Category Archives: Health, Home, Property, Safety

Run (or walk) for a good cause!

December 18, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

Attention anyone who lives in East-Central Florida! The Gilchrist Education Foundation (GEF) will be hosting the 2nd annual Light the Way 5K. If you are not familiar with GEF, it is a non-profit foundation that raises money to provide scholarships to children who desire to attend Christian schools in North Brevard County.

The date for the race is January 19, 2008. This event is a run/walk event and even though it is a part of the Titusville race series, GEF considers it a family event and goes out of their way to make it a great time for both adults and little ones. So if you can’t run, come out and walk with your family. Mark your calendars and invite your friends and family to join you. I wrote about our family’s great experience at the 1st annual Light the Way 5K earlier this year on leucht.com and also included a couple photos from the event:

If you are the one saying, “I can’t run or walk 5K” then there are other ways that you can help. The race committee is in need of 20-25 volunteers for the day of the race. They need help with parking, water stations, registration, etc. So if you are not interested in running/walking, but would be available to help on the day of the race, please contact myself or Samantha using the “email us” form on this website!

There is an additional way that runners and walkers can help raise more funds this year, by getting friends, co-workers and family members to sponsor you in the race. Although it is not required, it is a simple way to raise an extra $10, $15, $25 or let’s think big $100 for the foundation. The sponsor form can be downloaded from the GEF website.

All of the race and registration information can be found on the web at www.gilchristfoundation.org So don’t delay… sign up today!!!

Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Health, Home, Property, Safety

Build Your Own Yard Shed

October 28, 2007 kleucht 1 Comment

According to recent website statistics, my Yard Shed Plans web page (http://www.leucht.com/kurt/shed/) is pretty much the most popular web page on my whole website. This is very cool to me because this is exactly the sort of content that I had most hoped to be able to provide with this website back in the late 90’s when I first created it. Sadly, that Yard Shed Plans page never even got completely finished. Mostly because the 3D models and images were difficult and time consuming to create. Also because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, which makes them even more time consuming to make.

. .

So busy-ness has kept me from finishing that particular page and also it has kept me from providing more content like this on my site. But the invention of the blog in the past few years (and my subsequent use of it here) has allowed me to quickly and easily create simple web pages, or blog posts, about even the most simple and small projects. So far the traffic on my blog is no where near the amount of traffic on the Yard Shed Plans page, though. Maybe most people that find my Yard Shed Plans page are searching specifically for “plans”. And it’s hard work and time consuming to put together actual “plans” for a project. So maybe I’ll have to go back and add “plans” to all my other projects that are on this site. In my spare time, of course. 🙂
Kurt

Health, Home, Property, Safety

My first 5K run: KSC InterCenter Run

September 25, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

This evening I ran my first 5K race. I’m not counting the one in January where Sam and I walked and pushed both boys in their umbrella strollers. This time I actually ran. 🙂 I guess I performed okay for my first race. I wasn’t studying the clock when I finished … guess I was just happy to finish … but a couple coworkers who were paying more attention than I was told me that I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 minutes.

Below is a poor quality photo from my cell phone. It was pretty hot and sunny and also very humid during the race, which started at 5PM. There was a pretty good turnout of KSC employees … probably around 400 people. They had choices of a 2 mile, a 5K, or a 10K. It was a well organized race and I definitely plan to do it again next year.

. Kurt after his first 5K race

September 27th update: The official race results are in and I came in 115th out of 149 runners in the 5K race with an official time of 33:00.17. I’m happy being in the front of the last quarter of the participants for my first race. My goal for my next race will be to be smack in the middle of the whole crowd.

There were 330 total participants between all the different race choices: 71 in the 2 mile walk, 58 in the 2 mile run, 149 in the 5K run, 48 in the 10K run, and 4 rollerblade entries.

Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Health, Home, Property, Safety

Toybox and shelf/desk for kids

March 4, 2007 kleucht 11 Comments

After not finding any kid furniture that we were completely happy with, I decided to design and create my own large rolling toybox and plastic-bin holding shelf that can turn into a desk as the kids grow up. If I can find some time, I might add some detailed plans for this project. But for now I’ll just post a couple of photos of the finished products.

Leave a comment below or send me an email from the link at the very bottom of the website if you are interested in seeing some plans.

Kurt

Health, Home, Property, Safety

Replacement of window sill on block exterior wall

February 17, 2007 kleucht 3 Comments

A few years ago on my 15 year old concrete block house, one of my exterior window sills started cracking severely and eventually started falling off in large chunks. We had new windows installed, and that work basically did the old broken window sill in for good. I decided to try to form a new concrete window sill on my own. You can see in the photo below that the missing window sill and the broken pieces on the ground after I had ripped off all the loose pieces.

In the photo below, you can clearly see the rebar showing throughout the length of the fractured concrete surface. I guess that rebar didn’t help the sill stay in one piece. It actually helped break it apart once the crack had formed in the area of the rebar.

I got the surface really clean and free of dust and concrete pieces. Then I painted on concrete adhesive that I bought at my local home improvement store. I’ve never used this stuff before, so I don’t know how well it works. As you can see from the photo below, I then mounted some wood strips that were about a half an inch thick to the wall with tapcon screws. These wood strips would become the bottom and side surfaces for my concrete sill mold.

Then I screwed a 1×6 plank that I had laying around to the wood strips. I mounted the top of the plank at the same height that I wanted the top of the new window sill to end up being. I then mixed up some concrete and poured it into the mold. I made sure that the top surface of the new sill slanted down and away from the house. Otherwise, water would pool instead of running off. The photo below shows the mold filled with concrete and curing with plastic around it.

The new sill is perfect. Eventually I got the house painted and the photo below shows the final painted product.

Kurt