Well here it is

Hi there. I guess I'm part of the bandwagon now, too. I was going to call it Curtis Family New York, but, since Colleen's last name isn't Curtis and technically, we don't have a family, I thought it just wouldn't work. Then I was going to have the address be "bensandjeremysblogssuck.blogspot.com", but then I thought the joke would get old after a while, and no one likes and old joke. "There once was a man from Nantucket...."

Anyways, we got a new car on Wednesday, a 2008 Scion Xd. In case some of you didn't know Toyota bought our Tacoma back from us for $12,997.50. I could just say $13,000 but I'm miffed that we missed out on that $2.50. It took them a month and a half to get our check to us, and in the meantime they gave us a 2008 Toyota Highlander Hybrid to drive. It can seat 8 people, with leather seats and wood trim. It was cool that they gave us something so nice to drive, but it was a pain the butt keeping that clean after working out in the welding shop most days. But, it's all over now. I'll post a picture of it tomorrow. It's too dark right now and it's raining to take a picture of it. The pictures I do have to post are the final pictures from the loft project that we finished last week.



Here I am getting pieces of the floor set in. It took 28 pieces of 1"x3" hollow steel tubing to make the floor. We had to set each piece in and then attach it to the frame with a screw to the little piece of tubing that's under my left arm if you can see it. The only problem was that each piece needed to be 12' long, and we can only fit things up to 11' in the freight elevator at the building, and only 9' into our work truck, so we had to cut each piece. So that made 56 pieces just for the floor, plus we had the stairs, railing, and a couple of other pieces of steel, plus all of our tools and ladders that we had to carry up. We took the freight elevator to the roof and then had to carry everything up two more flights of stais to get to the people's apartment. It was pretty cool though.


This is just a funny picture that Colleen took.


Here I am doing something. I think I was marking the floor where the support beams were so we knew where to put the screws.



Here's me and our boss Jim, making sure we cut the top part of the railing before we attached. Thankfully, we did. The entire structure is steel, and we glued leather to the flat parts of the railing.


Here's the (almost) finished floor and the inside part of the railing. We'll be making a felt rug to go on most of the floor, and the woman wants us to build her a desk that will go along the railing on the left side of the photo.

These are the stais. It's actually more of a ladder, they're pretty steep, but we had to work with the space we were given. The thing on each stair is a piece of suede with rubber glued to it and then the whole thing is glued to each stair. We had to build the stairs a the studio up here, since we wouldn't have had the time or the equipment down in NYc to do it there. We originally made it as one whole unit, but then decided that since it weighed close to 500lbs or more that we should cut it in half and then bolt the two pieces together when we got there. he only thing that sucked was that we had to bolt them together and then lift them up to attach to the frame, but it was still better than carrying the whole thing up.


And here is the finished product.

So I hope you all like my first post. I'll try and remember to take a picture of our car tomorrow, plus hopefully we'll be launching our new work website which Colleen designed and built almost all on her own. And she took almost all of the photos for it, and it turned out really nice, so maybe I'll remember to send you the web address for that so you can look at it and see what she's been up to the last 3 months.