Muscle, Muscle Man

Hi all! I hope everyone is having a wonderful memorial day weekend. After just coming back from Idaho, we are taking it easy this weekend. I actually have spent most of the day being fairly lethargic, so this post is actually about a project that J worked on, which I supervised. The deal was that I would help him (aka tell him what to do) and he would let me blog about it.

The problem: J bought a pull up bar (see 2 pics down). The thing operates based on the structure of a 36" wide doorway & drywall. The bar that wraps around the frame is supposed to press on the drywall for support. First of all, I told J that the pull up bar needed to go down in the basement. I expect that I don't need to give much explanation as to why. :) This door (below) was the only door in the basement that J found appropriate. The problem is that the frame does not include drywall on the side that expects it for support. In practice, this means that the support bar bends when you try to use it. But... this problem is fixable.

We actually bought our materials for this project weeks ago & it has been hanging out in our basement.

The first step was to remove the existing trim. We tried for the entire top piece, but it was nailed & painted in fairly strongly, so J resorted to sawing off a piece of it.

He then screwed in the blocks of 2 x 4's into the door frame. He needed a double stack to take care of the height.

Once he has screwed the 2 x 4's down into the frame, he used some nails at diagonals to secure them to the studs.

He then nailed & screwed a 1 x 3 piece into the frame (wow, that sounded dirty) as the "trim" supporting piece.

Ta-da!

This post makes it sound fairly straightforward, but there was some consternation during parts of the project. Mostly, the consternation involved hand screwing & stripped screws (good grief.. the innuendoes). But, he/we got it done in the end! (I really only offered advice and some cheerleading along the way).

I wanted this picture to be J using it, but he refused, so here I am... hanging. There is no way I can begin to do a pull-up. Nevertheless, the new support works very well and is way sturdier than the drywall/trim configuration that the pull-up bar is engineered for. Plus, all the extra pieces are on the unfinished side of the wall, so no real change to the way the basement looks overall.

Oh, and I totally forgot to mention this in my Idaho post, but we found a really cool rock while we were hiking. I have no idea how this happened (geologists, feel free to step in here), but a strip of quartz somehow got sandwiched between 2 other types of rock. Pretty cool, huh? (Actually, probably not pretty cool, it's pretty nerdy, whatever).

Have a great one!