Radical Railing

  From October until May, we had an unfinished railing for our loft. To some of you risk takers, this may sound fun. Not knowing if you are going to fall 10 ft onto concrete, living the high of sleep walking to your death, or being able to dangle from your feet to be able to reach down and grab a drink off the counter.......to a person who has a slight fear of heights and always climbs into bed head first, it was TERRIFYING.

For this post, I am proud to show you our completed railing. But first....You must get an idea of how scared I was for 4 months:

Here you will notice there is not a single thing keeping us from toppling over. The wire you see is actually about 4 ft back from the edge of the loft.

We had some friends in from Warsaw and I was able to just lean over and snap this picture. Once again, terrifying. More than one occasion we discussed the possibility of death if I was to accidentally lean too far over the edge. And for the record, I have fallen out of trees, fell down our ladder, and managed to fall off the top standing area of a combine. I had a real reason to be fearful.

We brainstormed for several weeks about ideas for the railing. It needed to be inexpensive, modern (but not too modern), and safe. Derek came up with a drawing and an idea about making the railing out of tubing, one metal wire, leftover roof materials, and a few scraps of cedar.  I always have the hardest time imaging his ideas but they always come out way cooler than I expected. Take a peak:

This is the process of adding the tubing and wires. He used a pulley system to attach the wire and then proceeded to string it through the tubing. I seriously slept better the night this railing went up. PS. Notice the Christmas tree in the bottom right hand corner. We had just the railing up for a few months before we got around to finishing it off.

Next up was adding the leftover metal roofing to cover up the plywood. I am happy to announce that Derek only cut himself once! He then trimmed out the tubing in cedar which really added a lot!

Once the metal was in place, he continued to trim with cedar. I was so giddy at this point. I was stating to really see progress and was getting an idea of what Derek had in mind!

And I just had to add the picture of Tenny being obsessed with Derek's juggling skills.

And here you can see our completely railing!!! I absolutely love how unique it is. It adds the perfect welcoming touch to Bunker and incorporates materials we had leftover!

And we bought a motorcycle and I have ridden on it 3 times. It hurts my rear.

Happy Thursday friends.