If you get on their mailing list they have great coupons for products.

I’m going to finally get around to putting some skull door knockers on there too. Hopefully I can kick the procrastination in 2012

-Mark

Mark5four0′s Etsy Shop

I got inspired tonight or maybe I just got bored and decided that if I was going to sit around and watch old episodes of ‘Always Sunny’ I should be doing something productive… So I made this.

http://www.boxoffice.swalrus.org/

I am not a woodworker. Any close examination of this construction will reveal this. But I am learning and this is my greatest creation to date. I learned a lot about the materials involved and I’ll try to share those with you.

Birch Plywood

Most of the construction is 2×4 pine but it is ‘wrapped’ in a layer of 3/4 inch birch plywood. I think this is how professionals make cabinets… but I’m just guessing here. This is normally $44ish per sheet, I was lucky enough to find a ‘Special Buy’ at Home Depot and got it for $24 per sheet. I think if you’re cautious with the cuts you could use only 3 sheets with this design. I actually really like the grain pattern that I was able to get in the top of the bar and for the price you can’t beat it. Which brings me to my next point

Staining Birch Plywood

This is where I spent the most time on this bar, not actually cutting wood or painting anything. But stressing over what color and how to stain the plywood. I had been told that it was nealy impossible to stain plywood without blotching problems. So on the recommendation of a couple woodworking forums I bought some pretreater. It was a little bit of an expensive experiment at $26 for a 20oz bottle. But it works miracles. Here’s a picture of the wood with and without pretreatment, same number of coats of stain.
Birch plywood is hard to stain. I knew this going in, but I got a great deal on the wood and I couldn’t afford any better counter top anyway.

Pine Trim Wood

I guess this is something that you just have to learn when you start building things with wood, but pine pretty much sucks for staining. The pretreater that worked miracles on the plywood was no match for the smooth sanded finish of the pine. The only way to make pine stainable would be to sand every visible edge with a rough grit sandpaper to ‘open it up’. They call it ‘select’ and you pay a little more, but I think what they do the make it straight is just run it through the sander an extra time. But besides the staining
it all seemed pretty standard to work with.

Epoxy Bar Top

This stuff is awesome and terrible at the same time. The secret is in the planning and design. If you’re going to cover something and dam the edges I would say go for it. If you think you’re going to flow it over the edges and have it look perfect like the tables at your local Thai restaurant I would prepare to be disappointed. Well, that may be a bit rough. What you’re going to have to to is be prepared for a huge mess. I almost did it right, I laid down plenty of plastic and leveled the bar perfectly. But on the first coat on the top I didn’t mix up enough to fully cover the surface so I was forced to squeegee it over the edge and it got this rippled effect in the process. I poured a second coat and was able to build up the top layer so that you didn’t notice, but the front edge stayed rippled. Another problem was that one edge of the bar didn’t have a lip for the epoxy to drip off of and I was so worried about the front edge that I forgot to smooth out all the drips. I could probably sand them off and try to put poly over them to keep the shine. But sometimes you have to cut your losses and go with what you’ve got.

Basements

They leak! Maybe I should have made sure that the basement was watertight in that corner, because the first big rain the whole area under the bar got wet. It turns out it was a downspout pipe that had come loose so the water was being directed against the foundation. I fixed that and everything seems fine now.

Lessons Learned

• No matter what they say on the label, wood glues and wood putty are not stainable.
• The pretreater required that you pretreat-sand-pretreat. Do Not Skip the sanding.
• With a complex design like the front, I should have stained the wood first before I glued it on.
• Leave room for the drill when mounting the Tap close to the bartop.
• Predrill holes for wires and lights.
• Foot rests are expensive.
• To get the trim to stain I had to let the stain basically dry, then use a rag to wipe some of it off so that you could see the grain. This probably wouldn’t work with lighter stain.

Composition with grey and light brown - 1918 *This is rotated 90 degrees

Marc Dewey of A Rad Documentary was in Calgary this weekend for the 25th anniversary and was able to get me a picture of the poster at the gallery. People were gathered around it looking at all the detail and even placing some bids on it, this thing might get sold after all. I am looking into having prints of it for sale on Cafepress or Zazzle, I’ll keep you updated.

One thing that irks me about the print though is that “Bob not blob” appears twice in the bottom right corner, I had redrawn him smaller and forgot to delete the layer. When they got the .eps file it must have been checked to visible. Which is a little annoying since it covers up the “he’s such a nice boy” lady and the Canadian flag that I hid down there. Which is sad, because THAT LADY WAS THERE!

BMX GALLERY
RAD 25

We checked into the hotel in northern Miraflores and asked the man at the front desk if there was anything open to eat around here, he suggested a little place around the corner. It turned out to be an Italian place, Which are apparently very popular in Lima. The wine was great and the food was delicious.  A trend that would continue through out our trip.  We were so tired that all we could manage was a quick walk around the neighborhood and then back to he hotel. We didn’t know it at the time but we were right next to the Huaca Pucllana, which is a huge ancient ruin, but as is common in Peru, you don’t always know the history of the area around you.  When we got back to the hotel they gave us two bottles of Cusquena to celebrate our arrival in Peru! These would not be our last Cusquenas…

The next day we woke up early, mostly because we weren’t used to the hard bed, we decided to get an early start on the day and went down to the lobby for breakfast. The staff at the B&B Miraflores was amazing. They were always happy to get us anything we needed for the room. For breakfast they served us toast, coffee, and bread with cheese. You really feel at home with them. After the breakfast we set out to see Miraflores. It is a really nice neighborhood, I would compare it to Arlington in the DC area. There are little shops and restaurants intermixed with houses. Some of them are clearly not expecting many tourists, at least not at this time of year, but like most of the Peruvians we me they were very friendly and gave us great service. We walked down the Ave. de Arequipa until we reached the Parque Kennedy which is the central park in Miraflores. It was really pretty and clean and surrounded by a lot of little cafes and shops… and stray cats.  We ate a second breakfast at Haiti (recommended in the guidebook, but nothing to write a blog about) and then set off exploring. We stopped at the cathedral that sits on the west side if the park. It was an active church so we didn’t want to be the rude tourists and take a lot of pictures, but I did take one of the altar because it reminded me if the end of “Big Trouble in Little China” …with the neon lights. For the next couple hours we wandered the streets looking for interesting shops and parks. We saw many pigeons doing their mating dances and abandoned cats sleeping in the grass. It was a good introduction to the city. Kind of a self guided tour of Miraflores. We talked to a lot of interesting people and ate some great street foods. Churros FTW!

The next day we set our sights on Lima Central which is a much bigger and more crowded section of the city.  We didn’t know exactly where to go but we decided to explore the area around our hotel a little more before getting in a taxi. So we just started walking north on Ave. Arequipa until we got hungry enough to stop.  Miraflores is a little bit touristy so the prices were a little high.  But about 10 blocks north they are dirt cheap. We had the biggest omlettes, fruit, juice, coffee con leche, and anything else we could stuff our faces with, The price.. about 10 bucks.  When we finally stumbled out of the cafe we went back to the street and found a taxi.  Laurel talked with the taxi driver a bit and we were off to Lima central. We learned that the taxi driver was starting his own taxi service and he gave us his number so that we could call him whenever we needed a ride. This actually worked surprisingly well,  he even picked us up at the airport on our way back too!  We were dropped off near an art museum, which I always like to see in other countries. But unfortunately they were closed because they were preparing for a new exhibit. so we just walked around the grounds for a while. They were really amazing actually. behind the museum there was a free clinic going on, we talked to a couple of women who said it was something to do with optometry. They were actually very excited to hear that Laurel and I were on our honeymoon in Peru. As were most people actually, it may be just my lack of spanish vocabulary. But I saw their faces light up when they found out that we were coming to their country to celebrate our marriage.

Central Lima is pretty much like any big city, lots of tall buildings and cars whizzing past on the street. But there’s something European and old world about it too. We went into the Cathedral  near the presidential palace and got a tour from a really great guide. I really recommend this for someone who doesn’t speak a lot of spanish. Our guide really knew his stuff. Sometimes in the tour he would go ‘off topic’ a little and you could tell that he really didn’t speak English that well, but he had this energy to his talk, that really made you believe him.

After that we walked around a little and bought a few things to take back and drank a coffee at a Starbucks.. because we are Americans after all.