All I really needed was just another day of work and the project would have been complete. Last night I got the balsa wood trimmed down with a sharp hobby knife. The balsa wood now runs along the diorama instead of boxing it. And I patched the gaps between the dio and the balsa, between the rocks and the balsa, and between the balsa wood gaps with paper clay. With all that dried and cured for a full day, I got back to working on the sucker after work.
Last week, I was busy scrambling to finish up the little jungle diorama base to further the story of the GM team and their poor command unit succumbed to a prowess of a battle hardened Gouf Custom. I originally wanted to be done by Friday so that I could bring it out to AX Friday afternoon; but that didn’t pan out. I got about 70% of the trees placed by Friday afternoon before taking off to pick up Angel and head out to AX. Angel wasn’t finished with his kit either, and he brought along his unfinished pieces to work on during the con. AX was the typical, nothing out of the ordinary, but it was fun to hang out with the crew, wander the halls, and chat with the old staffer crew and just enjoy the people watching that ensued.
This year’s been really damn busy. The house renovations are finally completed. The office room still needs to get organized and furbished; and the guest room has now become a storage room in the interim. Hopefully the next few months will see these last bits of the house settled. But on to other things. Earlier this month, I had to head down to Santiago, Chile for work, and I spent a week down there. Here are the pictures I took with the little time of exploring I had, Beautiful Santiago, Chile. I didn’t even have time to offload the pictures from the previous month’s build gathering. I got back into town a day before the this months build gathering, so I’m using that as my excuse for not snapping pictures. It was a pretty good gathering, and I got some decent work on the MG Zaku Mine layer I started in May. Last weekend was Angel’s birthday so Nicky and I collaborated and planned out an elaborate sequence of events. It worked better that we thought. A good time was had by all.
But more importantly, I’m revisiting the GM team that I had worked on last year as part of the giant diorama for SCGMC. The Driessen’s been in a suspended state since the house work started, and remains until I clean up my new workshop. I want to finish something decent for AX, so I started working out a different diorama landscape to tell my GM team story.
A few weeks ago, Yuki and I hammered out some ideas on what we want to do to the house to update it. A contractor that my mom and step dad use was consulted and we got a fairly decent quote to do the following: clear the atrium and place pavers inside while repairing the deteriorating wood lattice; replace the bathroom, swap out the sliding glass doors in the two back bedrooms to windows, and tile the kitchen, entryway, and bathroom. A separate contractor was going to get called in to lay down some wood laminate. Naturally, we discussed this with Angel and his parents as they are very knowledgeable about home renovations as they constantly do things to their own houses. After some budget crunching and calculations, we discovered that we could add in some canned lighting to the house and add granite counter tops to the kitchen and reach the same quote given by the first contractor. The decision on contractor was fairly simple, and the first week of May, we started to buy and order most of the necessary raw materials. Dry walls, canned lighting sets, tiles, wood, etc. The stuff was piling up in the front living room.
This post will not follow a chronological order as I wanted to group the various projects together from start to finish for a easier view on the changes from old to new. Some projects were interminably finished to help with the progression of other areas.
