Office Project: 3D rendering & more!

I know this is going to sound utterly ridiculous—but I have worked on SO many little (and not-so-little) home projects over the past couple of weeks that the prospect of “blogging” about them is overwhelming!  I think that’s why I like furniture—each one is a discrete project with a beginning, middle, and end.  It makes it much easier to write about!

So I’m going to try and break things up a little, rather than remain silent any longer!  Believe it or not, the office project is actually on-going!  When last we visited this project, I was in the room-planning stage (see here).

I shared my “design” here, as follows:

…and Sheri from Sean’s Woodworking (a local furniture builder in Salt Lake City) turned my little sketch into a 3D drawing:

Isn’t that amazing? 

As you can see, we made one minor change, which is trading the drawer bank with the cupboard where the printer will go.  It seemed to make more sense to keep the CPU and the printer next to each other.  I also gave up on the seeded glass (it’s expensive!), but other than that, its pretty true to my “vision.”

While the desk is being built, my job was to set up the front room with Internet access—would you believe it’s the ONLY room in the house without a phone jack??—and to move an outlet from where it would have been covered by the desk.

That was a big deal!

You-Tube and a wonderful friend (Zack’s dad) were invaluable in figuring out those projects!  A You-Tube video helped me learn how to remove--and replace--our vinyl siding so we could daisy-chain a new phone jack off of the adjacent room’s jack.  It was a (fairly) simple matter of running the wires underneath the siding rather than through the walls.

Rather than splicing electrical wires, we were able to remove the old outlet box and just “stretch” the wires to a new box.  They were just long enough to give me the six inches I needed!

I was left with some pretty funky holes from that job, so I turned to You-Tube again to learn how to patch dry-wall.  As you can see by all the screws, I attached short pieces of wood to the existing dry-wall, and then used them to anchor the patches.

Don’t laugh.  It works!

Next step was to tape…

…and mud everything.  I think I used two coats of joint compound.

Then I had to figure out how to give some matching “orange-peel” texture to the patch.  I used an old terry-cloth washrag and “pounced” more joint compound onto the wall.  I can’t say it was perfectly successful—but good enough for me!

But the best part is that the new wall treatment hides my patching job very well. 

Want a peek?

More to come!