Man, You Say Red a Lot...

Aside from the day-to-day Mr. Fix-It stuff I have been doing since we moved into the new place the boy and I cranked out a few projects together.

The first is a Red Toolbox Classic Toolbox Woodworking Kit from Lowe's.  We actually put this together at the old place but for one reason or another it never got painted properly.  I didn't have any red paint so I figured I would just bop on down to the local True Value and get me a pint.  

No dice - no cans of pre-made red of any shade that was not spray paint.

I was annoyed but I wasn’t really surprised. Based on my experience there attempting to rent the Emperor's New Garden Tiller and failing to buy other “of course they will have it” type things I am now wondering if this ginormous place isn’t really a Mafia front or just a movie set or something.  Hmm... Next time I’m in there I’ll check and see if they have Red Apple Cigarettes...

I ended up going to Lowe’s and getting a sample size container of a dark, traditional red.  (Valspar Posh Red 1011-4, if you must know).  The result is there on the left.  It works just fine.

The second project we worked on was refurbishing an old cedar birdhouse.  This birdhouse was at the old place when we moved there long ago.  I rescued it from the tree it was attached to after that tree was felled by Hurricane Isabel.  The “before” pic is there on the left. 

The boy and I were going to hang it up as is but he asked where the food would go.  Good question.  Let’s make it into a bird feeder, instead.

I cut the parts for the dish and roof extension out of some spare cedar from my recent mailbox refurbishment project and cut the a perch from a poplar dowel I had for leftover from some other forgotten thing I probably half-did long ago.  I used a hole-saw on the door to make a nice neat circle and to enlarge the entryway a little.  The boy enjoyed using the drill, cordless screwdriver, and hammer to put the parts together.  

It was painted red and white and we hung it together where we could see it from his bedroom window.  The squirrels and the cardinals love it.  

The last project: finally painting some bookends Grandpa bought a long time ago.  Like the toolbox project it was started at the old place but the paints that came with it were mostly bad-in-the-box - only the metallic blue was usable.  Last week it got bumped up to the top of the queue and we painted it and bedazzled the living buh-jeebus out of it with glitter from his craft box.    It sits on his desk now and holds a few books of his choosing.  He is very proud of it.

Three fun projects, each with their own “lessons learned” - some for him and some for me.  First, I learned to stop counting on the local True Value to “stock things” and “provide services” and just make peace with the fact I will most likely be driving 15 miles to Lowe’s whenever I need something. The second, the boy’s lesson, is that not all red birds are robins, and not even all robins are red. The third we learned together - although mixing yellow and red poster paint does make a different color, doing so in a one-to-one ratio makes a pretty crummy orange.