Bathroom DIY and a cowboy

FIRST OF ALL.... J FIXED MY COMPUTER AGAIN!! I seriously hit the jackpot with this kid. He told me I should start saving for a new one though, he's not sure how much longer and can limp this one along. But yay! Computer! Blog post!

Here we go...

Our bathroom needed a pick me up. I mean, look.

The only thing we had done to dress it up was put in the cowboy we got when we were in Auburn, CA. He still didn't have a proper home, and he's my favorite.

I did some searching around on Pinterest and found this wonderful tutorial. I'm not going to go into all the details here, you can head over to the original post for step-by-step instructions, but here's how it went at our place. 

We had an extra board lying around from when we redid our coffee table (alas, it was done before this here blog, so we have no pictures of it) and some stain I had bought to jazz up some plain Ikea mirrors. The board a 24" piece of 2x7.

I bought a package of wide mouth medium mason jars and decided how many I wanted to fit on the board.

Math is hard, even when done on pretty paper.

We tested the hose clamp on one jar so we could know exactly where they would land vertically.

This is the stage when I had to call in J. I wasn't strong enough to drill through the hose clamps. The tutorial made it sound like a breeze. I probably had the wrong drill bit.

After that was done, I drilled pilot holes in the board.

Listen, I know that picture is terrible. It turns out I do not have drill-while-taking-a-picture skills. It's FINE. I'm good at other things. One the holes where drilled, I screw in the hose clamps.

There is no excuse for how terrible that picture is. My apologies. Once all the clamps were attached, I popped in my jars and tightened them up.

Nice, right?! Here's how they look installed and filled...

While we were on a roll, I had J put up our buddy.

I'm super pleased with the way they came out. It only took us one trip to the store and maybe an hour and a half after the wood was ready (sanding and staining where literally the most labor intensive part of this). It's amazing how much of a difference it makes not having all of that in jars on the counter. It feels so much cleaner! Go forth and DIY.

This is a sad story.

I posted that I was going to blog more, and dammit, I WAS going to blog more. I uploaded a crap ton of pictures, edited a bunch of them, put them into folders to help myself out and was all ready to post away and... my computer died. Cue taps. My beloved Mac failed me. I brought it to the Genius Bar with low expectations. I even asked the guy helping me if he couldn't fix it, would he think it it would be weird if I cried. He laughed but I was SERIOUS. After spending an hour there I was told my hard drive was donezo. I am very proud, I didn't shed a tear. I wrote J sad, dramatic text messages. I kept trying to turn it on even though I knew nothing was going to happen. It was a low point in my computer owning life. J came home from travelling for business, pulled a hard drive out of a different Mac (we have far too many computers in our house) and low and behold, IT WORKED. He was even able to crack into my old, broken one and pulled all of my pictures, documents (including one of my best friend's wedding invitations I am working on) off it and put it on the new one. Just when I thought I couldn't love him anymore.

But.

This is a sad story, remember?

Last night I was working on the wedding invite, got up to eat dinner and came back to a black screen. No big deal, my settings are such that my computer goes to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. Only it wouldn't turn back on. It's doing the exact same thing as before. J is convinced it's something in the computer hardware itself, not the hard drive. I cried quietly in the corner for a bit (not really, but almost) and asked if he could fix it. I got a maybe, which I'm hanging onto for dear life.

So I'm back to where I was last week, with no pictures and no computer. I'm writing this from my work computer, which I'm not a big fan of doing. Hopefully he can get something to limp along until I can save up the billions of dollars I need to get a new one.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go talk to some food about this.