A photo

This photo is sort of a famous one in our family. It s the last photo taken of my mom before she died in a car accident on July 14, 1983. My sister reminded me of the date today. I was 20 and my sister was 18. She and my dad had been married 20 years and met in high school. The photo is of her seeing off Yuko our Japanese foreign exchange student as she traveled back home.

But for me this photo isn't the one I like the best. Actually there isn't just one photo. It's more the different phases in her life in my 20 years with her that I remember.

This is one of my favorite looks. The 70's straight long hair. A young boys memory of his mom before he got too old to hang around her.

The business professional look. The bank manager during my teen years.

I can't say that I remember this one but I love the late sixties outfit with the gloves. This was probably Easter Sunday.

Best Christmas present ever

My wife gave me the best Christmas present ever last year. It is a hand painted sign for my shop. She even cut the wood trim and puttied it and sanded it. The lettering is all free hand and the design is hers.

I have wanted a shop sign for a long time and was considering either a metal plaque that just said Jeff Davis Shop on it or a hanging metal sign that said the same thing. Either one would have been pretty simple. This sign is so cool since it has that old 18th century English pub feel to it.

She finally finished putting the last of several coats of lacquer on it and I hung it on the shop this weekend.

The basement - the bigger picture

The office project is just phase 1 of a 4 phase project to remodel the basement. The office was the cheapest and easiest part to do first. It also helped us get more organized and forced us to clean out the basement of all our junk.

The grand scheme is to put a 1/2 bath in the basement and divide it into an extra living space and storage/laundry area.

Now that the office is done our next project is build the dividing wall between the living space and the storage and laundry area with a 36" pocket door in it. This is a little tricky because we are also going to replace our water heater with a tankless water heater that will hang on the inside of the wall. This has to be done all at the same time. Shut off the water, remove the water heater, build the wall, install an outlet for the tankless, install the tankless. It will take the framing guys and a plumber working at the same time almost. Once this is done we'll build some more storage shelves on the inside of this wall and move all our storage to that side.

The 3rd phase will be to install the 1/2 bath. We want to use a standard toilet which means cutting into the concrete and connecting to the exisiting cast iron sewer stack (our quote for this is pretty expensive so we'll do it next year) . Then we have to frame the bathroom and plumb the water for the toilet and sink. Then do the drywall and finish work. The bathroom will have a standard door.

The 4th phase will be to finish the main living space by framing the outside, doing the electrical including lighting, insulating and then drywall the entire room including the ceiling. Then we paint and trim the room and decide on flooring options.

I used this software to do an initial drawing of the what we wanted to do.