Refinish Furniture Blog

Our blog is back

After an extended hiatus due to illness and other things our blog is back and running strong.

We're going to try something new. We had to close down our guestbook, because spammers were filling it with inappropriate content. We discontinued our newsletter, because too many email filters thought we were spamming because of the length and too many people forgot to put is in their good guy filters so our newsletter could get through, consequently we got floods of returns. We had to discontinue our answers by email, because spammers got ahold of my email address and the spam email numbers were into the thousands per day making it next to impossible to get the good stuff out of the bad stuff.

Lots of Tips and Tidbits To Pass On

I have lots of good stuff to pass on, so I figured the Blog might be the way to do it. I'll concentrate more on tips and tidbits than on stuff for sale.

Excursion to renew sanity

My blogging duties have kind of taken the back burner for a while, but we had an experience recently I had to tell about.

We needed to get away for a couple of days to renew sanity and decided to go to the Okanogan Country in north central Washington state. That part of the state has some very significant history and a few ghost towns, as well as some of the most beautiful scenery you've ever seen. It was typical early April weather, the sky was overcast and there was still enough snow on the ground to get our 11 year old granddaughter excited, but the temperature was in the high 50's and you can't mask the scenery there with clouds and overcast sky, it's fantastic under any conditions.

Eden Valley Guest Ranch

The most pleasant and enjoyable part of the trip was our stay at Eden Valley Guest Ranch, a working ranch with cabins and many activities. There's too much to describe here, but a trip to their web site will give you all the information and pictures.

Pat and Robin Stice, the owners, are two of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, not only down home friendly, but also very knowledgeable about the area wildlife, flora and history.

If you want relaxation plus, have a visit to their working ranch. The working part is the real thing, but they put the comfort and enjoyment of their guests first.

Okanogan Country

The Okanogan Country is beyond description for scenic beauty. The following links are to some pictures. When you click the link it'll open in a new window. Just close the window and you'll be right back here. The first is a lake scene that invites just looking or dropping in a fishing line. One of two large herds of deer that we saw and a couple of members of the herd .

Molson, Ghost Town

The town of Molson, WA was a real bustling place at one time, but now is mainly home to ghosts of the past. We didn't see any ghosts, but they're probably friendly enough that they just stayed back and watched us instead of making us jump. If you have any ghostly dollars to be taken care of you could deposit them in the Molson Bank a teller just might appear in the tellers cage if you have the right currency. There's lots of antique furniture on display and a comfy antique chair near the stove to warm your bones on a cold day.

There aren't any non-ghostly stores in Molson, so if it's getting close to lunch time be sure to take your own.

Be sure to take all your litter with you, because the ghosts may not be so friendly if you litter their town and I sure wouldn't want to run into a cranky ghost.

We're being plagued by a porno site which has intermittantly hijacked our URL in the search engines. Sometimes the search results will show a porno site, sometimes it will say loading please wait ..., but most of the time will show our site. Our site is safe to click on, but DO NOT CLICK ON THE PORNO SITE OR THE LOADING PLEASE WAIT... If you have Internet Explorer the porno site will download malicious code to your computer.

WE ARE NOT AND I REPEAT WE ARE NOT IN ANY WAY ASSOCIATED WITH THE PORNO SITE. If you see a link in a search engine for the porno site do not click on the porno site. It may take two or three tries, but you should get to our site ok.

Don't forget the bag sale at your local Ace hardware on Saturday Feb 18. There should be some good bargains along with the friendly faces.

Have you priced the cost of resilvering a mirror lately? Pretty expensive. I used to see kits for do it yourself resilvering, but the chemicals are so extremely toxic that they don't seem to be available any more.

Take a look at our page about a trick to 'resilver' a mirror without any chemicals, no ventilation required and very little cost.

Remember Valentines Day is coming up quickly. Take a look at all the Valentines goodies they have at Overstock and the really good prices. After you get your Valentines taken care of browse the remainder of the umpteen categories they have at Overstock and save a bundle over everyone elses prices.

Wow, I haven't been here since last year!

I've been a little busy in other areas.  A couple of months ago I had to have a defibrillator/pacemaker replaced and yesterday I had to have my gallbladder and a sizeable amount of pea size gallstones removed.  

You'd think that they could come up with a more glamourous name than gallbladder.  For some reason the word gallbladder just kind of falls flat.

They told me that I shouldn't make any important decisions or do any important work for a day or two, because the medicine I'm taking sort of makes me foggy, so I thought I would occupy my time with some non-earthshaking prattle.  

What better prattle than my thoughts on the HD/Blu-ray DVD confrontation.

When it comes to high definition TV I think that an awful lot of people could just get glasses or renew their glasses prescription and accomplish a great deal toward a sharper TV image.

I think when the time comes we'll go to HD DVD rather than Blu-ray, because Sanyo is backing HD.  We have a Sanyo VCR and a Sanyo DVD player.  Both have built in TV Guardian foul language filters.  We have a free standing TV Guardian for the satellite receiver.  I haven't heard if Sanyo will have the foul language filter on their HD DVD player, but if they don't have they've still impressed me with doing their part to keep the rank language out of our living room.  

There are so many words in the english language that anything can be described much more clearly with regular words than can be described with profanity.  

If you whack your finger with a hammer and let out a string of naughty words a person in the next room won't have any idea what happened.  You might have whacked your finger, the cat may have jumped into your paint tray then took off all through the house or you may have been standing still for too long and the dog might have mistaken you for a tree or a fire hydrant.

A well mustered, exuberant, "Cripes, I whacked my finger" will let everyone within earshot know what happened and they can come running and give you the sympathy you have coming. Who knows, maybe with enough exuberance a neighbor may come over with a freshly baked plate of cookies to make your finger feel better.  A really good bellow of any societally acceptable word will give as much mental release as bellowing a nasty word, too.

Now is this first class prattle or what?

Backing up a bit, I'm happy with TV as it is now, so even if HD DVD isn't quite as sharp as Blu-ray, neither is real life.  Almost everything I'm looking at now has soft rounded edges and shadowing softens edges even more.  I like the idea of being able to watch all of our ancient DVD's on the HD DVD player too.

A supplier of art, painting, picture framing and a lot more.

Have you ever visited Dick Blick's web site? It's chock full of lots of interesting things from artists supplies to Zig 2-way glue. Heh, heh, that was easy finding a Z item they have the alphabet along the top of each page to help find the items you may need or to browse to discover the items that make you say, "wow, I'd like to try that".

Dick Blick has everything you could imagine for the artist, craft person, picture framer and lots of things for the furniture refinisher, such as pigments to get your stain exactly the right color for your furniture or kitchen cabinet refacing project. They have spray paint in lots of colors and types to make painting projects easier. Go have a visit it's a wonderful site for window shopping.

Refinish Furniture dot Com, How we happen to be

I always said that I didn't have any plans to retire, but as you reach that age in the business we were in furniture seems to get a little heavier, as well as the waistline, chemicals seem to be more potent, even with good ventilation and it seems that it would be a good idea to lay down the stripper and scraper and move on to the next step of the journey.

Sitting twiddling your thumbs can keep you occupied peacefully for at least a good 10 minutes, than retirement seems like it's not the finest idea in the world.

I took a computer programmers course in the mid 1960's, but ended up staying a railroad telegrapher and house remodeler for a few years more. After twiddling my thumbs for a while I got a pallet of old computers and took them apart to see what makes them tick and discovered there was a world of difference between modern day computers and the one I learned programming on, even the older computers I was using to discover the world of cyberdom.

To shorten this part of the story, I discovered the fascination of the Internet, which wasn't available, as we know it, in the 1960's. I figured that might be a good way to keep me occupied and out of mischief and to share the knowledge about furniture refinishing and repair, working with wicker and chair caning, custom picture framing and most anything else I had experienced over the years.

A furniture repair and refinishing site was born on a free web site hosting service. It was one page long and before long had blossomed to four or five pages. It didn't take long for it to become popular, so I decided it was time for it's own domain and RefinishFurniture.com was born and has a home on TRKHosting.com, a very reliable paid host.

RefinishFurniture.com now stands at well over 200 pages of information and I'm adding more frequently. People look at our pages over 1,500,000 times a year and I receive thousands of emails a year requesting additional information. How's that for retirement?

The whole thing has become fairly expensive, but I've added links and ads for products that people need for their projects and I get a tidbit every time someone buys from them and it's enough to keep the information free and flowing. It's a great pleasure to be able to give information that can help others and a lot of the email that I get thanking me for the help that I've given is very heart warming and makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Some times it takes some real sleuthing to help people find what they need. A man a few states away from my location in central Washington state wanted a product he couldn't find, so I went wandering through cyberspace and found the product in a hardware store two blocks from his home. I've found furniture services and products for people in other countries through that still fascinating medium, the Internet. I'd like to help everyone who sends me an email, but there just isn't time to answer them all. I apologize to those of you who don't get an answer to your email question that I know is very crucial to you.

Some of the pages on the site are the originals that I wrote in 1998 and throughout the past years I had decided that changes needed to be made for better navigation and clarity, so as you can see there are a few different styles of pages on the site. I'm in the process of pulling it all together and making everything more standard appearing and to make it easier to find the information that you need, but I'm remodeling while the free information store is still open, so It'll probably take a few months to accomplish.

Some great holiday gift buys

December 3, 2005

Rockler offering

Here's a good example from Rockler Holiday gift guide for the person in your family that works with wood in any way shape or form. The offer expires December 31, 2005.

Computer generated eyestrain

I read an article at WebMD about eyestrain from squinting at a computer screen.

A year or so ago I read about Cathode Ray Monitors having an indiscernable squiggle that can cause eyestrain when you stare at the screen for many hours a day. The squiggle can cause eyestrain and headaches, which I was beginning to have. I went to a 19 inch LCD screen, which sits stable and squiggless and lo and behold, no more eyestrain and headaches. I always increase the text size when I have a lot of reading to do from the monitor too.

Did you know that you can change text size by going to View at the top of the screen in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer and choose text size in Firefox and IE and zoom in Opera?

With Firefox you can either click the choices in view/text size or you can use "control" + or - to increase or decrease the text size.

Netscape works the same as Firefox.

In Opera you can use view/text size and the choices or you can use "shift" + or - without the shift to change the size.

In IE you need to use view/text size to change.

If you have a wheel mouse you can use "control" and your mouse wheel to control the size of text in all four browsers.

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