Busy before Christmas

Well, we are only 2 days away from our trip "home" to the pacific northwest. I know this is our home now, but for some reason I can't stop calling it home up there. We are very excited to get to see people we miss, that's a given, but why can't Christmas have fallen in the warm months? We are going to freeze our butt's off! I'm still considering wearing shorts up there, til I talked to my lil brother yesterday, and he told me the high was 35! I've gone out to head to work in the mornings and had it be 35, but usually it gets up to high 60's in rather short order (no punn intended) so thats ok, but if that's all the warmer it's going to get, no way am I wearing shorts, I'll freeze my twig and giggle berries off!

I decided to try and get the garage cleaned out of peoples stuff I've been working on, so Friday and Saturday afternoons I got some serious work done in the garage.

This is 2 tables from a lady I did an inspection for way back in October. Sometimes when the Insurance companies send us out to do these inspections, they don't give us permission to do the repairs, they just want to know how much the repairs would cost. Then, they will either call us back and say "go fix their stuff", or you just get your check in the mail for doing the inspection and thats all you hear about it, when that happens, they send the shipper (thats the person whose crap they destroyed) a check based off of my report telling them how much it would be to fix their stuff. Once in a great while, people actually want their furniture fixed and will call us to come back and fix it. This last week was the first time someone actually called me back. Of course it would be one of my shippers that is at least 4 cans short of a six pack. She is a bit of an odd duck, shes alittle older, probably in her 60's, and I think a bit of a hypochondriac . She walks around in her house all bundled up like she is going to go climb the rockies or something. Anyway, she had a couple tables that got trashed, her moving truck had a leak in the roof and so alot of water got in and ruined quite a bit of her stuff, some could be fixed, some could not, or at least not for as cheap as it would have been to just buy new. Anyway, this first desk, its pretty cool. Tiny for a desk, but as best as I can tell, thats what it is. It has 2 drawers on it, one is concealed on the underside, and in fact, the shipper didn't even know the drawer was there, to bad it wasn't full of money, finders keepers! ha!

Anyway, here are the before shots:

2 Drawer desk




And now, the after:



She also had a sofa table. Cool table, not very well taken care of, but the leaking truck did it in. In this first picture, notice that the legs are black? Well, I re-did the table in black, even called her before I did it and told her I was going to redo the entire table in black so that it looked the way it used to look. "ok, whatever you think is best" was her response. Boy, I'll never trust that one again. When I got it to her house, she hated it. Cooky old bird! She then says to me "I didn't realize when you said it would be black, that it would actually be black".....is there a black out there that anyone know's about that once you apply it, it turns green or something? Holy smokes lady!!! Whatever, anyway, before and after again, you know the drill.





In an effort to get the garage even further cleaned out, I pulled a table out of a house this week to be re-finished, and am now waiting for my leather repair lady to call me back and tell me when she is headed up to this gals house so I can meet here and pay her after shes done with the work, and bring the ladies table back at the same time. So, here again, before/after.


So, that's what I did the last couple days. Now it's back to the grind, well, for a day anyway, taking Tuesday off to pack and work on cleaning up the office. Last night before Elliot went to bed, we were bringing in some still unpacked boxes from the garage and moving them into the spare room to be unpacked, its all mostly Crystals books getting unloaded onto a bookshelf. Thats the room we've moved our DVD's too until I can build us a cabinet with doors on it to keep out the boy. He got in there and went to work on the rack. It does my heart good to see him go straight for the video games, I'm going to really enjoy it when he grows up alittle and I can kick his butt at them, until he turns 5 at least, then his eye hand coordination will catch up and I'm screwed.


Well, thats it for now. Gotta hit the shower and then it's off to my next cooky old birds house. Did an inspection for her last week and got authorization to repair already. Hopefully I can get it all done today and never have to go back! I won't get that lucky. Oh well, at least its a pretty drive down to Sahaurita Arizona.