Activesteve.com is Born…

Thought I’d pop in another post on the progress being made on the bar front. Things have been going so slowly that I ended up actually taking a day off work to get some work done on this project! Actually, I had a ‘personal day’ that was going to expire if I didn’t use it by the end of the month so I figured it would give me a chance to get a little extra work done on the bar, not to mention get laundry and my taxes done! Pictured to the left here is my attempt at capturing what the oak pieces look like after two coats of stain and three coats of varnish. Shiny, isn’t it? What you see is the product of almost 2 weeks of effort. Every step takes me an evening, because you have to let the stain / varnish dry thoroughly before either sanding it or re-coating it. Plus, most of these pieces had to have both sides done, doubling the time! The good news is that I have about 2 other ‘groups’ of pieces that I have to work on, and most of these are simpler pieces with a lot of 1-sided finish coming up. After those are all done, it’ll be the true building time. Can’t wait for that stage! I have to question the people who submitted testimonials on the website where I got the design saying it took them 3 weeks to build the bar! Okay, maybe they truly meant ‘build’ and not prepare. In my opinion, there’s no way on God’s green earth someone could possibly do all the cutting, routing, sanding, staining, varnishing, dry fitting, and putting together this whole bar! NO WAY!! Maybe if they worked full time on it. Naw. Granted, I had to learn a lot of things along the way (namely how to properly use a table saw and router), but just these last few steps of finishing take so long…

So Jody and I ended up hosting a smallish Christmas gathering this past weekend. We just wanted a chance to see everyone once more before the holidays and heading off to Cuba. We just made it an afternoon gathering with munchies (way too many munchies….), muzak, and a little gift exchange game. The usual suspects were present, altough there were very few really bad ideas put forth. The only things that came close was courtesy of Darcy. For the gift exchange, Darce was kind enough to re-gift a beer blaster, which, lucky for all of us, was chosen by Kevin. Funny enough, Kevin didn’t actually know what it was before. He looked in the package, and didn’t know what it was, so he avoided it on his turn. Because of this, I figured it wasn’t anything good, and skipped it as well. Had I known…. I’d be the proud owner of a beer blaster instead of a plastic flying saucer! Although in the end, Kev donated it to my bar, commenting that the only time he’d probably use it would be at my place anyway :-).