home gym – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I will probably post pictures once everything is completely cleaned up, and especially once we have the basement functional again, but tomorrow is absolutely going to be a book review unless I decide to write two posts. I only got two projects done today, really, other than organizing and cleaning, but man, they were doozies. Both of these have been waiting for literal years to get done, and they took between ten to twenty minutes each. One of them required me to spend some more money, though.

Anyway, look at this thing:

That is a TRX X-mount, used for TRX suspension training. My wife used some wellness funds she had access to to purchase it years ago, and it has been sitting in the basement ever since, because it needs to be carefully anchored into a stud to work properly, and the enormous bolts it came with put me off at first, and then … in the way of such things, it just never got done, and then we had a basement goblin for two years, and, well, now the fucker’s on the wall and it was done in less than ten minutes. I am not actually strong enough to do pull-ups but I put as much of my weight on it as I could and my hands gave out before the mount budged. I have spent a lot of time today uttering the Dad Mantra, “That ain’t goin’ nowhere,” and this was the first thing that Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.

Speaking of:

Those mirrors were originally in our bathrooms, so at least one of them has been sitting in the basement since the original Terrible Decisions remodel a thousand million years ago. They are mounted to the wall now. They, also, are Not Goin’ Anywhere, although I might put a cleat on the one on the right just to ensure maximum safetiness. Actually, thinking about it, I could put trim around them. That would protect the edges— you’ll note that the top corner of the taller one is already slightly broken, and I’d like these to be as safe as possible.

They are also heavy as fuck, and I had to go to Lowe’s and buy two of these to move them, at which point a nearly-impossible task became something I could do by myself. Worth it.

Our new nightstands also arrived today, and I probably ought to put at least one of them together before bed. For now, though, it’s absolutely video game time.

First things first: there will be a review of the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series, but I’m waiting another couple of days for the fallout to settle and give folks a chance to watch it, because everything I have to say about it concerns the finale, and you best believe I’m going to spoil the shit out of the show. The short version is that I was already enjoying myself, and that the finale did a great job of wrapping the whole program up in a neat little bow, and (this is why it has to be a spoiler review) the way it integrates itself into existing continuity is fucking fascinating.

So the real reason that we cleared the basement out was that our son is ten and it no longer makes a whole lot of sense to be holding on to things like his bassinet and all of his baby toys and plastic crate after plastic crate of toddler-size clothing. Bu the other real reason we did this is that we’re converting the basement to a home gym. You may recall– I think I was blogging way back then– that I used to lift weights pretty religiously, and while I was never “cut” by any stretch of the imagination I used to at least have the chest of somebody who picked things up and put them back down. It was exercise that I enjoyed, at any rate, but once we moved to the opposite side of town from my gym, and even more once my brother moved out of town, driving for half an hour to get to a gym to work out by myself stopped being a thing that I did. We’ve had the idea to do this with the basement for a while now, and there’s already a treadmill and an exercise bike down there, and a few things still yet to be added. There’s some painting to be done and a few other tasks, but my job this afternoon was to get the floor washed and vacuumed (there used to be a huge, ugly, yellow, 1970’s-era area rug down here; we gave it away during the garage sale) and get the mats down and get the bench and the rack put together. I was going to wait until the entire basement was done to post any pictures, but this was a fair amount of damn work and screw it I wanna celebrate now, so I’m going to.

And then, uh, I gotta make myself use it. That’s … probably going to be the hard part. But hey! New shiny stuff!