Basement shopping part 1 & 2

I am making myself a standing desk, to be paired with a treadmill (one specialized for walking rather than running). I've been trying to make a desk top without having to buy anything. Today I rummaged around in our basement and found a pair of doors from our 1910 carriage house that I had rescued before we gutted the gardener's quarters (which was completely rotten due to an enormous hole in the roof that the previous owners left unrepaired).

Put together, they would have made a beautiful large desk top. They're made of quartersawn oak and are in really good condition once I cleaned off the dirt and mold. But I realized: they would make a HUGE desk and it was too big.

So with this gorgeous pair of cupboard doors cleaned and set aside, I went back into the basement. We have a few areas that have been partitioned off with old tongue & groove pine boards, prboably done when the house was built in 1900. Some of these areas had "doors" (4 boards fastened together top and bottom with a cross-board). Since one of those doors was hanging off its hinges anyway, I took it off and repurposed it.

I ccut off the top and bottom cross-boards, cleaned everything thoroughly, pulled the boards apart, glued the tongues and grooves, and put them back together. They're drying under tension and under weight to keep them held together snug and to make them dry flat. I'll install new cross-boards tomorrow once I cut the final desktop to size.

It's a bit of work but I really didn't want to buy anything. I'll sand it down and finish it with Osmo Oil. Voila! A desk top! It's more rustic than I was hoping for but people pay a lot of money for this kind of look and mine is 100% authentic rather than the faux-rustic-barnwood look that is all the rage.

We went swimming at the university pool this morning. Afternoon? Some talking, some working, a movie for the kids. During Zari's soccer practice, Eric and I bought school supplies for the kids at our Buy More Big Box store, aka Walmart.

We came home and found our friends cooking dinner! Wow! What a treat. We had a nice post-dinner walk to campus and back, all while a big thunderstorm was rumbling nearby and threatening to douse us. We were sad that the rain missed us!