creative little daisy

Really??

How did I not know this? I was nominated for an Apartment Therapy Homie Award and I didn't even know it. I was doing a little more blog tweaking this morning and noticed a referral to my blog from the Everything Typepad blog. That peaked my interest so I clicked over to see that I was one of the Typepad blogs nominated under the DIY category. I'm really bummed. Not that I would have won, but I could have let my readers know and shamelessly begged asked you to vote, pretty please with a cherry on top.

Oh well, a day late and a dollar short, I guess. Thank you to the three people who voted for me anyway. Had I known I could have managed at least three more votes from Alyssa, Kelli and Mitch. I'm sure my sister would have voted for me too. Unless you have to have a blog to vote. I don't even know the rules.

I'm happy to have been nominated, and so bummed that I didn't know. I definitely would have campaigned. Maybe next year.

I've been a little under the weather for a few days and have felt like doing little more than sitting on the couch. I've taken advantage of the down time by giving some attention to my neglected blog, uploading photos to my forgotten flickr account and also taken a few trips down memory lane by reading some old posts. It really made me appreciate having this little journal and reminded me how important it is to just blog. Stop worrying about who is reading and how it will be accepted. Some of the posts that meant the most to me, may not have been the most "popular" in terms of hits or referrals, but I'm so glad to have captured those moments.

On one of those personal notes, I have a proud mama moment I can't let get by without mentioning.

I think you all know that my son Casey is a Marine. His job involves maintenance of this big bird, a V-22 Osprey. He and his dad teamed up and did some painting.

 

The quality of some of these photos isn't the best. Casey took them with his phone and he said he got overspray on the lens.

I'm super proud of both my talented guys and so glad they had this opportunity to work on such an amazing project together.

In case you're interested

I'll tell you a little more about the range hood cover. It was constructed entirely from scraps and left-overs and though Holly showed it can be done by a girl, this girl left the sawing to the man of the house.  First I showed him Holly's wonderful instructions, and also showed him another cover  constructed using those same instructions to give him proof it could be done. And done quite beautifully. He studied the situation and scratched his head for a few minutes then got down to work.

He removed the hood. This required turning off the power at the breaker, turning a few screws and unplugging a couple of wires.

This left a big ugly  hole above my stove.

Notice the lovely wallpaper that was back there and where I stopped painting the cabinets.  He didn't make that big hole in the sheet rock. I guess the guys who put the range hood in when the house was built did that.

He took the hood out to his shop and cut off the portion that sticks out using this really cool air powered cutting tool. We didn't have any sparks like Rebecca, Nathaniel and their friend Dwayne  but we did get a neat curly piece of metal. This tool cut through that metal like butter. 

 

Then he ground down the sharp edges.

He put the stubby hood back in place.

 

Then using L brackets he screwed a wooden cornice to the face of the hood.

I'm very sorry I didn't get a picture of  the next couple of steps, but this is the basic frame work. To this he added a board that is the face of the cover and attached the trim pieces to that board. The top trim is some chair rail that was removed during another project. The bottom got some left-over rope trim from like was used on the bottom of the cabinets. The beadboard is wallpaper scraps I had left from when I did the bar.

The light and fan are still functioning and easily accessible, just hidden from view.