Rumblin' and Tumblin

So I was supposed to write this follow-up post forever ago. As mentioned in a previous post Michael got me a rock tumbler for my birthday. The process of polishing rocks using a tumbler is much longer than I anticipated. I had figured that it would take hours. In reality it takes weeks. The tumbler is just a cylinder that rolls with rocks, water, and various grades of grit/sand which wear down the stones. Here are two pictures of the initial rocks with coarse grit. 

 A rumbly noisy week later the rocks are already starting to look like the collectible trinkets you see in the gift shops.

 I still need to send it through the medium grit phase. Then of course there's...

I can't help but adopt some southern-ish or country accent -- "This -ere's some fiiine grit."

Glitter Wedges

Michael and I occasionally do charity work with Third Friday Bingo. We host a bingo night at a local church. The catch is that we're all in campy over-the-top clownish drag. This isn't glam or female impersonation. The more ridiculous the better. I was lucky enough to find some wedges at Our Store that are actually my size but were a plain beige color that simply wouldn't do.

   

So we stopped by Modern Display and got big ol' bags of glitter glue and decided to transform these drab shoes into some drag shoes. 

I first took some tape and masked the soles and along the areas where my foot would go. I figured I wouldn't want the shoes to sandpaper my feet whenever I wear them. Then I grabbed a cardboard box, dumped in the shoes and started spraying with glue and dumping glitter.

I actually have a lot of glitter left over for other projects. Below are the mostly finished shoes.

The final step that I still need to do is to spray down the shoes with some sort of gloss finish to seal everything down. I did this project months ago and the glitter is wearing off and I leave a little magical trail wherever I go. 

Kitchen Faucet

So last month we found out our kitchen faucet had a major leak and was causing damage to the wall and floor/ceiling of the laundry room. The frame on which it is mounted has a large lip which got in the way of most of our tools. We had to order an extra large basin wrench to get at the large center nut which took a week to ship and so we basically moved to cooking downstairs.
We ran into more roadblocks along the way. We couldn't repair the old faucet and had to buy a new one which was a downgrade from what we had before but at least was functional enough. We also wound up buying a smaller adjustable Crescent wrench in order to fit in the tight spot and twice we had the wrong faucet supply lines. The first time we had the wrong connector and the second second time one of the tubes was just an inch or two too short.
This was a bit of a milestone for me as a homeowner. Michael had done most of the work replacing the bathroom faucet. This one wound up being mostly me. I finally got everything connected late one night while Michael slept and voila I had my kitchen back. There was a tiny leak in a drain pipe which was easily fixed.