Five easy steps!

1. Grasp sledgehammer handle with both hands.
2. Stand in front of the cabinet you want to demolish.
3. Lift sledgehammer head above cabinet.
4. Slam sledgehammer onto cabinet.
5. Repeat until all cabinets are in tiny pieces.

See how easy it is:

Over last weekend, Ames and I installed a support beam in the attic and removed all the old lower cabinets with a lot of help from my friend Tom (as seen in the video). We also cut out a wall and pulled up all the layers of linoleum in the main kitchen area. This week has run a lot slower than the weekend though. We ran the electrical for the oven but we may have bought the wrong type of box so we haven’t installed the 240v outlet yet. We cut out a 4’ x 8’ section of the floor around where there was some rot, but having to sister the joists with some extra support pieces, fitting the new sub floor around the plumbing and getting it into place taking more time than expected. Amy also did a lot of sanding and spackling of the old walls, but we still won’t be able to prime and paint until all the drywall is repaired. It seems like there are a lot of jobs right now that are relying on each other, and until all those things are done, we won’t be able to start bringing the cabinets in. We definitely have a lot more work to do, but we’re both very happy with the progress we’ve made so far.

Anybody out there that owns my book should know that I have a gratuitous fascination with monkeys. I didn’t think about this when I was writing it, but looking back now I realize that I used monkeys in the illustrations of 3 out of the 5 chapters of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Why do I admire monkeys so much? For the same reasons as anybody else I suppose:

• They are eager to help those in need.
• They have limitless literary potential.
• They know when to hold’em and when to fold’em.

Ok, so I’m not as hung up on primates as underworked statisticians or Kevin Cornell, but when I saw the fatwallet headline “Flying Screaming Slingshot Monkey $6.84 Shipped”, I was fumbling for my credit card before I even read the full product description. When my monkey arrived in the mail, I knew it was going to be the best office toy EVER. To give you an idea of just how the flying screaming screeching monkey works, I captured his first Cyberwoven office flight on video. Enjoy!

As with Numa Numa, this is a vodcast post in response to a post by Dustin Diaz over at Web Standards with Imagination. Dustin mentioned that he’s been really busy and hasn’t had time for podcasting, so I thought I’d provide some AM entertainment by posting a short lesson on color theory. The reason for this impromptu and low-budget production is because Dustin was told that the green and orange on his site are exact opposites and don’t go well together. I’m fairly horrible at this whole video-casting…thing, but if you don’t mind waiting for the streaming quicktime movie to load, I’ll explain what makes colors opposite and how to balance colors that aren’t quite opposites.

<plug type=”shameless”> I mentioned something about a book in the video. The fine folks at Sitepoint thought it might be fun to have me write a book about design. This book should be handy to anybody who wants to design good looking websites but hasn’t had any formal design training. The real target audience though is web developers (like Dustin and many of my other programmer friends) who would like a quick primer on graphic design from the perspective of a fellow web nerd. I’m only about half way through writing it, so I have no idea what the prospective release date is, but it’ll be a fun read.</plug>