So.... what have we been up to?

It's been a while since we posted a proper post, and I'm sorry for it.  Between busy weekends, winter weather and early nightfall, I haven't had a chance to sit down and keep you up to date.

So, just what have we been up to?

The biggest news is that I've built another shelf.  Previously, we had no footwear storage in the house; we had a black metal shelf outside the front door where we stowed our shoes, farm shoes and rubber boots.  But with winter settling in for a good long visit, this outdoor storage wasn't going to work.  So I made some measurements and headed out to the barn to plug in our trusty circular saw.  (There's a bit of a story to the circular saw... but that will have to wait for a future post.)

Measuring and planning

Ideally, the shelf would have been 35.5" long, but as I had some 3' boards hanging around, I decided I could just move the shelf over that .5" so I wouldn't have to trim the existing boards or worse, cut new ones.

Hooray for previously unfinished projects!

I then completed the measurements on the 2x4s and got them ready to cut.

Awaiting the saw

 After everything was cut, you guessed it - I screwed it all together!  When I was building the big shelf, I had screwed the shelf supports to the legs before I had screwed the shelf boards on.  This meant that I had to use a ratchet and a driver socket to screw the shelf boards to the supports.  I learned my lesson - this time, I attached the boards to the supports before attaching them to the legs.

Piled boards - the boards in the nice pile will be for the top shelf, while the uglier boards will become the lower shelves.  There's method to my madness, I promise :)

 And, ta-da!  Here's the finished product, complete with shoes and baskets full of small tools.

The large box on top holds all our outerwear accessories, such as scarves, toques and gloves.

 This past Wednesday, Jordan spent most of the day in the shop trying to make sense of the mess in there.  The place is a disaster, and it's a challenge to find anything in there.  So a good part of his day was spent cleaning out and organizing the toolbox.

Sockets, in their traditional place - the top of the toolbox.  Now they're even in size order!

Wrenches - we have 7 or 8 9/16 wrenches, so if you need one just give us a call :)

We also propped up the back roof.  While Mom and Dad were here, Dad noticed that the roof seemed to be sloping to one end.  So we're hoping that this will get us through the winter and hopefully we can investigate the cause of the poor slope next summer.  You can also see the support I had to install under the deck - that was barrels of fun to do on a day after we'd had a record-breaking snowfall that decided to melt.  I spent an hour under the deck in the mud, with water dripping between the deck boards into my ears and down my neck.  I'm glad I'll only have to do that once.

Supporting the roof.  Ignore the logs, they were the base for the bottle jack during install.

You can see that the roof is still sloping quite badly from the right side to the mid-point.  From the middle to the left is now level, at least.

There have also been a few puppy playdates.  I promised pictures in my last real post, but any pictures I tried to take come out showing two blurry black blobs - the pups move too fast.  Luckily, there's a solution to this - video!

When Doodle barks in this video, he's not barking at Zim; he's barking to tease the dog next door.  Apparently this is a regular occurrence - Doodle will be calmly chilling in the yard, then will suddenly bark, then the neighbour dog will bark, then Doodle will go back to what he was doing before.  What a goofy pup :)

Doodle had a set of booties that outgrew him (or Doodle's feet shrunk, one of the two!), and Doodle's awesome humans gifted them to Zim to try and curb the iceballs from forming in Zim's feet in the snow.  Zim wasn't too sure about them when he tried them on...

Once he got to wear his booties outside in the snow, he was fine with them.

So that about brings you up to date on our super-fantastic-fun activities lately.  For the rest of the night I'll be cleaning the house and making cookies.  They're the best cookies ever - I'll post the recipe soon :)