success!

[godream]

My loft is finally together! (With much, much, much help from beat_the_beaver and other friendly hall denizens.) It's a tiiiiny bit taller than EC regulations say it should be, but hopefully I'll get away with it. I forgot how much I love bunk beds -- maybe it's just the association with home, but I really like sleeping, reading, tooling, whatever, while way high up. And I now have lots more floor space too, which is really nice.

Plus, it looks like my stepsister is going to be un-grounded and able to visit after all this weekend, so there will be baking of Pie. Probably at least three, thus the capital letter. In fact, if you're reading this, you enjoy delicious fruit pie, and you're going to be around EC Saturday afternoon, leave me a comment and I'll try to remember to drop you an e-mail when it comes out of the oven -- I'm going home Sunday afternoon sometime and I'd feel better if it were eaten before then so I can put away the dishes, which may require more help than will be available on 4e alone. (Although most of the people who fall in those categories and will be reading this are already on summersalt so you'll get the e-mail whether you want it or not.)

Three more days left at work -- weird how fast perception changes from "this summer just keeps going" to "whoa, what do you mean school starts back up in three weeks?"

Comments

[cassandraia.livejournal.com]

I won't be around on Saturday, but if you're bored on Friday afternoon, I'll be moving in to my temporary room in Senior house, probably with parents in tow, because they "need to see the room" despite that it won't necessarily be my actual room. Saves opening that particular door, I guess, and shuts them up.
Pie is good. What kind?

[godream.livejournal.com]

Depends on what looks good at Haymarket. Almost certainly at least one apple/variation on the theme of apple, plus something involving cherries if they're reasonably priced (it's getting near the end of the season I think so maybe not), probably something peachlike too -- whatever strikes me as yummy or interesting. (I keep wanting to try putting mango in a pie just for the hell of it but this may not be the time that happens.)

[cassandraia.livejournal.com]

Sounds yummy! Too bad I'm not there :(
How did you loft your bed, by the way? I'm looking in to doing that just on the basis of floorspace, and I wondered about the method.

[godream.livejournal.com]

At some point I'll take pictures -- it's pretty much just building a very tall, very stable table. The way I did mine involved a rectangular frame of 2x6s, a little bigger than the mattress, with an extra support running down the middle the long way, with a 8x4 piece of plywood on top, and then 4 4x4s for the legs to hold it up, and two-foot diagonally-edged chunks of 2x4 keeping the legs steady. (Maybe not a very clear explanation? -- it's easier if you see it.) In general you have to build a loft in the room it's going to be in because they're too big to actually move through the doors. I hear the tried-and-true way to do it is to build it upside-down, then turn it over when you're done, but I didn't have quite enough room to be able to do that. So instead we put together some chunks and drilled the holes for the half-inch bolts to hold the major pieces of the frame together outside, moved all the pieces in, then recruited lots of people for five or ten minutes to hold it up and stick the bolts in (six or seven in total, I think, probably could have gotten away with five), straightened the legs, put on the diagonals, and then got two of the tall guys back to get the plywood on top, which there was just barely enough room to do. (One of the six-foot-tall guys who's around this summer is always teasing about being taller than the rest of us anyways so he totally deserves to get recruited for putting stuff up high anyways, heh.)

The other thing you can try is: some of the beds consist of two wooden "ends" and the spring part that supports the mattress. I'm told sometimes people construct lofts just by building new-and-taller-and-more-stable "ends". I don't know much about how that works, though, and I'm not sure if Senior Haus has the same set of furniture EC does.

In terms of getting wood here, you really do need a pickup truck or a van or something like that, particularly for the plywood. (U-haul rents pickups, if necessary.) There are at least three Home Depots in the area, two of which are easily accessible by T and one that's better if you're going by car. There will also be lots of wood kicking around after Rush... but you might want to put off construction until IAP or some other time when you've got lots of time and energy and other people do too to help -- most of the parts of this are best done with two people, and like I said there's a time when more is necessary. :)

[cassandraia.livejournal.com]

I wasn't planning on doing it immediately (well, ok, I was, but not until I get a permanent room, and probably not until at least thanksgiving or christmas (which is IAP, I guess)
Thanks for the info!