A Haunted House

The house is vacant in the West Adams District in Los Angeles.  I have been to this house before for the movie The Soloist.  This time a TV show wants to use it and has asked me to make it look a little haunted.  But I only have one day of prep time, which seems normal these days for TV.  Never enough time, never enough money.  My budget was set at $1200 in materials.  You can buy rolls of grapevine in 25ft and 50ft, or you can get the larger stuff called starter vine.  I thought the 25ft rolls would be the easiest to deal with.  Imagine trying to unwrap and giant wood slinky with small tenickles while standing in a condor lift.

 Luckily the vine did not need to go all the way to the roof line.  The production designer said the camera will not be looking up that high.  Thankful... as it was I had a difficult time even reaching around the column.  Twisting a double line of stovepipe wire in the electric drill motor makes for a stronger tie line.  An eye bolt was previously installed on the back of the column.  My first few wraps of grapevine would then hide the wire.  The larger vine is the first layer, and then starts the process of layering more vine over one another to create the effect.  If there was more time I could have added dead leaves.

Silverberry comes in pots and can be so wild that is covers it's own pot (self masking) but to help with the wild and unkept look I will buy cut brush, like wild Oak or brush Cherry and use it to help hide the pots.  Needing to think outside the box, what can be brought to the project to sell the idea of a haunted house?  The brush cutter can be a big help to your project.  He has old ranch's or farm land where he has access to acquire any type of plant you can think of, even weeds.  Yes I buy weeds.  

More vine was added to the front window by using Chinese Elm branches, which makes for a great flat vine look.  Again it would have looked much better had I had the time to add old dead leaves.

 Once the sign is placed out in the yard, some dirt sprinkled around the posts to hide the plywood base, then a layer of old leaves and wild Oak, and you have the look of a haunted house.

Easter Sunday

All the family is coming over for Easter Sunday and a potluck lunch - dinner will come together.  But we need a place to sit and enjoy.  The trouble is my teak patio table from Target only seemed to last 2 years and is now ready to be repurposed into something else.  I think if I sneeze it will blow over.  In shopping around for a large patio table at Home Depot or the DIY Center everything is super expensive, and will it hold up?  Why not try and build it myself?  I love the big farm house table design, plus I have a big backyard and patio so a big table would look fine.  Looked at a few ideas on You Tube and penciled out a game plan for materials.  Called up my good buddy Jacobus, said he'd be happy to lend a hand, and it was off to Home Depot to fill my shopping list.  4x4's for the legs, 2x6 for the frame, but what for the top?  Redwood?  Pine?

Nothing looked good at Home Depot.  Did I bite off more than I could chew?  Will I not be able to complete this project in time?  Jacobus came over and we went to town with building the frame 10 feet by 4 feet, seemed huge.  But why not, a lot of people can sit at a big table.  Cut the 2x6 to size, the 4x4 to size, predrilled the 4x4 legs to accept the 1/2" carriage bolts, added some wood glue and started building.  By 3pm I thought it best to call Stock Lumber and asked when they closed.  After all it was Good Friday and they might close early.  And wouldn't that suck if they did, because we did not have our material for the top of the table at that point.  And how many times have I started a project thinking I had all the materials only to find half way through I needed to make another store run for something more.  Seems all the time when working on the car.

Stock Lumber sells wood up to 20 feet long, but you need to buy the whole board if you can not leave at least 8 feet of wood to be put back on the shelf.  You could end up paying for a lot of the waste.  Red Mahogany, Red Oak, Clear Redwood, so much to choose, what should I get? what will look best?
And Jacobus... what will this cost?  The wood here is sold by the foot.  How much feet do we need ?  If the table is 10 feet long and 4 feet wide, we want some wood to over hang the frame and then we can cut the ends to the size we want to end with.  OK... how wide is each board?  And to think I was to busy smoking pot in high school, ditching math class and saying to my buddies; who needs this class anyways. The Redwood was the prettiest, with it's long streaks of red and yellow coloring.  So Clear Redwood it is.

I'd love to say we finished it before dark, but that would be a lie.  Thank God for flood lights and good friends, Jacobus was great staying until we finished.  At 7pm the new table went into the backyard ready for Easter Sunday.

Lemonade Anyone

Sign painting is an art all it's own.  And why not, we have all tried the stencils from Office Depot and they never seem to turn out what we had envisioned.   Kay Kropp  is a scenic painter and artist for the studios.  She seemed delighted to help.  And so the day was set.  We all agreed to go with a loose design, no hard lines, just the look of homemade and fun.  First a chalk out line was drawn to create a plan.  If a change is made, a little spritz of water erases the chalk to start over.  Kay then pulled out her arsenal of artist brushes; a 5 gallon paint bucket filled to the outer edge looking more like some abstract flower blossom and a canvass wrap.  Some square and wide, some small with only the tiniest tip, some round like a finger tip.  They all had a purpose, they all work and so a brush was picked.  First she laid down the creamy yellow lettering, and then followed up with a bright yellow outline.  Washed the chalk away with a wet rag and the lemonade stand came to life.

Rustic Lemonade Stand

Rustic Wedding

It all started when my niece asked me to build a lemonade stand for her wedding.  The big day was planned for May 2014 at the historical Strathern Park in Simi Valley.  The park is cheaper than most wedding venues but you need to bring all your own stuff.  First I started a pinterest page to get the ideas flowing and see just what lemonade stand the bride wants.  Then asked her to comment on my pics.  A trip to Home Depot to load up on lumber, paint and supplies, and so it began.

  I cut the wood at uneven lengths along the front to give the stand a homemade look, also some boards are smooth while others are rough sawn.  This will help with the aging process.  On the back side shelves are installed so the stand can act as a bar or tattoo stand at a party or even a car show.

Burnt Umber is normally a tint used in adding color to a base paint in making a custom color.  I asked for it at my local paint store and the salesmen seem lost.  Nowadays machines tint all the colors, but back in the day a painter would have a color rack of tints and he could make the exact color for the customer on site.  Luckily there was a paint code for burnt umber.  I poured 1/3 into a solo cup and then added 2/3 water, mixed throughly. It then looks more like a watered down stain. Then comes the garden hose with an adjustable nozzle, turned to a fine spray and mist down all the wood.  The water acts like a vehicle for the paint.  If you want more runs, mist on more water. The different wood types accept the paint differently.  Using a wet rag ,follow up with dabbing and sometimes wiping off some of the excess.  This starts the old aging effect, you can even add some burnt umber to a small spritz bottle.  You could stop here but I love some different colored boards, as if the young builder had grabbed his building lumber from anything he could find.

 Blocking… grab a smooth piece of scrap wood and brush on your paint to the face of the wood / block.  Slide the block in one direction over the surface of one or more boards.  The paint on your block will stick to only the high points on the wood surface.  You might want to try it out on a piece of scrap wood first.  I believe less is better, and you can see the results…  One rustic lemonade stand ready for the wedding.

creating a grave site

This is how it starts.  The idea is to create a small grave site where the person will be seen digging in the dirt.  It will be a close up shot so the buildings and trucks will not be seen.  On this day it just so happened to be over 100 degrees, so working in the direct sun on a black top parking lot was brutal.  Lots of water, a good shade hat, and some creativity in hand.  The plants are over grown in the pots or what we call self masking, and I will need to hide the pots.  Hopefully I can bury them in the dirt.



OK so I was able to use the dirt to help hid the pots.  And build up the dirt to create a digging area.  Some of the plants are laid on their sides to build up the fullness.  Add some carpet grass weeds, and leaves tossed about and it all starts to come together.  The "shot" will be at night and the camera will start low and slowly rise above so the white trailer should not be seen. 

It's been a while

It's been a while since I posted anything to my blog.  Maybe I'm not a blogger, maybe Facebook has been my thing.  Who knows... More importantly what can I do to get off the computer and into the yard today.  The pipe on the backyard sprinkler needs to be dug up and repaired.  The vegetable garden needs to be weeded out, The Tipu tree needs some thinning and the list goes on.  Maybe I can also get some time to get back to my welder and make more steel garden baskets.

Garden Cart

People throw away the darndest things. I'd had seen this cart next to the trash can at work for several weeks. It can't be trash, someone must have left it there and not returned yet. Maybe it belongs to set dressing, or the property department, I thought. But I asked everyone. Even the stage manager did not know where it came from. My last day of work I asked one more time and wouldn't you know it. It was up for grabs. But how was I going to get it up and into the back of my pickup truck. 4 men will be needed to lift this thing and everyone has gone home. One drivers was out back and offered his help. We can roll it up onto the lift gate of his 5 ton truck and then roll it right into my truck. And so we did. A couple of tie downs to secure it and all was done. But what will I do with it ?

I seem to be in this situation a lot. I have brought home more things with the idea that it will make for a really cool thing only to get pissed off later and take it out front to the curb. It never seems to sit for very long at the curb. I live on a some what busy street and neighbors, strangers, by passers have all grabbed something from my curb spot. Maybe some day I will be at someones house and see something that I have thrown out.

Some large Terra Cotta planter pots would look great on this. And the ability to roll it around your patio with ease makes it all the more better. It reminds me of something you might see on the loading dock of an old fruit packing plant, or around the yard of and old railroad stop. There is a cool type of connector on either end giving one the ability to connect several carts together. But then what do you pull it with. A friend stops by and says it may have lived it's life on some studio lot transferring tools from stage to stage. Being pulled by some small tractor thing.

For now it will sit on the patio until I get tired of looking at it, or moving it around, or pissed off at all the junk I have once again brought home and send it to the curb.