The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

OR How we changed out the legs on our ottoman

First things first - a shoot out to my favorite Ottoman Turk who will never see this anyway, Tolga! A solid dude about to become a solid doctor dude. Now that important matters are out of the way, let's talk about changing the legs on this here storage ottoman. Behold it in all of its glory! 

Sup, Cat?

Now this thing has served us well. It's been recovered about 18 times. And by "recovered" I mean Sarah has put new fabric over the old fabric 18 times. We really like its size and function. The covering gets updated with whatever our living room happens to look like at the time (which, married to an interior designer, changes just as often as you'd think). The legs have never really been our style, so we'd been wanting to change them out. Sarah found these on some website that shipped them to our local lumber store.

These are the supplies we used.  Total cost: $24.

You may notice there's not a lot of thread on the bolt sticking out of these new legs. That presented a bit of a problem since the existing legs were pretty deep and we had 18 layers of fabric to contend with. That's why we bought these little t-plates at our local, independently owned hardware store! (Always shop local - unless a big national chain is closer and is way cheaper. Really I don't care.) So once we stained these new legs and had a snow day some extra time, it was time to actually put them on.

Legs stained. Ready to put on the t-plate and screw them in.

We had to trim and pull back the existing fabric to get the t-plates as flush as possible.

One t-plate down.

One leg down.

That's pretty much it. It was a really easy. Take a look at the finished project.

Done!

Anyone want these old legs? Free to a good home.

So why did we decide to change these? When we originally started this blog, it was because we were putting an offer on a house and we wanted to blog about the renovations we had planned. Obviously that didn't happen. But guess what? It's happening now. And we've got a lot more potential to work with in this one because it's pretty much all original from 1962. Between actually doing the renovations and raising our baby, who knows how much we'll actually be able to document. Hopefully a decent bit. We've got a lot planned.

Here's a little drawing I did for Sarah. No, it's not in Southern California - but it looks like it could be!

Currently there's ivy growing all over that big brick chimney, which I conveniently left out of the drawing. You see, I want to tear it off as I think it'll look cleaner and more in keeping of the style of the era. Sarah wants to keep it to avoid that big brick mass. You help us decide - your vote counts!*

*it doesn't really count.

We've gotten some complaints recently...

There's been a lot of priss and not a lot of punk. You're right. And thanks for voicing your opinion to our staff. Without further ado...

The weekend after we close on the new house, I'll be heading out for a weekend with the band I play in, Gut Feeling. We are excited to being headed out with vegan straight edge pioneers Earth Crisis! Of the ten guys in the two bands, only our drummer Dan and I aren't vegan. This should lead to some interesting meals! As I told a friend of mine, if you would have told me 15 years ago that A) I'd still be playing hardcore music, B) Earth Crisis would still be playing, and C) your band would be doing a weekend tour with them, I wouldn't have believed you. But here we are, and I'm pretty excited about it. At the tender young age of 33, I'll be the second youngest guy on the tour. Come say hello if you're in any of the above cities!