Thursday, November 5, 2015

Four houses!!!!

So, this happened all of a sudden.

We wanted to buy this house back in February when it first went on the market, but someone beat us to it. Something fell through with their sale, and we swooped in like ninjas and just a few weeks after submitting paperwork, it was ours! That house to the right is also ours (that was the first rental).

This house is much less of a project (thank goodness). We had people living here barely a week after closing. The first project was attaching a baby gate to the top of the stairs. Easy, right? Drill a pair of holes on the left, pair of holes on the right, bam.

Just kidding!
That's not going to work. We can't exactly leave a four inch gap for the baby to fall through. I determined that I needed to build a column on the left so we could put the gate at the actual top of the stairs.

 Preferably a column that would look something like this post at the other side of the stairs. Because I'm trying to not be a slumlord.
Here's the solution I came up with. It had to be solid (we don't want the gate crashing down with a toddler). I used a pair of 2X4s to anchor the column.

And then I built a box to go over it, which I stained to match the woodwork.

And then, the baby gate:
And of course, what should have been a 30-minute project under normal circumstances turned into a full morning of work, plus 3 trips to Home Depot.

And I definitely needed a new saw to be able to do it. So I got this one. It's got a laser!


4 comments:

  1. History in the making...move over Donald Trump, you've got competition!

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    1. No competition there-- I've got way better hair!

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  2. b-san i bet you could be the model for that famous wwii era drawing of the lady flexing her arm and it says "We CAN do it"!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!

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    1. Ha! First I need to do some more heavy lifting... I usually get Perry to do that for me!

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