Pedal Board for Aaron

My brother-in-law is a musician, and plays the guitar really well. He also has a lot of pedals for his guitar. Without some way of organizing them, they can get a little unruly. A few months back, he sent me a couple pictures of pedal boards and asked how hard they might be to make. Me being me and loving a challenge, barreled straight ahead and volunteered to take a crack at it.

So I did! Here are the pictures he sent me of a design he found online:

It has a bunch of holes, so you can zip-tie the pedals in place, and places for the cords to go too. Once I had the drawing, I printed it out poster style to the right dimensions, and cut it out to show my brother-in-law, as it was pretty big. Wanted to make sure that's what he was looking for. It was. 

I taped it to the plywood I was using, and got to work with the jigsaw and sander.

P.S. I had to make those saw horses before I could get started on the project, because I didn't have any. I also needed them for something else anyway, so this just made me get it done.

I couldn't find anything similar to the metal brackets that were in the original pictures, so I ended up cutting some 2x4's at an angle, and then cutting those in half to give me two supports for the top piece. Also, I didn't get a picture of it, but I only printed the paper template once, so I had to use it twice. Once to cut out the lower deck from the plywood, and a second time to cut out the upper level piece (I had to cut up the paper template to do it).

I routed the edges and sanded them a bit so some of the top layer came off, making a cool-looking feathered edge to it. Then I drilled. I drilled a TON of holes. I did count, but I forgot how many there were. It was around 150-200. Yeah. I drilled all the ones in the picture here by hand, before I was able to borrow a friend's drill press for the rest. That made it a zillion times better.

I finished it off with a coat of natural stain, and a couple coats of polyurethane, the night before we left for our mini-family reunion.

My brother-in-law was pleased. He's already making good use out of it. I showed this to a co-worker who plays as well, and he got really excited, wanting to do something like it for himself.

A more recent version of how he has it set up
(the beauty of the holes is he can move pedals around as needed) 

Window Blinds

In addition to the roller blinds I made (see my previous post!), I also ordered and installed some custom blinds for the window next to our front door, and for the giant window on our landing. They were actually super easy to install. The front door blind provides privacy, and the giant window blind provides protection from the summer heat (that window heats up our upstairs more than anything else), as well as privacy from the neighbors.

No pre-install picture, but you can see how
we didn't have any privacy without this blind

This is pre-blinds on the big window (46" x 92")

And here is the window with the new blinds