weekend warriors

for our housewarming gift, my lovely father made us a box/bench for our new spa. i had originally requested a step so i could get in and out of the spa easily and safely, as i have short legs and brian did not get a step when he got the spa. dad said he'd do one better and make us a bench with storage underneath. he delivered it last week and all we had to do was stain and varnish it (he couldn't match the color without us, so we did it). my mom made the weatherproof cushion on top.


i think it is beautiful and it is currently storing some lawn seed and the spa chemicals and there is a ton of space for us to fill up still. brian was disappointed that the color we chose does not match the spa perfectly (too dark) but i just wanted it to blend and i think it looks great.

did you know home depot custom-blends wood stain just like they do paint? maybe you did, but i didn't. finding the stain was a challenge in and of itself. i wanted individual stain samples (little ketchup-size packets) that i had gotten before, so we could test a couple different colors to find the right one. i couldn't find them here in our town and i didn't feel like searching too hard so i got the spa access panel and took it with me to ace hardware to match the stain. then it turned out i got the wrong kind and ace did not carry the correct one, so i had to go back to home depot. personally i hate the paint counter at our home depot, because they only have one computer to put in your order and there is this old guy that always takes his sweet time no matter how long the line is.

when we went to home depot the first time we also got stuff to put up a storage shelf in the garage. i had been talking about doing this for a few weeks now and brian seemed to be all on board - and then at the last minute (literally, as we were walking out the door to go to home depot) he decided he didn't want a shelf in the garage. he finally relented and up the shelf went.


i would like it to be longer, like 24' (it is 16' right now), but we can extend it later. for now it gets a bunch of stuff up off the floor that we don't use on any kind of regular basis (but unfortunately do use often enough to warrant keeping). as a treat for brian, i cleaned up the garage and the ping pong table so he can play ping pong this weekend when mil comes over. maybe that way he will forgive me for that "awful" shelf.