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.

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.

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.

It’s the detail work

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Jef

When I opened up the kitchen wall, I made this little half-wall between the kitchen and living room. I capped the half-wall with this 2×6 that I planed down and smoothed out and stained until it was passable. Nothing fancy, as you can see, which fits in well with this “nothing fancy” house. But now that the kitchen is getting a little fancier, I thought this piece might need to go.

The backsplash over the new countertop will be something pretty cool, so to replace this cap I wanted to use something nice. Hardwoods can be hard to find on this island, but I did find this piece of milled oak that was just long enough (seriously, within one inch) to do what I needed it to do.

Measurements are very carefully marked out before I start making sawdust out of it.

Making the band that goes around the edge is a little tricky, as the kind of banding I use in this house takes at least four passes over the router, and some of those oak 1×2’s were 12 feet long. My shop isn’t set up to rout lengths of wood that big, so I had to move the router table out into the middle of the garage, and carefully feed each piece through featherboards to clamp it down against the fence and the router bit securely. That length of wood tends to get a little springy and unwieldy unless it’s adequately supported, and I don’t have the bench length to do that… anyway, enough boring woodworker talk.

Too Long; Didn’t Read: It was a really tricky cut.

The successfully routed bands fit well against the cut cap.

Shaping the edge is a little tricky too. You can shape the length of it on the router, but against the grain it needs to be sawn by hand. However, since most of the routs are circular, I could use a drill to make those circular cuts against the grain, and then just cut it on the miter saw.

TL; DR: Another tricky cut.

I then clean up the edges by clamping two sides together to ensure symmetry. I use sharp scrapers, files, x-acto knives and a little bit of sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle cork. Got plenty of them laying around the shop.

TL; DR: Just stop reading and look at the pretty pictures.

Even after shaping the edge, each piece had to be further cut and fitted very precisely to fit along the wall nice and flush. The devil was in the details on this one, and she was one really mean devil.

This is a roll of 36 gauge copper. One side has been specially pigmented with an interesting pattern along its length. We’re going to use it for the backsplash. I told you we were doing something cool in here!

I had to lay this thing out on a nice flat board, some of the leftover birch from the cabinet extension project.

It cuts pretty easily. Once you get the cut going you can just pull a utility knife across it and slice it in a straight line.

Cutting the holes for the electrical outlets was also tricky.

So, a little contact cement, a lot of work with a roller, and some carefully cut trim pieces, and the copper backsplash is now installed! The copper is adding some very unique character to our kitchen and everything is coming together very nicely, even if we’re over budget and it’s taking several weeks longer than I wanted it to. Hey, this is our kitchen. We cook in here every day. I want it to be nice.

The new cap is installed and looks great.

I did take one shortcut in this whole kitchen. I didn’t move this electrical outlet, and just installed the trim banding over it. Call it laziness, call it what you will, but I took a quick look at that box in there and it was in such a tight space that I didn’t want to mess with it. So, I apologize to the future owners of this house, this kind of stuff drives me crazy too. But I’ve been busting my ass in this kitchen for weeks now and I have attained the point at which I just don’t care anymore. Be glad you can still plug two things into it, for I’ve seen worse in this house by whoever did the prior work.

And if you don’t think it looks cool, well, you’re in the wrong house. Go away.

Inky went to the beach, of all places.

The War Zone

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Jef

Okay, when your fridge and oven are in the dining room, it’s safe to say that your house has become a War Zone.

Yup. Cardboard taped to the floor, no countertops on the cabinets, nothing is where it’s supposed to be, nothing is in its place. Looking for the coffee? I think it’s over by the cat litter box.

Here’s the old countertops on their last day in the house. They didn’t put up much of a fight coming out, though the old backsplash had to be cut away with hand saws.

Yeah, we had no running water in the kitchen for a couple days while we waited for the new countertops. Well, the leaky hot water valve down there wouldn’t stop dripping, but that still doesn’t count as ‘running water’.

The old sink. May it rust in Hell.

I can’t say I like these cabinets, but resurfacing the doors and drawer fronts sure helped. New knobs, new hinges, new polyurethane, I guess I’ll keep them now.

And here’s the new countertops installed. It’s quartzite, which has a really nice texture and is very, very durable. You could smear grape jelly and red wine all over it and it would never stain. Oh, look, and the fridge is back in its correct place, too.

The new sink is HUGE. You could take a bath in that thing.

And now we have running water, and a fancy new faucet. I’m loving this sink. You can leave dirty dishes in it and it’s so deep that you never really see them. Out of sight, out of mind. Seriously, you could wash a goat in that sink. It’s huge.

I love the colors in this picture. The sky is bright, the water is reflective, the trees have many shades of green, and the houses and decks add little spots of their own color to the mix. You may notice our kitchen has a myriad of colors and textures, and not all of them really ‘go together’, and that’s quite deliberate. Living where we live, it really fits in.

The Cabinet Butcher

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Jef

The cabinets directly under the sink have recessed doors, so you can comfortably stand at the sink all day long washing dishes or doing laundry or performing whatever task Island Life has in mind for you, and there’s plenty of room for your knees and shins and feet. However, the new kitchen sink that we selected is too big to allow for this recess. There won’t be enough room to install it unless the cabinet doors are made flush with the front surface.

That’s where I come in. The Cabinet Butcher. I can take that recessed frame and reconstruct it so that the doors are flush and there is room for the sink, at the obvious expense of one’s comfort while standing there doing dishes. Since that’s usually me, well, who cares if I’m inconvenienced. We have a new sink to install, after all.

Now, the new configuration of the cabinet doors down there makes the opening wider, by a total of six inches. So, we need a strip of wood 6″ x 24″ to put in there between the doors. This is a pretty good opportunity to go down to a salvage store and find some odd scrap of carved wood that I can integrate into the cabinetry!

“Pick me!” squealed these two pieces. No, you’re both the wrong size, and you’re both ugly.

“Pick me! Pick me!” Okay, you’re the correct size but you’re still ugly. No dice. I’ll keep looking.

Yeah, well, while I ponder my newest conundrum, I must pry the remaining cabinet doors off their hinges so I can replace the hinges (with less-ugly hinges) and resurface them and stain them and make them pretty.

I did replace all the cabinet shelves with melamine. I’m no fan of melamine, but I am a fan of sanitary kitchens, and the melamine shelves were far cleaner than the greasy, sticky, cigarette-smoke infused cabinet shelves that we had.

Aprupt change of topics, but Inky is a mountain climber. Here she is atop a rock that’s about 30′ above the road below.

The Farmhouse Table

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Jef

We found an old dropleaf farm table at an antique store. It is rumored to be from Ireland. Or made by someone from Ireland. Or owned by someone who drank a lot of Bushmills. Anyway, we saw it and we had to have it.

Antique wood furniture can teach us a lot about woodworking. You can see exactly how things were made, and more importantly, how these techniques stood up to the test of time and use. What worked, and what didn’t.

In this case, it has taught me that we have been doing everything wrong. We spend so much time making sure everything is straight and flat, that table legs are plumb and solid, that pieces join at right angles. We cut tenons and mortises and dovetails, wasting precious time in a useless endeavor. We buy expensive table saw fences for accurate cuts, but there is no reason for them.

You see, all you need to do is split some lumber with an ax and nail it together with some tenpenny nails, and you’re done. That’s it.

Why make sure your table is flat? It doesn’t need to be. And is mortise and tenon joinery really superior to a few clipped-head steel nails? This table is like a hundred years old, and it’s still getting used.

Should you protect the surface from burning pots and pans? What the heck would you do that for? Just set the frying pan right down on the table, the wood will absorb the heat. No biggie. And if the legs get loose, just twist those screws a turn or so to tighten them.

And there’s always room for more nails, just pound them in!

And don’t bother finishing it to a nice flat even surface, when the pens of children doing homework will simply indent the table top with a strange cuneiform. This table is riddled with overlapping pen strokes, and it adds to the character. In fact, I think it even inflated the price a little bit.

The table legs are made out of oak, and judging by all those crisscross cuts were probably used to parry the broadswords of viking invaders. No effort was made to remove the splinters on the exit side of all those nails.

All I had to do was slather on some polyurethane, just trying to make it a little more sanitary, that’s all. This table is now in its final resting place.

You can’t get this at Restoration Hardware. No sir.

The Hodge Podge Lodge

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Jef

Here’s a picture of the kitchen countertop that came with the house.

See that? See that deep impact wound in the top of the kitchen countertops? That’s lovely, isn’t it? My best guess is that was caused by a tomahawk thrown by an angry indian at a prior owner of this house. But I really don’t know. All I know is we’ve been staring at that ax wound in our oh-so-lovely formica countertops (with the gold flecks that look like the bottom of a bottle of Goldschlager) for longer than I care to remember. And we want it gone. Is it possible to hate kitchen countertops? Yes, it is.

So, that’s the whole point of this exercise. Remove the existing countertops with a sledgehammer and a crowbar and maybe a tomahawk, extend the existing cabinetry, and install new countertops atop them.

Easier done than said, eh?

I made these platforms that will hold our trash bins. We can pull the trash bins out on the little (and rather expensive) drawer glides and they’ll be conveniently next to us ready to accept copious amounts of kitchen refuse while we cook. I have to admit, I have my doubts about this idea. It looks good on paper. We’ll see how well it does in practice.

If my cabinet burns down, this will be all that’s left.

And here is photographic proof that our house is rodent free. Because when I removed the drawers from the existing cabinets, in preparation for the install, I found this pile of spilt cat / dog / gerbil / whatever food, just waiting for the ravenous little fangs of rats and mice and other assorted vermin that can sneak into a house. The fact that this pile has sat undisturbed for at least four years is evidence enough that nothing comes into my house that would want to eat it.

And here they are installed. Yeah, it’s a hodge-podge of colors and textures, the red cabinet doors, the blue stools, the green floor. This house is a patchwork quilt, which is something you get when you live on Orcas.

I’ve got some plywood pinned on top temporarily, as it could be months before the new countertops are installed. Island time, you know.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

Category Archives: Renovation