Kurt Leucht’s Blog

Behold!  From the distant planet Mmmkwqpytcsw … this giant floating “M” was sent to warn us of our impending doom!  It was last seen floating up into the rafters high above the stage in the old historic Cocoa Village Playhouse in Cocoa, Florida.

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Well, actually it’s just a set piece that I built yesterday afternoon for the Cocoa Village Playhouse show Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is opening next weekend (Feb 6th) and showing for at least 4 weekends.  Call 321-636-5050 to get your tickets now!

I did this weekend project a long long time ago, but just recently cleaned out my messy garage, got the Ranger back in and finally took some photos of the project.

I built a pool lift for the toddler swimming pool. This pool is too big to deflate and blow up every other day or even every other week, so we keep it inflated all the time. But we had no place to store it when it was fully inflated. So I built the pool lift.

It has pulleys and a block-and-tackle and you just tie the rope off at the wall anchors. I tried it without the b&t, and it was way too hard to lift. It’s light as a feather with the b&t, though. My wife gets the pool down all the time while I’m at work and puts it back up. When the kids outgrow the toddler pool I can think of all kinds of things that I can store up there.

One word of warning, though: the bottoms of your garage ceiling joists are not designed to hold the weight of heavy objects! Attic joists are designed to carry a heavy roof load only on the topmost spans. The lower spans are only designed for compression or tension.

Kurt

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.

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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

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.

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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

This was another case of seeing a product in a mail-order catalog and saying to myself, “I could make that, and it would cost me way less than 40 bucks!”

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I don’t really have a lot of details to talk about here. I saw this product, probably in an expensive Pottery Barn catalog or something. It was not a big deal to make. I just cut some boards to size, made rabbit joints and finish nailed them together. I put lots of coats of dark stain on it to get it as dark as I wanted it. I wish I would have made it about an inch wider, though. When we put magazines in it, they get rolled up at the bottom corner because the slot width gets skinnier at the bottom.