Scattered Thoughts . . .

S ometime last night, I realized that I had not yet captured any photographs of our Christmas tree and ornaments this year.  I figured I should jump on that since I won't have any time between now and Christmas so, if I don't do it now, then Christmas will have passed by the time I can get to it again. We (mostly "I") feel like the tree is missing something and I actually feel the same way every year with every Christmas tree even after adding a little more to it each year but I've had difficulty figuring out what still might be missing.  I'm not a fan of most types of garland and I definitely hate tinsel so I know it is not missing these things.  It is possible it needs more ornaments in the way of more styles of decorative glass ornaments.  Our Christmas tree will most definitely never have items/characters from movies so that is out.  I'm not a fan of 'crafty' or 'country' type stuff either.  Maybe I'll figure out what is missing one

A fter using the new Alexa-enabled dimmer light switch for the train room for a few days, I still wasn't completely happy with the lingering potential for future train car disasters on these shelves.  As I mentioned in previous blog entries, when people would reach into the shelves to access the light switch that was mounted flush on the wall inside these shelves, they would sometimes snag or bump a locomotive and the locomotive would come crashing down to the hardwood floor resulting in significant damage to the locomotive(s).   I added an extra shelf immediately below the switch to help mitigate where the arm could swing as well as adding a voice controlled Alexa-enabled dimmer switch but I wasn't convinced this was enough.  After using this new configuration for a few days, I decided I should extend the switch box outward a bit to play it safe.  This would move the dimmer switch closer to the front of these display shelves so people wouldn't have to reach into the shelve

A fter five or six half days of cutting, sanding and painting shelves, on Saturday morning, I got started right away on installing these new shelves.   I  started installing at the top shelf and worked my way down the wall installing one shelf at a time.  I had to refine the shape of a couple of the shelves with the belt sander so they fit the wonky wall perfectly but, other than that, this job went relatively quickly.  The only casualty is a long drill bit that ended up bent at sharp angles in two places.  (Hmmm...  I'm not sure I ordered a new set of long drill bits yet...)   Now, when you enter this room, there are display shelves on both sides of the door.  These new shelves can be hidden safely behind the open door to the room.  I might even add a latch to keep that door secured to the shelves when I don't want curious little fingers and hands near my fragile trains.  The new shelves can be seen in the photo below.   After completing these shelves, I spent an entire aftern

S ometime back about seven or eight years ago, I installed a new hardwood floor in one of our bedrooms to be used "temporarily" as a multi-purpose room until we get further along in our renovations.  This room is slated to be the "train room" when we eventually finish playing musical chairs with bedrooms and renovations.  It actually is more like playing that numbered tiles game where you slide the numbered tiles to get them in numerical order.  In order to renovate one room, we need to move a few tiles out of place to make room for the appropriate tile.  Our numbers are still quite scrambled here for a variety of reasons though so this room is still a multi-purpose room.   So about seven years ago, I built a walk-in closet, repaired the walls and ceiling, painted the room, installed a hardwood floor and baseboard trim.  After I installed the hardwood floor over the subfloor, I built some display shelves right next to the door to the room.  My plan was to neatly sto

L ukey's train set is being improved little by little.  That was the intention when I first built this HO scale train set for him.  Every now and then, we would add something else to it.  About a week ago, we added railroad grade crossing signs. These buckboard crossing sign posts came as a laser-cut kit so there was a lot of work to be done to make them look like grade crossings! We cut out each part, filed and sanded the edges smooth, glued each piece, and painted them in appropriate colors.   We added these newly built buckboard grade crossing signs to the layout even though the actual road grades now need some adapting and attention.  We now have some buckboard crossing signs without a road in a couple of places.  Plus, even where there is a road, the road grade does not meet the track smoothly.  Finishing up these road grades at the crossing will be a project for another day.  Today's project was to assemble, paint and install the buckboard crossing signs... It may be diff