For Christmas I treated myself to a mitre saw to make creating and making easier and quicker, we finally got it out of the box last weekend! Isn't it just typical that you really need to have something and then once you get it you can't find the time to actually use it! Well, last weekend Ben used this for the first time and gave me a quick 2 minute tutorial on how to use it, today I go solo for the first time, what could possibly go wrong?? The sun was supposed to be making an appearance today but as is typical of the British weather it hasn't. Instead I got wrapped up and took the plunge.

I managed to get most of the wood I had cut to size before I had a slight mishap and broke the safety guard, I got a little bit over confident cutting the dice pieces which were too big to cut though without turning. I'm thankful that the safety guard got mangled and I came off without a scratch, I know it could have been worse! Lesson learned, respect the power tools, take things slowly and pay attention. I managed to get the safety guard off but I'll leave it to Ben to see if everything is working OK before I try and use it again.

Now to get sanding and get the sample colours onto these pieces, I'm planning on 3 sets of these tumble towers (Jenga) to hire through Shropshire Garden Party, a bright and colourful set, a pale coloured set and then a set that is different wood stains. I think they're going to look pretty awesome personally so I'll keep you posted!

If you would like to see some of the colours we decided on then have a look here.

We acquired this beautiful piano for free back in 2013 while we were living at RAF Cosford, Ben had been watching a Kirstie Allsopp show and had become inspired to create something wonderful with it. But it sat in our porch there for 18 months until we moved to Oxfordshire, lived in the shed there for a year until we moved back to Telford and has lived in our garage for a year until we finally got round to starting it!

Ben has stripped most of this and I had the pleasure of trying to get all of the wire off, I've still got some left to do but my fingers got blistered doing this and I had to stop for now! Now it's started I'm hoping it won't be an eternity until we continue working on it and get it done.

Below is a picture of some ticket pieces that came out of the piano, they were being used to prop a piece of wood so it was a good find for us and I'm glad we took all of the bits out to discover these. From the date on the tickets our lovely piano was manufactured before 1893!

This is going to be a personal project and I can't wait to get it done and fill it up :)