The leash has tightened.

Seems you can’t open up a single news site without reading about the big upcoming, cinematic release of “New Moon.” I don’t know much about it. It supposedly has vampires in it. And since the young women seem to fawn over it, I’m sure it is jam packed with romance of some sort. What vampire movie is complete without romance?

The wife is a relative new-comer to the series. She started reading it less than a year ago. Although she may be a Twilight-newbie, she is hooked.

Do you know what happens when a wife is counting down the seconds to a new movie, and she wants to go with her husband? The husband goes.

Honey, payback sucks. If they ever come out with another “WarGames,” I’m moving the leash from my neck to yours and dragging you with. Mwuhahaha!

Brendan’s room is finally done (almost)! Our neighbor Ron did an amazing job of redoing the walls and the paint colors turned out great. I will admit that I painted the ceiling the same color as the window wall and it was way too dark. So I ended up having to reprime and repaint. I opted to go with the lightest color from the same color swatch that I used. I’m loving it! Here is a picture pre-carpet.

The carpet install went pretty smoothly. It didn’t take Lowes very long and they were pretty nice. Brendan is definitely all boy and loves to play rough. We did go with the thickest option for this reason. So far I am very happy with the results.

Sorry about the picture being sideways. I am not too computer savy with how to fix this. Trust me I tried! So I will have to have Shane do it later!

My only complaint about the carpet install was that it scratched up our wood work. After all the hard work I put into refinishing it I was and am still bummed. Lowes did come take a look as a small piece was also chipped, but did state it was unavoidable. So now we have to sand all of the woodwork and repoly. YAY! Not. So this is on our to do list. It will probably stay there for a while as I am burnt out on working.

Besides fixing the woodwork, we also need to finish some areas of the window frame, strip the closet and bedroom doors, and touch up some paint. With the doors we are hoping to have them dipped and avoid the headache, but we will see! All in all I am very happy how Brendan’s room turned out. Shane and I discussed it last night and his room is by far the best room in the house. I do think it was all worth it as Brendan looks at his room every morning and says, “Nice room.” Sometimes he replaces nice with the word cool! Last night as Shane was installing his windows Brendan was telling his Daddy thanks for those. It definitely makes it easier to put all the work into it when your two year old sure seems to appreciate it!

Since I made the post on 10/25/09 about our big changes, things have been insanely busy. How long ago was it that I last blogged about Brendan’s windows? Over a month… ouch.

While I’ve waited for the glazing to harden on the last window, I did replace the storm windows in his room. While I like the new aluminum storm windows better than the old aluminum storm windows, I’m not proud of the fact that I gave Menards the wrong measurements and the storms had to be mounted to the exterior rather than up against the normal storm window stops. It doesn’t look bad, but I don’t like to make stupid mistakes like that. And because they were custom sized, they couldn’t be returned, which is why I installed them on the outside trim.

It took me a few days of 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there to prime and paint the window frame that is exposed to the elements. Once I finished that and let it dry, it was time to get the windows in place! We have to create new window stops as the ones that were there consisted of about 3 pieces for each part that should have been a single piece. Lots of seams. So for now, we have windows that more sitting in place than secured in place.

We have two pulls for these windows, but it seems we “misplaced” the screws for them. So for now, you get a shot with my arm in place.

These windows also did not have sash locks. I’m guessing that as the wood rotted, they pulled loose and were thrown. We are going to have to buy a bunch anyways for the rest of the windows in the house. For these windows, I’m pretty certain that I’ll have to dump some wood hardener into the screw holes on the upper sash as that board had quite a bit of moisture damage (it actually sags about 1/8-1/4″ of an inch in the middle, used to be much worse). Speaking of that, any suggestions on how to deal with sash locks that don’t line up equally? Should I buy a jig saw and cut an 1/8″ thick board to match the foot print of the sash lock for the upper sash to get it to the proper height?

Also, on a different note, thank you Todd at Home Construction Improvement for your suggestion on my Office Progress post regarding using a 12″ blade to fix the visible drywall seams. I ended up using a 10″ blade as that was the largest I had, but it worked wonders compared to the 8″ I was using initially.

After using random.org to generate a random number for the number of entries, it dumped out a 7. I almost chose the wrong winner as Ethan racked up a hidden 5 entries by mentioning the giveaway on One Project Closer. So after triple checking it, the winner was indeed Ethan.

Ethan, please click on Contact on the upper left and send me an email with your mailing address.

Thanks to everyone who entered! And thanks to Woodshop Bits for supplying the giveaway!

I recently received an email from the folks over at Woodshop Bits about the opportunity to offer my readers a small giveaway. While it was tempting to keep it for myself, I decided it would be more fun to give something away.

So what am I giving away? A trip for 2 to Antigua? A night in NYC? A weekend on the beach? Boring. How about a couple router bits? So much better, right? Erm, maybe not, but it is all I have to offer!

Classical 2-Piece Router Bit set

If you think you could use these, post a comment to get entered. If you subscribe to S&C with a feed reader, post another comment telling me so and you’ll get another. While this isn’t the fanciest giveaway in the history of blogging, if you blog about the giveaway, I’ll give you another five entries. Just make sure to let me know.

Thanks to Woodshop Bits for providing the giveaway! Go buy something from them as a way to say thanks. I’m not getting paid or anything to do this, I just thought someone could use the bits more than I could!

Giveaway is over. Thanks for entering!