Recovery

Here's a project I did the other day. As you can see in the first shot, kitty cat's claw post is ALL tore up!!! He's vicious with those claws!!!

I've seen the claw posts wrapped with rope, and that seemed like a pretty good way to go. Figured all I'd have to do is get some nice, fibrous rope, unbolt the post from the base, pry the top cap off, secure the rope under the top cap, wrap to the base, and bolt it back on with the rope under the post!!! Easy, huh???

Started in, and the first complication arose: The wood block for the top splintered into pieces, first one edge as it was being knocked loose, then in the middle as I attempted to hammer the top back into place with the rope under it, to where it was unusable. I pulled out some long finishing nails instead, hammered them partway in, then bent them over to secure the rope end. Not pretty, but functional. Wrapped away, and ended with another. While trying to secure the end under the post by bolting it down, and the hole stripped out!!! Used half a dozen 3" drywall screws and fixed that up... kind of. it's leaning back about 5°!!!

And the final results??? The wrap started out real good, but came up short on the bottom end. Apparently you need more than 50' of rope to pull this off. Now remains to be seen how durable it is!!!

Another project I undertook recently was re-purposing the 80's era stereo cabinet in our front room. One of the things I got for Christmas last year was a 46" LED TV for our front room. There's only one place it fits well in our front room, and that's diagonal in the corner. I bought a mount kit and had the idea of running a 2x4 across the corner and hanging it from that, but haven't done that. I just stuck it on top of the wood and glass stereo cabinet. The tuner/amplifier in the stereo hasn't worked in a couple years (and I link to a post where it ended up working afterwards!!! I'm thinking it was a year or several months later that it really quit, so maybe only a year or so). The tape player gave up the ghost years ago. I think the turntable was fine, but I never really used that anyway. My vintage 18-disc player was the only thing going that I might have used, but without an amp, it wasn't seeing any action either. So, finally, I took all that out, and set up the DVD/VHS player on the top where the turntable goes, used the next shelf for DVDs, put the old VHS 2 drawer cabinet on the bottom, with a row of VHS tapes on top of it, and a digital clock off to the side. Not shown is the sound bar on the floor to the front. New TV's have really bad audio!!! We've got a 17" flat screen TV in the bedroom, and it's got better sound than the new TV!!! In retrospect, I could have kept my 18 disc player onboard and ran it through the sound bar, but these days most our music gets played on pocket sized devices!!! Anyway, I'm more pleased with the way this came out than the claw post!!!