Bed Frame and Taxes: All Done!

Refinish Bed Frame: check
I stained the bed frame yesterday. It turned out a bit redder than I had planned, but I think it'll work out still. It'll be a nice pop of color in the room. Today I sealed it, and other than finding the hardware (I cannot remember where it got put), the bed is ready to go.

Things I learned from refinishing this bed (and will be keeping in mind when I refinish furniture after we move):

1. Trying to apply stain on top of a clear coat does not end in good results. That's why we had to strip, sand, stain, and seal the bed. I'm convinced that we got such a good deal on the frame because the people selling it messed it up and didn't want to fix it. Understandable- it did turn out to be more work than I thought it would be.
2. Chemical stripper still finds its way through stripping gloves, and it makes your hands all weird and tingly. Neither Mr. M nor I enjoyed that. Sanding was much easier to handle.
3. My dad's multi tool from Harbor Freight is great for getting into the nooks and crannies of furniture. They're going on sale over the Valentine's/President's Day weekend, I'll be buying one and I'll post a pic then.
4. I have got to find gloves that fit. The one size fits all stripping gloves definitely do not fit my hands. An extra inch of thick rubber glove hanging off each fingertip is frustrating, annoying, and fatiguing.

Do Taxes: check
I stayed up last night working on our taxes. I waited till this morning to actually file them so I could review them one more time. I needed to get them done asap- our refund will be paying for our move, the deposit and first month's rent on a house, and our train ride out there. It's supposed to take about 10 days to get deposited in our account, so once that happens, we're moving forward with things.

To do tomorrow:
If the weather's yucky, I need to sew the chair cover still.
If the weather's nice (it has been for the last week or so), I need to start organizing the storage container. This will involve pulling a lot of stuff out of the container and putting it back in specific piles. We'll be using ABF's ReloCubes to move, and I already have an idea of how I'm going to divide everything up, but I'd like to get a better idea of just how much space everything's going to take. The cubes combined are a bit smaller than the storage container, but they should also have less wasted space (since you can fill each completely), so everything should fit. I hope.

A random goal for after we move:
Improve my photography- we don't have good natural light in this house, so my picts tend to turn out on the dark or over flashed side. Hopefully we'll move into a place with lots of natural light throughout the day. When we're rich and famous (as my sister says) I'd like an SLR camera. It'll take some work to figure out how to use it effectively (I attempted to learn as a teenager and failed miserably), but I'm willing to do it if the results are better than what I'm getting now. Digital should make a huge difference: instant results= instant feedback on technique.

The lighting in this photo was actually pretty good for once, but my camera still didn't like having the flash off, so it turned out a bit blurry. LMS was laying on my worktop, watching Caillou. I couldn't resist catching this pose!