After the hiatus...

Sorry for the long time between posts. Been busy and just taking some time to actually enjoy the house. My dad flew into town to lend his help with the house (and spend some time with his grandkid). We had a small list of things to do on the house, nothing too serious, some cleaning, installing small items, fixing the doorbell... However, the way my dad works, he had most of those done within the first morning he was in town and had added some larger more involved and significant projects to the list.
One of those projects was to replace some rotted boards on the deck. This also involved reinforcing and refurbishing the support joists with extra joists, dry rot epoxy resin, bondo, and new flashing. The existing railing on the deck doesn't even come close to meeting code. My plan is to build a new guardrail at some point, but we don't have the funds to do it at the moment and I haven't quite gotten around to designing it yet. So we put up a temporary rail in the mean time.

I also got around to making the return-air grill that's in the front hallway. Usually these things are pretty ugly, just a bunch of horizontal louvers which are nothing special. I did find a company that makes some really cool grilles custom ordered to whatever dimension you want in a variety of materials. That company is called Architectural Grille. However, a grill that was 12"x24" would have cost around $185 including shipping. That seemed a little steep.
So, I decided to make one myself and went to a metal shop and had a piece of perforated Aluminum cut to size. I then bent over the edge myself to create a little lip and bought some 1/4" aluminum spacers for the screws so it wouldn't crush when screwed tight. you may have noticed that I did a similar screen for the exhaust fan over the kitchen stove.