It’s a Great Day to Make Sawdust

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Jef

It was a gray weekend outside. Nothing but rain, and more rain, and when that was done, it rained again. A nice day to get in the shop and make some sawdust.

All the pieces to make the kitchen cabinet extension are cut and ready to be put together. Here they are posing for a picture. Like a bunch of little jigsaw puzzle pieces.

These beams are going to hold the weight of a stone countertop, a portion of which will be cantilevered so we can put some stools there and have a new seating area. I over-engineered them deliberately, wanting them to be very, very strong.

Oh yeah, that will be a strong joint.

I assembled the base cabinet upside down, it was a little easier that way since I had these support rails that had to stay nice and flat with the top of the cabinet. In fact, I even made the joke “oh no, I glued it together upside down!”, acutely aware that no one else on Earth would get the humor but me.

And here it’s all fitted together. So far this project is going very well. I’ve screwed up very few things on it, and nothing I couldn’t fix, so I’m kind of anticipating some major catastrophe.

As much as I love Festool, it can be such a pain in the ass. I have to find a bunch of scrap pieces of wood to support the piece I’m cutting, as well as other scrap to support the rail, and then I have to clamp down the rail, and sand-bag down the other side since a clamp won’t fit, and I have to cut it in three passes since it’s such an acute angle and the wood is so thick that it would bind and try to explode if I just made one pass. And don’t even remind me about the stupid hose that keeps getting underfoot and trying to trip me.

But that’s what it takes to make brackets. A nice bracket is a complicated piece of wood that takes about a dozen precision cuts. When I have to make multiple brackets all the exact same shape, I make a template out of 1/4″ MDF so I can shape it and smooth it out on the router table.

I promised sawdust. And sawdust there shall be.

Several hours later I finally have nice brackets made and installed, slender enough to not be an eyesore and sturdy enough to hold a crap-ton of weight.

Really happy with the way this project is coming along so far. Well, I’m not happy with the pace, as this is taking forever and I still need to install hardware / make doors / make shelves / cut the back board / put on some trim pieces to conceal the plywood edges / find a way to carry this inside / hope it fits / install it / etc. But the overall quality of the cabinet, I am very happy with.

A Small House Abhors a Vacuum

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Jef

Small houses have to make good use of their spaces. The space in the pic up above just looks like it’s missing something. It’s a void, dead space, and small houses abhor a vacuum. You can fill the void with trash cans and cat food and old woodworking projects but is that really the best use of that space? Why don’t the kitchen countertops extend all the way down that wall? I don’t know why they didn’t just do it that way, but I also don’t know what used to be there when they originally built those cabinets. Maybe that’s where they put the washer and drier. Maybe they kept dead bodies there in boxes. I don’t know, but for some reason they didn’t see fit to build out the kitchen cabinets for more countertop space and more storage.

That’s where all this lumber comes in. I can use this to make more cabinetry in that space and then we can extend the kitchen countertop so it runs the full length of the wall. I got some solid planks of birch and a couple sheets of high grade birch plywood. Birch is the most boring wood on the planet. It is bereft of character, does not like to be stained, and as hardwoods go it is one of the softer ones. But the existing cabinets are birch and if I want to match them (part of me does, and part of me doesn’t) then I have to use boring ol’ birch.

I started with the base, so I have a nice foundation to set everything on. There will be three cabinet areas, two of which will house the garbage and recycling containers and one will be New Storage which we can put New Things into. That’s very exciting to me. And I’ve made these with room to sit at the countertop like a bar. It faces the tv, so you can grab some snacks and a cold beer and watch hockey all in one place. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

The wood chopped up readily enough. A little burning but I kind of have a crappy saw so that’s to be expected. My last project was made with 2×6 beams so it is nice to work with a wood that’s flat and square and doesn’t have a bunch of knots in it.

And here’s a really preliminary dry fit of all the pieces I’ve cut so far. It’s so important to me to fit everything together as soon as possible just so I can see the scale of it. Sometimes when you look at something in a live, 3 dimensional scale, you miss things that you didn’t see when you drew it on paper, and it really helps me figure out exactly how all this needs to come together and how the pieces need to be joined. I consider where the force goes, what holds weight, and what joints need to be stronger than others.

The existing cabinets were plywood boxes nailed together with solid wood frames pinned to the fronts and plywood doors. These will be similar, except that the joinery will be mortise and tenon on the solid frames and good fasteners instead of nails. I fully expect it to last longer than the house.

Pocket Doors, Part 2

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Jef

There are few things on this dirty, gray planet Earth that I love more than a finished project. The pocket doors are now done and installed and they will remain there until the End of Days.

They shut.

And they open too. Yay. All done. Okay, so I still have to do some little things like polyurethane and setting stops and making some adjustments so they close squarely and levelly, but hey, for all practical purposes they’re done and I can move on to the next thing.

The other pair of doors, depicted above, is on the opposite side of the room and can only be accessed by crawling under the desk. It may seem like a pain in the ass, and it is, and so was the install for that matter, but these eave storage areas are a pain in the ass no matter where the desk is. It’s just a good thing my desk is huge enough that you could park a volkswagen under it.

This project was pretty fun but it still takes a lot of time, and there were a lot of cuts to make and grooves to rout and holes to drill. Working with imperfect wood has its ups and downs. On the plus side, you get a raw and rustic look, which can fit in well in a little house on a small, remote island. And you can cheat a little, things don’t need to be dead flat and dead square and perfectly level. On the downside, it takes a bit more of an effort just to make sure it’s square enough and flat enough to work.

I was at first going to leave these holes open. They’re just storage area doors, I figured the ventilation would be beneficent. And then I had the horrific thought that someone could get their finger stuck in that hole, and if someone were to slam the door shut the result would be catastrophic (though on the bright side, the detached finger would fill the hole). Anyway, I decided to use wine bottle corks, just for safety reasons.

Cork can fill irregular holes really well because they’ll conform to its shape. All it takes is a mallet and some wood glue and maybe a little swearing. The ends can be sawn flush and sanded and they blend in very well. Not to mention that cork is very resilient and stronger than most people realize.

The panels I stained separately. The grain texture of the plywood panels is very different than the frame, so I deliberately made them a bit darker to give them some contrast. So it’s an ebony stain on the panels, and a different stain on the frame pieces.

It took hours to sand all those. I felt like I had sanded a tree.

Loft Renovation – No More Wood Paneling

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Jef

When we left off last time, the loft had become a bit of a war zone. Paneling had been torn off, framing had been nailed into place, drywall had been screwn on and joint compound was drying in the seams. In my head, these things take like an hour, but in reality it takes weeks.

I called this the Corner of Horror.

Yuck. When you’ve lived with this paneling for a few years, there’s a part of you that doesn’t even see it anymore. It’s like a disease without any symptoms, slowly killing you inside and you don’t even know why.

That white stuff is frass. It’s what carpenter ants leave behind when they tunnel through wood. It’s ant poop.

These triangles were tricky cuts. Trickier still carrying the cut pieces up the stairs without damaging anything. And there really weren’t any good beams to screw it into behind it, I had to get a little creative sticking these to the framing.

I really only had one drywall seam on this install. Most pieces were small enough I could just cut them out of a single sheet. That bottom piece on the left hand side had four cut outs for boxes: one electrical outlet, one phone jack, one cable and internet box, and a box for the rear speaker hookups. I must have measured everything out six times before I cut that piece. If I screwed it up, I wouldn’t have enough drywall to finish.

Finally got some paint on the walls. I had the trim all cut and finished before I even started painting, so the trim install went very quickly.

I even finished the inside of the closet. It looks like there’s a light inside but that’s just my work lamp. It’s an eight square foot room with a low ceiling. I’ve seen refrigerators bigger than that. It doesn’t get its own light.

A lot of the big tasks are now finished, but there are still some major projects ahead. I need to make windowsills for both windows, I have a special way that I’ve done to other windowsills in the house so it’s not as simple as nailing a board down and pouring half a bottle of shellac over it. Which is how the current windowsills were done.

And then there’s flooring. The floor sags pretty badly in the middle and it’s a little spongy, so I have some structural work to do before I even put down a finished floor. Currently, I’m walking on plywood panels that have been here since Nixon was president. The good news is if it hasn’t caved in by now it probably won’t, but I’d like to at least try to shore it up a bit.

I finally have the desk fit into a little nook so that it doesn’t block any windows. I not only have a nice view, but I get some natural light. The green sleeping pad over there is for Inky, she loves it and sleeps there daily.

With the desk in a nook, it’s really opened up some space in the loft. It’s not a big room at all and the A frame limits moving around very much. In small houses it’s really important to make the best use of your space. Or, be very small. In fact, I bet this house is considered fairly large by cats, squirrels and mice.

The Hobbit Door is at last in place. I love it. The whole thing cost about $60 and almost half of that was the hinges.

There’s a bit of an unfinished corner up there. And speaking of doors, I need to make some pocket doors for those storage area. And see where that cheap bookshelf is? I’m going to put a nice built-in bookshelf in its place, a bit bigger and with some better storage spaces.

And see that gap between the beam and the ceiling timbers? The ceiling isn’t straight. My guess is when they made the dormer up here they didn’t support the roof correctly. They had to cut a load bearing beam to make this dormer so maybe that was their problem. Anyway, it’s now my problem and I need to find a way to either fix that gap or cover it up. There’s really nowhere to put the load of that roof anymore, so I’ll probably just cover it up.

Looks great from downstairs too. Well, it looks better than it did. And now the handrail and balusters look really awful so I guess they’ll have to go soon. Very soon.

The Loft that Time Forgot

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Jef

High above the shores of Orcas Island, sits a squat little chamber of small windows, low ceilings, and wooden paneling that has been left to rot in the salty air. Its timbers are splintered by the wounds of a hundred nails, and wormed with holes from whatever insect was allowed to teem unchecked over the years. Its floor is cheap plywood, worn down and prying its squeaky nails loose with every footfall. Shrouds of cobwebs gather dust and dirt in aphotic little corners, unseen by the eyes of any warm blooded creature for many, many years.

A mysterious access door sits out of reach above the wood burning stove like the sally port of some old medieval castle. It is a useless feature, it serves no purpose.

My daishō rest on the wall near me in easy reach, in case I would like to test their steel against the splintery wood paneling that surrounds me. A rocking chair sits like a ghost in the corner. There is no good place to set the desk. There is no adequate light. When people come up here, they touch as little as possible, and leave as soon as they get what they came for.

There is a closet up in the loft. This was the inside. They used corrugated cardboard for walls. Cardboard. They didn’t even have enough leftover scrap paneling to do the inside of the closet.

Let’s tear it all apart!

That saw is the Silky Bigboy, a Japanese folding saw used for camping, cutting fallen limbs off of trees and as a weapon against monsters. It cut through that beam in ten seconds.

I removed almost every piece of old framing and put up new framing for drywall. There is a significant difference between the way you frame for drywall and for paneling. For drywall, you need a solid, flat frame with good right angles and everything perfectly level and straight. For paneling, judging by the work I tore out, you can hire blind men, get them very drunk, and give them hammers and a bag of nails.

It doesn’t help that the house doesn’t have any right angles in it. And the load bearing beams are all twisted and out of plumb. And the floor sags a little bit in the middle so not even it is level.

These were challenges I was driven to overcome. I was sick of the old paneling. Sick of looking at it, sick of smelling it, sick of snagging my clothes on it.

Instead of sawn-off hollow core doors dangling from a rusty rail, I’m going to make solid wood pocket doors to access the storage areas in the eaves.

I love drywall. I can’t wait for that new paint smell.

Could that be a light socket and switch? Could the loft finally have electrical illumination?

And there you can see the 2 x 4 door, resting in the corner. We’ve dubbed it “The Hobbit Door” for reasons including but not limited to its short height. It just really looks like a door made for a hobbit.

For a week, my desk was pushed against the opposite wall to make room for all this work. To access my desk, I had to crawl underneath it and sit on its opposite side. That was fun. (And look on the right hand side, some paneling I haven’t yet gotten to.)

Should’ve just bought a boat. Would have been easier.

The 2 x 4 Door Project, Part 1

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Jef

I have this small closet door up in the loft that I completely hate and I would like to replace. Well, I’d like to throw bladed weapons at it, then burn it down, then replace it. It’s one of those ugly hollow core doors but this one has been cut down to fit an unusually small door frame, some 25″ x 58″. I was hoping to find a salvage door that I could saw down and fit but no luck there. If I want to replace this thing I’m going to have to make it myself. (I’m acutely aware that non-woodworkers don’t think this way) (and maybe even other woodworkers don’t think this way) (it’s possible that it’s just me).

I don’t want this to cost a lot of money. In fact, $0.00 would be a great price, but I’m prepared to spend as much as fifty bucks including hardware. Well, it just so happens I do have a few spare 2×4 and 2×6 leftover from other projects. Hey, this one here is like 16 feet long. If I leave it outside any longer it’s just going to grow mushrooms so I may as well make something out of it.

And so, the 2×4 Door Project has now commenced! The lumber I have has been left outside with the spiders and the salty sea air for longer than it should have been, but it is still solid and durable, and I think all its dings and dents and gouges and wormholes just make it look that much cooler.

I’ll sand it down and stain it and stuff, but I’ll make no effort to fill or conceal or do anything at all about the nail holes, the saw marks, the boot prints. This is going to be a traditional door with mortise and tenon joinery and solid wood.

The challenges will be many. Construction lumber is not usually flat enough to cut into a nice flat door (and doors have to be perfectly 100% flat or they won’t open or close right). I don’t want to do too much planing or jointing because that takes away from the distressed look that I’m hoping to preserve. But I think this door is going to be completely awesome when it’s all said and done.

I can’t say that everyone is convinced.

My First Screen Door

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Jef

I love a finished project. Now the door is stained and has a couple coats of spar urethane on it and I even put a little brass handle on it so we can open and close it. It’s everything one would want in a screen door. The only thing it lacks is hinges, I had to order them and they have not yet arrived. But other than that, it rests in the frame and is held in place by magnetic catches and as far as I’m concerned it’s done.

Screen technology has come a long way. It used to be a big pain in the ass when you needed to make a screen, often involving special tools and working with aluminum frames and steel mesh that all had jagged pointy ends to cut yourself on. Well nowadays, it’s still a big pain in the ass. But at least the screen fabric isn’t steel anymore, I think it’s nylon. The old steel sheets were awful to work with.

I got the screens in the frames and affixed them to the door with brass washers and screws. The brass washers came super shiny and bright, but here’s a trick. Put them on a metal wire and hang them over the flames in your barbecue grill. Let them cook for a while, get them as hot as you can. These cooked to about 700 degrees, and at that temperature the brass takes on a nice antiquated patina. (I actually didn’t want to use washers, they sell special brackets that hold these things in place, usually used for mirrors or glass panes in cabinet doors. But good luck finding those on an island.)

Here’s the finished door. I’m glad to have some room to move around in my shop, makes projects like this a lot easier.

These are the full extent of the drawings I used to make the door. On some projects I draw everything from every angle but on this one I just kind of winged it. Didn’t even need to do much math.

Bathroom Cabinets Completed

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Jef

There’s nothing like a finished project.

Finally have the bathroom cabinets all finished and the bathroom trim is painted to match. I’m not terribly happy with the paint job on the cabinets, no matter how much I sanded it and tried to get it smooth it just came out a little lumpy. It’s fine. I’ll live with it. It’s much improved from what was there.

I had some nice, dark brown wenge leftover from a previous project and I just needed to order a little more to make shelves for the entire cabinet. But even after I ordered more, I still didn’t have all that I needed. I had to join some narrow strips together to get the 4 1/2″ width I needed to complete the shelves. I’ve never joined an exotic wood like that; I’ve heard this wood can be a little oily and that sometimes interferes with the glue bond. That, and these are going to live in a damp environment and if they start to warp or deform at all they’re going to split right apart.

They seemed to glue together just fine and I think it’ll work. I would have preferred solid slabs but the wood is so dark and evenly grained that you can’t really tell that some of the shelves are joined. Here they are in place. Great fit, very sturdy.

Driftwood Handrail

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Jef

We’ve had this handrail on the side of our house since we moved in. I guess building codes require a handrail next to the stairs because they care about people, or something. It was installed at the last minute and at a very low budget. It wasn’t much to look at but I guess it got the job done. Well, I finally found something pretty cool to replace it with.

I’m not really a fan of making everything out of driftwood, but I found this piece a while back that would make Gandalf proud to use it for a wizard’s staff. It looked like it would fit well at the side door so it didn’t take me long to rip out the old handrail and affix this one to the wall.

I was going to make or buy some nice brackets to affix it but I discovered it was faster to simply use lag bolts and plug the holes with dowels. Actually fits fairly sturdy that way. I think it will work nicely.

Landscaping is coming along slowly but nicely. It’s cool to live in a place where you can use what you have on your own land for landscaping materials instead of having to go to home depot. It’s one of the very few ways you can save a little money out here.

The Truth about Painted Cabinets

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Jef

Painted woodwork conceals some flaws, and reveals others. Notably, it will reveal poor painting skills. I’m not a big fan of painted cabinets, I suppose not many woodworkers are, but in this case they fit in with the existing design.

With painted cabinets, you can use lower grades of wood, but you still can’t go too cheap because you need a smooth surface and you need sharp corners where you make your cuts. Even painted, any tear-out or splintered edges will be obvious flaws. And if your holes and gaps aren’t adequately filled, they will forever be a glaring defect that everyone will see. So you still have to take care even if you’re going to paint what you’re building.

The door frames are pretty narrow (1 1/2″ wide), and as such I felt the need to join them by mortisse and tenon. They need all the strength they can get.

So, above is a pic of me cutting four tenons at once. I taped all four pieces of wood together so they all fit in the jig, and in one pass I made the exact same cut on all four pieces of wood. This may seem foolishly dangerous, but these pieces are so small that they would not fit into the jig one at a time. Normally when they’re this small I’d just hand cut them, but this seemed to get the job done.

Here’s the frame being assembled. Note the absence of blood; I haven’t lost any fingers yet.

I had to cut out a groove for the mirror. The mirrors are 1/4″ thick glass. I think they’re stronger than the frame I’m putting them in.

It fits well. I hope the paint will conceal that tear-out in the wood. (It won’t.)

I’ve had these mirrors over a year. They’re finally going to have a home.

The fit is great. About 1/16″ between the glass and the wood. I’m going to put a bead of silicone gel around the inside of the wood frame and just rest the glass onto it. I have some plywood backings that will go onto the back of the glass. This should be a really solid door for a medicine cabinet.

Now I’m just waiting for the paint to dry.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

Category Archives: Renovation