Rings, Tables, Citrus Seeds.

.

Yesterday we decided to tackle several things that were cluttering our home.

I wanted to try to grow some citrus house plants. They are so pretty, and a friend of mine even gets lemons twice a year from hers, which we all enjoy so much as her lemonade.

I brought out oranges, lemons, limes, and tangerines. Only to discover what I should have known in the first place, if I'd thought about beforehand. Only the lemons had seeds!





I will have to buy key limes, and some oranges and tangerines with seeds. Then I'll have a whole orchard in a planter. For now, I've lemon seeds in soil.





The next project was the gymnastics rings we had purchased for Michael's workouts earlier this year. It is one of those projects that we just didn't have the tools or the right set up to do, so figuring out HOW to go about it has been a challenge that we kept putting off.

But I am good and tired of them laying on the porch so, necessity being the mother of invention, we decided to do SOMEthing, come Hell or high water.

The original plan was to bolt this board 16 feet above ground, in between two perfectly spaced trees in the woods.





Finding two perfectly spaced trees is harder than you might think.





And 16 feet up them is higher than you might at first think, using either an extension ladder, nailing stairs up a trunk, or climbing.





We finally decided we were not going to find just the right set of trees. We also do not quite need 16 feet yet, and likely won't until it was time to redo the board anyhow. So probably 14 or 15 feet will do.

We also altered our original plan from a bolt system to a lashing system. So we'll use this rope, to lash the board across a couple of trees in a different area than we'd been planning on for a while. But we are going to need help to do it. Michael called his friends who think they can come over to help sometime this week.

The rope for lashing.





The eye bolts for attaching chain to the horizontal board.





The chains will have a quick release clip on the bottoms so Michael can take the straps and rings off whenever he needs to get them out of the weather.





The next project was continuing work on the table. We needed to exchange the formica top for the oak top I had glued back together the other day.

I will miss this feature of leaves and extensions, I dearly love those. But I have no leaves to fit in the new oak top. Here is the bottom of the table, with the sliders, and the separated leg frames.





Some of the legs were wobbly, so we tightened them. I later discovered this was unnecessary. The legs must be loose to place the framework on the new top, then re-tightened.





We removed twelve screws from the frame, and each slider had about 6 or 8 screws. I kept those for use with future furniture building.





The wonderful, used drill I bought at the yard sale a few months ago. Cords in the way, yes, but you never need a battery!





And we actually did most of the work with a hand screwdriver, as the power drill was too bulky to fit near enough to the screws.





It's all apart and ready to be screwed onto the oak top.





I didn't want to scratch the surface, so we worked on it on the carpet. Michael is removing the support boards that came with the top.





The part that I glued back on was outside the framework. That is not good. So we turned the frame 45 degrees so the corner would at least be underneath the glued piece. That is still not good enough so, on our next trip to town, we'll pick up some lumber and find a way to add strength and support to the underneath side of the table. Then we should be able to begin refinishing.





It was warm yesterday, but the nights have been cooling off a lot, so our swim was a little chilly. We forewent heading over for another get together for target shooting, and stayed home to rest. Michael has been needing it.

And I got 8 or 9 hours of sleep last night. I think I just heard a very hot place freeze over.

~Faith

.