The Triangle of Doom

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Jef

We have this gable wall over our kitchen and dining area that I’ve been procrastinating for quite some time. It is the Triangle of Doom.

I always thought I would drywall it, in my quest to rid this house of cheap paneling, but putting drywall up there invited its own problems. For starters, I don’t think it was framed very well (no other wall in the house was) so putting drywall on studs that aren’t particularly flat is problematic. Fixing framing problems on the ground floor is lousy enough, but 8 feet off the ground makes it a real pain. Getting up there is not easy, unless you build custom scaffolding to get around those beams and cabinets, and fit into the tight spaces in the kitchen.

I could get up there with ladders well enough, but didn’t want to haul up drywall sheets and mount them while on a ladder. So I just decided to just paint it. A nice dark color would hide its imperfections pretty well.

Let’s go with Epic Adventure!

Damn, that’s blue. Doom Blue!

I lightly sanded the entire Triangle (of Doom) with a sanding pad on a long pole. That was fun. The primer went on very well. The first coat takes the longest, and every other coat goes on quicker and quicker.

I think that’s about coat no. 3. I went with five coats of paint, really wanted to get this thing covered.

I feel like painting it was the easy part, now I had to install the trim. The apex of the Triangle (of Doom!) is about 16 feet off the ground. I had to make a trim piece that would wrap around that beam up there, get it finished and ready to install, carry it up there and fasten it into place with some trim screws.

I had everything stained and sealed before install. Holes pre-drilled for trim screws. It’s so dark and so high that you don’t really notice the holes for the screws.

All finished. For about 1/5th the effort of putting drywall up there, the end result looks pretty similar to what it would have ended up looking like. And if we ever add on to the house, that’s the direction we’ll probably go, so that triangle may be Doomed anyway!

So, just one more room to go and the interior of the house will be entirely finished. I’ve saved the bedroom for last. Before I start it, I have some stuff to do out in the shop (that work is never done) and I want to do as much prep work for the bedroom as I can. When I’m all ready, I’m going to move the bed into the living room for a week while I gut the entire room down to the studs, and re-do it from scratch. I’ll keep it simple but it’s going to be a big job no matter how I cut it.

Been here 4 1/2 years. Hoping to have the house done in five.

Finished Stairs (well, almost…)

Posted on October 16, 2016 by Jef

We’ve had a few stormy days up here. It wasn’t as bad as they predicted, thankfully, but we had some very high winds and tons of rain. This is how bad it was: usually when we look out to sea we’ll see at least a boat or two out there, even in bad weather the big tankers will go out and the tugs will take barges across the strait. But for a few days, we didn’t see one damn boat out there. No one wanted to sail in these waters.

Well, despite the looming possibility of the power going out for a few days, I was able to get in the shop and finish up my stair project. Above is the jig I made to keep my drill holes at the correct angle for the iron balusters. That’s a 2″ thick piece of rock maple, and it held the angle great over all 19 holes I had to bore.

It took a little patience but I cut a wide groove in the bottom of the jig to keep is straight on the handrail. Worked well for me! Again, we are firmly in the realm of “I don’t know how it should be done, or how it’s supposed to be done, or how everyone else does it, I just know how I do it.”

It looks a hundred times better than it used to.

The risers have a nice, coppery color to them. That’s T-111 paneling, so it’s rough cut cedar plywood, sanded a little smooth and drowned in about a pint of spar urethane. It still retains some of its rough texture, yet is smooth enough to be cleaned by a damp cloth if necessary, and hard enough to withstand scuffs and scratches.

The finish trim was the trickiest part. It’s just a crooked house, and it wasn’t exactly framed for drywall or nice stairs. It was The House That Was Not Allowed To Have Nice Things. Indeed, the finished stairs look so nice that they don’t seem to belong in this house.

The cabinets came out … okay. I guess. (I love those brass handles!) I used trim hemlock, and it took the stain a little blotchy. But that’s okay. I’m thankful for the storage space. That big door on the left is where we put the vacuum. Yes, I built a vacuum chamber! Ha ha ha. Get it? Vacuum chamber… because it has a vacuum in it… ha ha ha, ha…. ah, bugger.

I stained the stair treads dark ebony, and the resulting color is beautiful, rich and varied. There are bands of orange and chocolate and even a little green and yellow in them. The grain was very tight and detailed. They were a real pain to restore but I’m glad I made the effort.

I did say almost finished, because when I ordered the stair balusters I was short one angled shoe. So I can’t finish the handrail install until I get that shoe, and then I have to take the handrail off, put the shoe on the baluster, put epoxy into the nineteen holes in the handrail, carefully reinstall the handrail and bolt it to the posts, and re-tighten all the shoes and fill the holes to conceal the bolts and re-sand and re-stain and drink copious amounts of beer and touch up polyurethane and spar urethane and drink more beer and touch up paint and put some clear caulk in a few joints and tighten the shims that got loosened with use and drink more beer. And then, maybe, this project will be done.

The Stair Tread Conundrum

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Jef

For some reason, some stupid, hair-brained, ill-conceived reason, I decided to use my existing stair treads instead of buying new ones. I could have bought nice, perfect, new stair treads But noooOOOooo. I had to use the crap that came with the house. It’s actually really good wood – old growth douglas fir, very tight grain, and it has a few knots and fissures but they are otherwise brick solid. A little twisted here and cupped there, but they’re old enough that they’re probably done moving. Something to be said for that.

Still, this is old, worn wood. It’s not like using old reclaimed barn-wood, nothing so romantic. These are more like some old pallet boards found beneath a dumpster behind an Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. Seriously, I’ve seen driftwood on the beach in better shape than this crap.

To lend a little perspective, here’s a Before Picture:

There’s the stairs as we first saw them. Please note the ancient wood spindles, the bio-hazard carpet, the splintery old paneling, the wobbly handrail. I won’t tell you what it smelled like.

We’ve renovated a lot of the house since that time but for some reason I saved the stairs until last. Even though it’s a centerpiece of the house, even though we stare at it constantly, even though I climb up and down those god-awful things ten times a day. And I’ve had a lot of time to think of how I want the stairs done, which is why it’s such a mystery to me that I couldn’t come up with a better idea for stair treads.

I do like the wood grain on these. Lots of natural detail, and they polished up pretty well despite all the repairs I had to make to them. I had to do everything: wood putty, epoxy, dowels, wine bottle corks. Sadly, I had to sand a lot of the natural patina off of it, but there wasn’t much getting around that.

They did take the stain well. I have all next week to slather on polyurethane before I install them, so they should be well sealed.

I’ve dry-fit the posts and a few of the iron balusters in place and they’re looking great. It all looks so different. When these stairs are done, it’s going to be so nice that it looks out of place in this house.

The cut trim pieces look like serrated jaws. Just in time for Halloween!

A Closet Fit For A Magazine Cover

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Jef

Yeah, well, almost. The closet is nicely done, but now that it’s finished, we feel the need to get nicer stuff to put in it. All our current stuff looks like crap. It used to look good, but that’s because it was in a really ugly closet.

Yeah, this is a vast departure from the before pictures (need a reminder? click here.) Now our closet is nicer than our bedroom. I’m really not kidding about that. It’s clean, it’s painted, it no longer smells funny, all the mold is gone, all the splintery paneling is gone, all the exposed beams are wrapped and covered. It’s really nice.

Thank goodness I only own one leather jacket, otherwise the closet would start to look cluttered.

That old bare light bulb with the frayed string dangling from it was really getting on my nerves. It was kind of gross to even touch it. It’s funny, I replaced it with a dirt-cheap light fixture and it looks ten times better.

And it has a freaking light switch. And the power outlet is up to code. You no longer fumble around in the dark wondering if you’re going to get electrocuted by the exposed wiring, because there are no more exposed wires! It’s all in boxes and covered by switchplates.

That shelving back there really helps. Okay, a little honesty here: we own more than one jacket. Right now you see just the one jacket hanging in there but I have to admit, while this closet is not posing for photographs it has like ten or twelve jackets hanging in it. So those shelves are a little hard to get to. Who cares?! I have shelves! It’s the back of the closet, it’s where we store crap we never need and never use.

All I really ever need is my gym backpack, and it’s front and center.

And the door is finished and installed. It’s fantastic. It was by far the easiest door install I’ve ever done. It fit perfectly! I must have measured everything correctly for once.

These hinges cost more than the door itself. I don’t skimp on hinges. I get solid brass, well machined hinges. They won’t rust, and they’ll last longer than the house will.

I really like the rough, weathered, distressed look of the wood. Some of it was artificially done (me stabbing the door with a knife, etc.) but a lot of it was purely natural. This lumber was sitting outside for about a year, and I did not treat it gently. I love the result. It has the look of old reclaimed wood from some remote corner of the world. And given that our hardware store is in a remote corner of the world, that’s not far from the truth.

So, now I need a closet door

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Jef

Don’t ask what happened to the old closet door. It was one of those cheap, crooked hollow-core doors, the kind that I hate. Really hate. And I have a lot of martial arts weaponry in this house. Let’s just say the old door is no longer in one piece, and we’ll leave it at that

I seem to have made a few doors since I got here. I’d actually prefer to restore old salvaged doors (yeah, I’m weird. I know. No need to tell me that.) but around here that’s not easy to obtain, so I’ve just made my own. I just use construction lumber, a little distressed and more than a little imperfect. It’s knotty. It’s naughty! It’s bent and twisted. But I like the look of it when it all comes together. On this door, the sandpaper I went through cost me more than the actual lumber.

Dry fit. Yup, it’s a door.

Glue-up went really easy and the door seems like it’s going to be flat, straight, and square. Not a lot of huge defects on this, despite all the knots there weren’t a whole lot of fissures or cracks. All the cuts went well, nothing split and there were no huge splinters to impale my hand on. I foresee a little shrinkage in its future, as its final resting place is right next to the wood burning stove, so it’s going to dry out like a bone in the desert. But I can handle that. As long as it opens and closes without having to use a fireman’s axe I think I’ll be happy.

Speaking of doors…

Demolition for Every Closet

Posted on August 7, 2016 by Jef

I started asking myself what was different about my closet compared to, say, normal peoples’ closets. Why is my closet never pictured on the front of magazines? What is so wrong with it? Why do people threaten me with violence when I offer to put their coat in my closet? Something is just different about mine, and to make it more socially acceptable, I started by removing all the things that I didn’t see in those magazines.

Well, I ended up with this. No paneling, and a bunch of uneven posts that by some miracle hold up the stairs.

Long gone is the bare light bulb and its frayed pull-string, though these electrical wires will pose a challenge to do correctly. I drew out the circuit, and I have to connect four 12 gauge wires together in this box. Sucks to be me.

Not to mention the ethernet cables, the HDMI cable, all those speaker wires for all the speakers I planted around the house. This is a lot of copper.

This section of wall has always been a little off, and now I know why. They installed the bottom plate right on top of that green carpet. They couldn’t even be bothered to take up the carpet to extend their wall 24 inches. That is seriously lazy.

It took a while to get all the electrical tucked away neatly (not to mention correctly) and put in a few more studs for the drywall.

Anyone here still remember Pay n Pak? Yeah, didn’t think so.

The weather was nice, so the front deck made for a really good area to carve up all that drywall. This is a small closet, but it still swallowed up six sheets. Lots of irregular pieces going in there, not to mention I had to carry them into some confined areas. It was like playing Operation: carry that big heavy sheet of drywall and don’t hit a door frame. Bzzzzzt! Oh, you’ll have to sand out that dent now.

Finally, some nice, shiny, mold-resistant drywall up, inside and out of the closet.

No help. No help at all.

Solutions for Every Closet!

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Jef

The pictures on these magazines crack me up. You know, if my closet only had to store twelve items or less, it might look so picturesque too. Yeah, all I need to store is a pair of antique tennis rackets, a cyan volleyball, the world’s cleanest baseball, and a basket that has no use and serves no purpose.

Sorry, but my closet is not a shallow set of cubbyholes designed to hold yellow galoshes in singles. Mine is more like the Black Hole of Calcutta. The area behind where those coats are hanging? Astronomers call that the Event Horizon; beyond that point, nothing can escape, not even light.

The bare bulb is actuated by a pull string so worn and frayed that it quietly sobs “kill me” whenever you grasp it. No effort has been made to conceal those exposed wires, or insulate them, or even bring them up to code. There is no code in the Closet of Doom, only a deep, eternal blackness that smells like dog pee and cigarette smoke.

The pitted backside of the paneling is what rubs up against whatever clothes you deem fit to hide in here. You don’t store things in this oubliette as much as you just forget about them.

Definitely a tripping hazard.

Reluctantly, daylight creeps through the various cracks and holes from the outside, but the deeper down it goes, the darker it gets. The unwritten horror stories of HP Lovecraft are down there somewhere. I should seal it off for the safety of us all.

I’ve been staring at these awful stairs for years now, and the time has finally come for a little remodeling. Out with the paneling, in with new drywall. This is going to be a lot of work in a small tight space and it may not turn out like the front cover of anyone’s magazine, but anything will be an improvement.

Hole in the Wall

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Jef

You know that space in the way back of the closet that you can’t ever get to? We have a space like that, and it’s really inconvenient. It’s near the base of the stairs so the only way to get there is to crouch and crawl, and remove the boxes and baskets and whatever else got put in the way. It was to the point that if I knew something was stored way back under there, I’d rather go buy a new one than crawl in there and retrieve it.

I thought this would be a great place for some built-in cabinetry.

The logistics of this was actually a little tougher than I thought. The little heating thing down there meant I couldn’t make these cabinets all the way to the floor, they’d need about a foot of clearance, so that right there eliminated 12 cubic feet of storage space that I’ll never get back.

But still I was determined to make this thing work. The final cut list would consume exactly one sheet of plywood, which I took to be a sign that this was meant to be.

But once it started coming together full scale, it made me realize there were still problems to overcome. Those small boxes seemed a lot bigger in my head, but now it was clear that I had to make these long, narrow drawers, or they’d be useless.

Not to mention the problem of how to get polyurethane in there. I should have finished everything before I assembled it.

I did find an unused electrical outlet in there, and it works and tested out okay, so I decided to move it to the front of the cabinet. Make it a little more useful. Please consider that it was 100% useless before, so anything would be more useful.

Once the carcass was assembled, it was time to make and fit the frame. Nothing fancy, just a bit of hemlock I had lying around.

The doors came out looking really good. And they were flat this time too. And square. I’m getting better at making doors, I think.

I think the hinges cost about as much as the plywood and the hemlock put together. I like good hinges, though. Makes the install go a lot smoother.

And here it is stained and finished and hardware installed and fitted into its hole. Still some adjustments to make before final install, but I think I’ll wait until I have the rest of that paneling knocked out and I’m ready to drywall. I just pinned it in place so I don’t have to look at the hole in the wall anymore.

Not sure if that storage is anything good except for ninja throwing stars and nunchucks but I could make that work.

Saw this heron out fishing at low tide. If he seems a little annoyed at all the tourists, well, he is, I assure you.

Built in Bookshelf

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Jef

Please ignore that ridiculous handrail and those spindled balusters. They’re going soon. They’re going next. In fact, as soon as I hit ‘publish’ on this blog post I may start tearing them out. In their background is the finished loft, all done now. I just completed the built in bookshelf and all the finish trim that goes around it.

I made the bookshelf out of the leftovers from the kitchen cabinet project. I literally had just enough to do all this. My pile of leftover scrap could fit in a lunch bag. That didn’t leave a lot of room for error, if I screwed something up (which never ever happens) I couldn’t re-make any piece.

The bookshelf it replaces was half its size, and not only that, this built-in is double sided! It can store about four times as many books as the last one. Maybe after this house is all done, I’ll have time to read books. For now, I’ll just have to collect them.

This isn’t really fine woodworking, though I used traditional joinery for the cabinet door and frame, and for the little end cap. One of these days I’ll make a nice piece of furniture, but right now I’m in a hurry to get this stupid house done. Check out those crazy hinges on the cabinet! They’re pretty solid too, I’m quite happy with them.

The shelves look a little bare now, but trust me, this house abhors a vacuum. They’ll get filled up soon.

Haven’t posted a critter pic in a while, so here’s a mink at the beach.

Finished Kitchen Remodel

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Jef

Let’s take a moment to let the above picture sink in. The lovely paneling. The yellow linoleum floor. The pencil sharpener. You see how those cabinets look like they lean in a little? That’s not a trick of the camera, they actually did lean in a little bit.

There isn’t much in the way of fast food on this island, so we cook a lot. Getting this kitchen fixed up was a huge priority, and it was also a huge undertaking.

Here we go, all finished.

Part of the challenge was having to use our kitchen while it was being worked on. As much as I wanted to gut the whole thing down to the studs and start fresh, that would have left us without a working kitchen for days at the very least, if not weeks. So, I ended up doing it the hard way, just a little bit at a time, as budgeting and timing permitted.

I like how the woodwork came out. The half wall cap looks really nice.

Definitely an improvement, anyway.

This used to be a wall covered with big boxy cabinets. And while the extra storage space was nice, it just made the kitchen look like the inside of a matchbox and, even worse, obstructed the view of the hockey game. That’s unacceptable in our house. We go to great lengths to be able to see hockey.

You can even see hockey as you walk in the side door.

The copper backsplash is one of my favorite additions to the kitchen. It adds some really beautiful color.

Lots of deep, island-y colors going on in our kitchen.

This is a pretty hard working spot, sometimes cooking two or three meals a day here. The wall mounted spice racks are pretty tight; I had a hard time determining what my twelve favorite spices are, and we had to fit in a thirteenth in there anyway.

Here’s our super clever trash can solution. It’s not as cool as it looks. In fact, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. But it works, and it keeps the trash can out of sight when you’re not using it, or right next to you when you need it.

Here’s a close up of the work I had to do to get the sink to fit. Those doors used to be inset, but I had to make them flush with the front surface. For the new gap in the middle, I just put some of that copper backsplash. Looks great.

The old countertops used to go all the way to the window, but we couldn’t do it that way this time because (1) the new countertops are thicker and the window would not be able to open or close, and (2) eventually that window is going to get replaced, and I can’t install a new window on top of the new contertops. So I just put a piece of wood back there. Quartersawn white oak, so it’s pretty stable, and it’s got a few coats of poly on it and some caulk in the joints but it’s otherwise floating and can be removed. I’m so clever, huh?

That banded trim piece up there was one meticulously cut piece of wood. It had to be carefully fitted to attach, all hand cut.

You could fill this sink up with water, put toy boats in it and have little pirate ship fights in there. The new sink is just HUGE! I put dirty dishes in it and I forget them because I never see them.

And Inky still has her catwalk up there, so she can get from the top of one cabinet to the other.

Still not my favorite cabinets, but with new hardware and a contrasting stain color they turned out alright.

It’s definitely come a long way.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

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