Handy on the way home

After work last night I  met Cindy at her daughters apartment.  They had a large Ikea wall mounted dvd cabinet to hang on the wall and asked if I could help do it.   They had the cabinet put together, my task was to get it securely mounted on the wall in a level manner.  Before I got started I identified one bracket that was not in the right spot.  It was a rather important bracket that is used to help reenforce the cabinets connection point to the wall.

At first I thought I might have to partially disassemble the cabinet to flip the bracket.  Luckily I came up with another solution that only required drilling a couple small pilot holes and some careful work with a screwdriver. Katie’s boyfriend helped me hoist the cabinet on the wall.  After securing the center mount point we leveled it and then sunk the anchors for either end.  The cabinet felt nice and secure at the end of the installation and looked nice complimenting the matching TV stand underneath.

The second task they had for me at first seemed to be far easier, hanging up one of those large outdoor roll up blinds on their lanai to help block some of the sun that beats in.  Somebody had already drilled holes in the aluminum screen frame, all that needed to be done was thread in hooks and hang the small triangle shaped loops from the blinds onto them.  Well this turned out to be an extremely frustrating task.

There was next to no clearance between the hooks and the ceiling.  When paired with the very small attachment points, and my fingers trying to hold the blinds up with one hand and guide the clasp with the other, it quickly became very frustrating.  I wound up drilling a second set of holes as low as I could on the frame to give me another fraction of an inch of room.  Even with doing that I still struggled like crazy to get the blinds on the hooks.  To get the last hook attached I used a pen cap as a surrogate finger, it was crazy.  All that struggling in the outdoor air had turned me into a sweaty mess.  The back of my shirt was soaked by the end of it.

Katie and Daniel thanked me multiple times for the help, the two projects made their apartment look more “finished”.  Another perk of helping out was getting to play with their dog Tank, a very cute and friendly french bulldog.  By the time we got home it was later obviously so we just threw a Costco pizza in the oven for an easy dinner since Friday night we aren’t doing our normal dinner ritual.

Tonight I am picking up the girls for another few days of dog sitting while Ali is out of town.  I just received my dog whistle in the mail.  Hopefully it makes it easier to get Nicki’s attention.

Yesterday Cindy found our second egg on the ground under the coop, woohoo!