Shop Renovation – Drawers and Cabinets

Posted on December 3, 2017 by Jef

I’ve been badly in need of a new clamp rack. Of course, I make the biggest, heaviest monster clamp rack that I can. The top is 1″ thick solid oak and because I didn’t think that was strong enough I put some 1.5″ thick brackets underneath to reinforce them.

Unfortunately, no room for expansion. But that’s okay, there’s no room for another clamp rack in the shop. Well, I’ll have a separate rack for small clamps.

So, I have this little side table along that back wall, you can see it here with the brackets underneath. I’m reworking some storage and work surfaces in the shop and I wanted to raise that side table to the same height as the main bench. I figured the best way to do that was to built some boxes on top of it. And then I can make drawers!

So yeah, double plywood sheets for added strength, well bolted into the wall and reinforced by those brackets. The drawers should be a nice size.

This will really help de-clutter the corner. Of course, I’m just going to re-clutter it…

The drawers fit great. I’ll put some oak drawer fronts on them at some point.

I partitioned one of the drawers, and now I’m wishing I did it to all of them. It was a pain, but having little boxes to organize things is really nice.

Up next: cabinets.

Big cabinets. They’re going to go where that awful brown pegboard is now. There will be under-cabinet lighting and doors that close and all sorts of fun stuff. I like using pegboard for cabinet backs, especially for utility cabinets, as you can hang crap on that back wall if you need to. Maximize your space.

No help whatsoever.

Shoes, Shelves and Pegboard

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Jef

This has been a cluttered corner for a long time. Things go here when they have no place else to go. Gardening tools, bags of mortar, sawhorses, bicycle pumps, camping chairs, floor steam cleaners. Hey, it’s what a garage is for, right?

Well, this winter I’m going to be spending a lot of time introducing better storage solutions, cabinetry, drawers, better layout, doing all sorts of things to make the garage work better for us. In this corner, I’m going to put up some pegboard to help hold the little stuff and keep it easy to access and out of the way.

Yeah, okay, it’s still totally cluttered. But it’s an organized clutter! A big part of any organization effort is just getting rid of the crap you don’t use anymore. That always helps.

Okay, this is a problem that we’ve been tripping over for years. This little corner by the rusty fridge has stored our shoes, but I’ve always thought this was a wasted space. So much more can be done with this area.

Yeah, now we’re talking. A little plywood, some lumber, a few pieces of hardware, and suddenly we have a space to store a dozen pairs of shoes, with a place to sit to put shoes on, and a storage trunk to store whatever you want!

I’m not fond of plywood for making furniture, but this is my garage, not the Earl Gray Tea Room in Buckingham Palace. Function beats out aesthetics. All it has to do is work.

I bought 2×8 lumber for the top and the bench, and I dug up the most beaten, moldy and weathered pieces I could find out of the wood pile. Old wood like that can polish up pretty good. I like the color, and it’s sturdy as hell.

I went cheap for hardware, but made sure to use solid brass. It can get a little humid out in the garage.

I’ve had this little clasp for ages, finally found a use for it. I think it probably wanted to go in a window or something, but here it works great, holding up the lid to the trunk so it doesn’t break your arm.

That’s like 10 cubic feet of storage in there!

Happy shoes. They all have a home and there’s room to grow.

It’s almost a closet again

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Jef

It’s been a trying few weeks. All our clothes and shoes have been scattered to the four corners of the house while I’ve been working on the closet. Our hanging clothes hung from one of the beams in the living room, blocking the television from my favorite chair. Shoes and boots have been on a towel next to the tv. Other shoes and boots are in a box out in the garage. Sweats and sweaters are on a high shelf in the laundry room. My jeans are on the bookshelf behind me.

It’s the War Zone. We’re used to it by now, and we know the drill. It doesn’t last forever, and when things go back where they belong, it’s refreshing to see the house all nice and clean. It’s like the day you put all the christmas decorations away. They’re nice to have out for a while, but eventually, you want your house back.

The drawer fronts came out great. Cannot complain. I just did simple tongue and groove with panels, which got glued and screwed to the drawer box. They should last the life of the house, or longer.

It’s really nice to be working with oak again. Hardwoods are hard to come by out here, and expensive. These are the frames that go on the built in boxes already in the closet.

I rarely do mitered joints (because I’m not very good at them) but the corners on this one came out pretty good. I cheated. Before I cut the strips, I cut one end of the board to 45 degrees, so that I had at least one perfectly clean miter without any tear-out or burn marks.

Everything installed pretty smoothly. A lot of math went into all that, and I guess I did it right this time because I didn’t have a whole lot of problems.

For closet doors, we got these hugely big rails for barn doors. This thing is very heavy and I had to put in a new header to support it. The header is bolted in place with these gigantic lag bolts and then reinforced with some additional framing. I think these are going to be the strongest doors in the house.

The hardware instructions were ridiculous enough, but I ended up modifying the install anyway so they were completely worthless to me. I ended up drilling holes in the brackets to accommodate another lag bolt to make sure it was secure enough. This steel was tougher than the cheap packaging would have you think it is. A hint: when drilling through thick metal use a little machine oil on your drill bit. It makes a big difference.

Nice! I don’t even need doors, I’ll be happy just looking at my open closet.

The drawers work great, very smooth operation.

Using a polished copper hanging rod really helps the clothes slide a little bit. The old rod was badly worn. Kind of looked like driftwood found on the beach.

Here’s the rails for the bypass barn doors. The house isn’t level but these needed to be, so they do look a little crooked if you stare at them long enough. But the last thing I needed were sliding closet doors that rolled out of place when you weren’t looking.

I do love the built-in drawers. Such a huge difference over the last ones.

Next up, I’ll make the Bam Doors … er, the Barn Doors for the closet.

Progress

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Jef

I need to remember to take some pics of the existing drawers when I ~~smash them to pieces while cackling like a maniac~~ do the demolition work. I just want the world to see how special they are. Well, the internet. Okay, the ten or twenty people who visit this blog. The existing drawers are just hideous. Maybe that’s why I’m putting so much time and care into the drawers that will replace them.

The new drawers are coming along wonderfully. I’ve only screwed up like four or five things so far, all easily fixed, so I’m going pretty good by my standards. I didn’t have much time this weekend, though, as I was up on the hill behind my house clearing brush with a machete.

This is no-man’s-land. We get these vine-like bushes that sprawl like weeds, and overtake everything on the hillside. They’ve already devoured a spruce tree near the driveway. I needed to clear a bunch of them that were threatening the shed behind the house, and ideally on a warm, dry day before spring. Once spring comes along, they’re heavy with new growth, full of bees, swarming with wasps, and covered with new, sharp thorns. Got my opportunity on Saturday, a nice dry day here, so I was up hacking way at them.

It’s rocky, it’s overgrown, there is no good footing, and thorny plants and vines are everywhere. But it’s remarkable how peaceful it all is. One of these days I need to forge some kind of a trail or a path up there. Maybe make a hidden Buddha shrine or two.

So after a few hours of grueling labor it was back to the shop. I decided to cover the end grain of the plywood with oak strips. I wasn’t going to do it initially, it’s kind of a pain and takes a bit of time and care to do correctly, and all the other drawers in this house have exposed plywood end grain. But I wanted these to look nice.

Nicer, anyway.

The drawer glides are these big beefy 24″ steel contraptions that are several orders of magnitude stronger than the drawers themselves. They’re a little finicky to install but when it’s all done the drawers open and shut beautifully.

Looking pretty is nice, but at the end of the day, they just need to open and shut.

Drawer fronts and framing will all be out of red oak. I need to install this base first, though, before I can make the exact measurements of where everything is supposed to be. It’ll be fun getting this into the closet.

All that hard work this weekend. I need to go down to the beach again soon!

How I Make Posts

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Jef

(Formerly titled “How Posts Are Made” but I have no Earthly idea what that is. I don’t know how professional postmakers make their posts, and I don’t know what the correct postmaking techniques are or what the appropriate post-making tools are. All I know is how I make posts.)

The only stock I had available was all milled to 3/4, so I had to join a bunch together to make that middle part. See, I don’t even know what post parts are called. Whatever that middle part is called, that’s what I made. Oh, and I made some strips on the router, and they’ll go around the, um, the other post parts. Whatever they’re called.

Laying out the joinery took some very careful planning.

This kind of joint is a lot stronger than just doing a simple mitered joint, and it fits together very squarely. In fact, it’s hard to make it not square. These will be for those things at the top and the bottom of the post.

Everything’s going together very nicely.

Just because there were a lot of pieces being glued, I used tape to hold them all together, then clamped them. And then I remembered what happened the last time I left clamps on tape overnight (the glue from the tape pressed into the wood and made areas that didn’t take stain very well) so I had to remove all the clamps and take off the tape and put the clamps back on. Live and learn, and forget, and re-learn.

It’s a clamp bonanza! Not to mention a tripping hazard.

The top part thing (maybe it’s called the cap?) was a little more difficult than I wanted it to be. Took a few tries to get it correct. Plus, that wood’s just a bit too big for the saw, and there were cuts where the saw couldn’t cut all the way through. The end result looks good, though.

In the end it all came together. These are going on my stairs and they’ll support the handrail at the top and bottom.

There’s one block I didn’t glue on, and that’s so I could bolt it into place and affix it with a couple of pocket screws. I’ve done this a couple times before on other projects, and it can get a little tricky to get them standing perfectly straight and tightly fitted to the floor. I’ll have to be ready for anything.

Here’s our newest toy, something to keep us toasty warm when it gets cold out. A pity I can’t use it in my shop, it would be lovely to have that kind of heat in there, but it’s an outdoor toy.

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.

Shop Tips

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Jef

Everyone come running because I am giving shop tips today!

What? No one. Okay, everyone come running because you’ll get two bucks!

Maybe these shop tips are things you already knew, but there’s still value in reading them, because even if you know 90% of this stuff, it’s the 10% that you didn’t know that might make you a better woodworker.

Those long aluminum rulers are great, but they will leave marks on things like drywall and painted surfaces. So cover the back of them with some masking tape. It makes for a smooth surface that won’t leave marks. Do not put tape on the front side, though, because then you won’t be able to read the numbers.

Sanding pads are expensive, so get the most out of them. Even when they’re spent, there’s usually enough grit left on them that you can sand some things by hand. I folded this one up and used it to sand inside the corner that the sander could not reach.

If you use dowels to plug holes, you probably know that it’s easiest when they’re tapered a little bit, that way they fit into the hole. Want a tool that does this for you ? Try a pencil sharpener. You can get a little hand held one for about $1 and it will very neatly taper your dowel plugs.

You don’t need a fancy pants phone dock. Two J-hooks on your pegboard will do the trick nicely. I drilled a hole for the charger. In my shop, the phone controls the music and it takes all these lovely pictures you’re looking at, so it’s nice when it’s in easy reach.

You’re going to own tools that you don’t have a use for except for very rarely. This is okay. When the circumstance comes up that you need it, you’ll be happy you have it.

If you want to protect something with duck tape, but don’t want to risk ruining the finish with its strong adhesive, you can put down some masking tape and then put duck tape on that. It will pull off the floor easily and won’t damage anything, and you can protect the floor’s finish from the edge of the sander.

Don’t throw away your sponge brush until you’ve checked for drips. Saturate the end grain with as much polyurethane as it will absorb. You’ll never regret pre-drilling your nail holes, whereas you’ll always regret splitting your wood if you didn’t pre-drill.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a nice view, be sure to orient your shop so that you get to enjoy that view while you work.

I’ve used the same stir stick for polyurethane for like 15 years now. I now know what over a hundred layers of polyurethane look like. I also know the consequences of adding layers of polyurethane without sanding in between coats: nothing. It makes no difference if you don’t sand. It’s just a little lumpy, that’s all.

A bug zapper for your shop may be the best tool you buy all year.

As promised, here’s two bucks.

The Pirate Crate & Box Company

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Jef

I’m really enjoying making these boxes out of scrap plywood! These are all storage/organizer boxes for places like under the kitchen sink and some small tool boxes for in the shop. I’m feeling a lot less disorganized now. Anyway, I’m enjoying making these so much that this may be what I (eventually) do for a living!

I’ll call it The Pirate Box & Crate Company, and I’ll make boxes for organization, for storage, and custom boxes of whatever size someone would need. We invest so much into plastic boxes and storage containers, and all that plastic either sits in a landfill or floats around in the sea and washes up on a beach somewhere. I think it’s a good idea to get back to some basic wooden boxes like this. They’re easy to make, and would be fairly quick once the process is streamlined.

Here’s a chest I made for our hammock, when it’s not in use.

And here I am assembling more boxes. These things are a cinch to make! This box will replace a cardboard shoe box that housed odd and specialty drill bits and replacement blades, and has been falling apart rapidly for years. It barely holds together anymore. This box here will last decades.

And it’s all made out of scrap plywood and some 1x2s that I had laying around.

I designed the lids to these guys from the traditional Japanese toolbox, with a lid that slides into place. You can make them so the lid locks into place with a tapered piece of wood, but I didn’t see the need. Both boxes are going to be for things I access regularly, and they won’t really need to travel anywhere, so I can leave the lids loose on top of them.

I’m enjoying this process more than I probably should be. These things are quick and fun to build.

To the right is my old box of gardening gloves. To the left is the new glove box. How awesome is that?

And I have got LOTS of scrap plywood left over to make more boxes. Going to make some bigger ones next. This is so fun! And yes, I totally get that my non-woodworker readers out there completely don’t understand any of this.

Not a box, but a toothpick holder. Before this, I kept my shop toothpicks in a box made out of duct tape.

The low tide today was 3 feet below sea level. It was surreal just to go down there and walk around on ground that is underwater for the vast majority of the year. All manner of birds and critters were about, enjoying the newly exposed seafood menu.

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.

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.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

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