Woodworking Project: Dying to Read

Okay, so I don't want to write this post. Writing this post is going to force me to think about a project that I've wasted WAY too much time thinking about already. But the only way I can make you read about it (misery loves company and all that) is to write about it. So ... yeah. Hopefully you really hate this post, but feel obliged to read it anyway for some unknown reason. That way we're both miserable at the same time. Hashtag squad goals.

Geez, I hated this project.

So we've got this sort of landing area at the top of the stairs that we've always rather facetiously referred to as "the bonus room" after the horrible sort of terminology used by the horrible sort of people that appear on House Hunters. It's really nothing more than a staging area for laundry baskets and a convenient railing that I use to hang how ever many pairs of pants I happen to be alternating between that week.

Already you know too much. This is going great.

Anyway, a few years back we stuck the dictionary stand there (I could have sworn I had written a post about it, but apparently not), just as something to fill the space, and then later we added a little bookshelf that we use to keep the books that we've bought but haven't got around to reading yet. (If you know me at all, you know that yes, we definitely needed a dedicated shelf just for this.) A little after THAT, the War Department found a nice-ish glass case that fit reasonably well on top of the bookcase which she promptly started filling with skulls and bits of bones and old bullets and pieces of driftwood that look like zombie legs. (If you know her at all, you found exactly none of that surprising in any way.)

Here's what that area has looked like for oh, probably a good five or six years now (though the skulls and books have rotated in and out at various intervals):

Someone who shall remain nameless (because I really can't remember whose fault it was, to be honest) thought that maybe we could use an upgrade there - a nicer bookshelf and a larger display case. I thought it would be great to get rid of the mismatched case and cabinet anyway, and had some ideas for how to make a two-piece set that would nest together nicely. (Skulls and books: the "Dying to Read" bookshelf, right? Clever, eh? No? Piss off.)

One of the other things I really wanted to do was use up some of the scrap wood I had laying around taking up space in my wood shed. (I seriously need to do a post about my wood shed.) I specifically wanted to use up some of that terrible "Baltic birch" I bought to do the bent bookcases that wound up being so shitty. I figured it wouldn't matter if I sanded through that micro-thin top layer as I was planning on painting the thing anyway. As a bonus, I had already cut down the majority of it into roughly bookcase-like dimensions anyway.

So I pulled out the bits of plywood and went rummaging around in the rest of my bin for scraps I could use for the edge banding and "frames" for the sides of the upper display cabinet. I came across some wood that was at LEAST as equally shitty as the plywood: the bits of my neighbour's doors that I salvaged when I made her the fancy ones out of cedar. I don't know what this "wood" actually was - rubberwood, maybe? tupperware wood? - but I had more than enough of it for the edge banding, and I figured with some creative glue-ups, I could make it beefy enough to make the frames, too.

I started with the lower part and knocked the entire bookshelf together in a single weekend. I mean, sure, it's a relatively straightforward build, and the shelves aren't adjustable, but still, it's a pretty solid little case. This, of course, lulled me into a false sense of security (stop me if you've heard this before) about how well the rest of the project would go.

So then I started on the upper part, and that's when things went sideways. Actually, no - things went sideways LATER. Initially, I thought the build went really well. I probably overthought how the base and sides would go together a little bit, but I really wanted to be able to put glass into the side panels without needing to use mullions this time. So I came up with an idea that would allow me to build and paint the cabinet and then put the glass in. I cut out all the pieces, carefully fabricated the shelves (with splines, of course) and assembled the top in preparation for painting.

I mean, that was good enough that I went ahead and ordered the glass, anyway. And then with a gift card that my wonderful in-laws sent me for Lee Valley, I picked up an air sprayer that I thought would make it a lot easier to apply paint, and might even result in a smoother finish. I put together a little spray booth (it's only stupid if it doesn't work, right?) and had a go with my new toy.

Well, that sucked. I mean, it worked okay, but the primer I was using was old and kind of thick, and was a nightmare to clean up, what with being oil and all. I sanded it mostly smooth and then had a go with the topcoat, but then ran out of paint. I went to get more, but THAT paint was so old I couldn't really get the same stuff or color, so wound up having to put on another full coat on everything just to make sure it all matched. Also, trying to move two rather large pieces of furniture around on top of the work bench (along with three kind of tricky shelves as well) and not spray paint everywhere was kind of exhausting.

But I got it all done!

Then I went to install the glass and realized that I'd blown it. Completely.

See, when I ordered the glass, I ordered it within fairly tight tolerances,. I wanted to make sure that gaps around the front opening were pretty small so as to keep the dust down at least a little but, and there wasn't much room for error. There also wasn't much room for the hinges. Like, none at all.

On top of that, the holes I had drilled for the adjustable shelf pins had somehow gotten misaligned during assembly, even though I thought I was being super careful. Also, I wasn't at all happy with the way the reassembly had gone after putting the glass in the sides - there were visible gaps where I had to cut the paint to get the pieces apart and the lines hadn't closed up again during reassembly. Oh, and the damn paint was taking forever to harden properly; even though I'd sprayed on three top coats (give or take), the slightest rub or scratch would leave a visible white line.

So I started the whole top part over again.

I still had enough of the shitty plywood to make the back, top, and bottom, but I was out of the shitty rubberwood. Fortunately, the shelves were still okay, so I just needed enough for the side frames. Another foraging session in the wood shed uncovered a few pieces of fir that would do the trick okay, so I cut the top and bottom, and then glued up another back panel. I milled up the frames, and started attaching everything together.

Which is when I realized I'd screwed up AGAIN. Either I had been overzealous in attempting to make the case as wide as possible, or I had been over-cautious in my conservation of material for the frames, but the top and bottom panels were too short. I managed to separate the sides from the back and reclaim that material, but I was now out of anything suitable or thick enough to make the sides. Nothing else in my woodshed seemed to fit the bill, so I needed to get something decent.

Unfortunately, by this time the pandemic had started so I couldn't go and peruse the stock anywhere and see what was available. No problem, I thought, and called ahead to Windsor plywood to make sure they had some four-quarter (1 inch for you non-woodworking types) poplar in stock. They did! So I asked them to set some aside and went up to get it on a fine, though eerily quiet Saturday. Of course, the other problem with not being able to peruse the stock is that I kind of had to just accept whatever they brought out for me. But it looked right (if just the teeniest bit twisted) so I brought it home and started milling it up.

Turns out that it wasn't even close to an inch thick - it was closer to 7/8, and edging towards 3/4 once I had it all cleaned up and ready for assembly. This just wasn't going to work. So I headed back up the following weekend and got some birch that they claimed was 8/4. It wasn't, but it was close enough and I had just about had it with this project. 

This time, I took a simpler approach and just assembled the side frames all at once, and routed out the back to accept the panes of glass (which I still had from the first attempt). I tore a great jeezly strip out of one side - the side you can see from the front, of course - but I wasn't going to back off now.

I also painted it by hand this time, partly because I has already disassembled my spray booth so I could get the the workbench and table saw again and partly because the bottom part STILL didn't seem fully cured yet. And then I carefully drilled the holes for the hinges (messed up one of them so the door will never hang quite straight but... you know) and realized that the shelves would only fit while the doors were closed, and not while they were open.

So I cut down the shelves and repainted them.

Then I waited three weeks for the damn hinges to arrive from Home Depot and finally, finally, FINALLY put the damn thing together.

It's done.

We shall not speak of it again.

State of the 'Vation

State of the 'Vation! Get it? It's like, State of the NATION, but it's VATION, which is short for RENOVATION!

Okay, so it's not, but it totally should be.

Well, here we are, another year, another successfully completed Operation Fat & Happy (mostly the former, but enough of the latter to make up for it), and I thought it was time for a little general update/random assortment of words and almost-words to bring everyone up to date. Especially me, seeing as how the last two weeks or so are a barely-remembered haze of head colds, coffee with eggnog, and lots and lots and lots of really good food - often, but not always, at the same time.

(Note: The preceding paragraph was written just after New Years, and this has been sitting around in draft form since then. I apologize for the delay. Still fat, though.)

Our current project is probably my least-favorite project we've ever done. No, seriously: I hate everything about it. Everything. But it didn't start out that way...

So, we did a little laundry room renovation this past summer, and the room itself turned out great. It started out pretty ratty and outdated, obviously (and full of crap):

We took out all the crappy old trim and cleaned the walls off REALLY well:

Bonus! This Week In Mayonnaise!

I have absolutely no idea what that was about. It was an old drink coaster, stuck to the wall with mayonnaise, covering up a hole in the wall that was filled in with... mayonnaise. I... yeah. Just... no.

Then we painted the whole room a beautiful, warm grey color and put down some pretty stellar vinyl plank flooring, right over the linoleum.

We even cleaned up and repainted the security bars on the window. Not that I think we NEED security bars on the window, but they were already there, and repainting them was easier than trying to fill the enormous holes in the window sashes left by the mounting hardware.

The flooring is great stuff - way better than the crap we installed in the sunroom. No stupid adhesive tabs for one thing; it actually locks together like engineered hardwood. Super easy to install, really heavy duty, and easy to clean. Looks pretty snazzy, too.

Once all that was done - and pretty easily, I might add - the real problems started. See, the War Department really wanted some built-in storage to hold the vacuum cleaner (currently stored in a relatively empty corner in whatever room it happened to have last been used) along with a few other bits and pieces. So, she came up with a design/general layout, and left it up to me to figure out the actual mechanics and implementation.

"No problem," I thought. "I got a garage full of tools and I've always wanted to make some built-in units!"

I'm an idiot, but you already knew that, and I'm getting ahead of myself anyway.

The overall design looked something like this (too lazy to figure out how to draw it up in SketchUp, even though it would probably be a good exercise):

That's three separate cabinets with doors (including a big one for the vacuum cleaner), a cubby on the bottom left without for the cat boxes, and a large open space on one side for the little chest freezer. The only common mesaurement was that they would all be 24" deep. The cabinets would go from floor to ceiling, and be attached directly into the studs in the walls.

I planned to make three separate units: one for the top right cabinet, one for the top left, and another that comprised the vacuum cubby and the open space for the cat boxes.

Here's a list of just some of the things that went wrong (in very rough chronological order):

• After cutting, painting, and assembling the cabinets in the garage, I brought them in to the laundry room to install them and THEN realized that the walls of the laundry room weren't actually square, and my oh-so-carefully built cabinets would have to be heavily shimmed before they could make contact with the walls. 
• When I measured, I had measured the distance at the FRONT of the cabinets - the room narrowed into the corners, meaning that I had to recut one of the cabinets (one I fortunately hadn't assembled yet) before it would fit.
• There was exactly ONE useful stud in each of the three walls. 
• The cabinets were so heavy and unwieldy that I bashed the hell out of the walls and ceiling trying to jimmy them into place.  
• I had glued and nailed the face trim to the front of the first cabinet before realizing that the face trim had to span both cabinet edges - I had to take it off and do a lot of scraping to get the faces flat again.
• I finally had a chance to use my fancy new (to me - I bought it used from the same guy who sold me the saw) Veritas Shelf Pin Drilling Jig to make adjustable shelf pins. The first cabinet went fine, but in my excitement and foolish confidence, I accidentally drilled the holes for the second cabinet in the top and bottom of the unit, rather than the sides. Which meant patching approximately 48 holes and repainting the entire cabinet. Not gonna lie: that really hurt.
• I had to redesign the face frame mid-build because I failed to account for a surface large enough to accept and support decent hinges. Oh, and I had to buy different hinges because the ones I was planning to use looked horrible.
• I had drilled a hole in the side of the litter box cubby hole because the plug was on the opposite side of the center piece from the freezer (of course). Stupid me drilled it too small and I had to cut out a larger one with a hole saw.
• I ordered some poplar from a store to make the doors out of (I had heard it was easy to work with and took paint really well). I went all the way out to the store in Langford the following weekend to pick it up and the guys in the yard in Vancouver had forgotten to actually put it on the truck - and then misplaced it. It didn't show up at the store for another two weeks. 
• I had to take the freshly installed, painted, and caulked trim off the door between the laundry room and family room so I could get the top right cabinet in. 
• Whilst reinstalling and repainting the trim, Amy noticed that the paint I was using was really shiny, and didn't match the existing paint. That's because I had inadvertently bought "medium base" instead of, you know, paint. I had to repaint the door trim on both doors in the laundry room - AND all of the cabinet trim, cabinet interiors, AND the cabinet doors, just as I thought they were ready to install. 
• When I finally finished painting the doors for the second time and went to install them, I realized that the curve in the wall to which I had carefully matched my face trim meant that the door on the top left cubby was overlappping on the top and gapped on the bottom - even with the hinges at maximum opposite adjustments. I had to remove and cut down the doors - and then repaint them to remove the marks left by the table saw.
• At which point Amy and I agreed that the finish on the doors was terrible (mostly due to the foam roller I had been using) and I had to repaint them all for a third time - by hand - to cover it up.
• Oh, and one last little indignity (and one Amy doesn't actually know about yet) I spent a VERY enjoyable evening in the shop making a sweet little jig for installing the handles. It worked like an absolute charm and the door handles are all lined perfectly (which is important because of all the parallel lines involved in the design). They're just a quarter inch too low because I measured the wrong damn thing. But because I double-checked before I drilled, I realized that the jig was wrong before I drilled the first hole. I went ahead and drilled them all anyway because god damn it I had just about had enough.

There's more (of course), but I'm depressed now just remembering all of it and I want to stop writing this. 

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would, but oh my god I would do almost EVERYTHING differently. Starting with the design, damn it. Who the hell thought 24" deep cabinets was a good idea? (Besides me, obviously...)

But, they ARE done - mostly empty still , but done:

Ba'ath Bath update!

So I thought maybe I should post an update about the current state of the master bath renovation before we headed out for our annual baseball pilgrimage. Then I forgot about it until ...uh, a couple months later? Oh, no wait. A little more than three...

Oops.

In my defence, I DID actually start a post... which doesn't help anyone, given that I never actually published it. Not only that, but it was so damn long ago that I pretty much have to start over from the beginning. Fair warning, though: if you come across any weirdly disjointed paragraphs or sentences in this post, you'll know why. (Damn. I should use this excuse EVERY post...)

Anyway, Tony came over to work his mudding magic on the drywall, and then we spent a few days (weeks) priming and painting over his efforts. See?

Oh, yeah: we went with the Restoration Hardware color, "Silver Sage", again. I think we made the right choice.

Once the painting was done, we installed the heating mat for our heated floor, and then laid down the Schluter-DITRA over the entire area. Messy! And for something called "an uncoupling membrane", remarkably unsexy, too. (How in the world I failed to take a picture of this, I will never know. I suck. Sorry.)

On a personal note, "Schluter-Ditra!" is almost as much fun to say as "Dr. Oetker!" (If you don't know Dr. Oetker, they make frozen pizzas or something. We like to call them the Nazi Pizza Doctor. "Ve haf vays of making yoo eat anutter slice!" Even though I think it's a Dutch name? But still, not a name you'd associate with pizza, unless it was, like, EVIL pizza.... Sorry, that got weird in a hurry.)

Anyway, then Mr. Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes came over and spent his Sunday helping me cut and dry-fit all the tiles for the floor.

And then, like some kind of... well, dumbass, he came over again the NEXT weekend and helped me actually install them. And all he wanted was beer. Weirdo.

It took me a couple of hours after that to scrape the dried mortar out of the cracks, and then I grouted it.

Heh, funny story about that.. well, funny if you're not me, anyway. So, after some careful research about the type of grout I needed (non-sanded), I went off to Slegg to buy it. When I got there, I got to talking with the guy who worked in the tile section, and he explained that I was actually mistaken. He assured me that I needed the other type of grout (sanded). Given that he'd been a professional tiler for 20 years, he seemed convincing, so I decided to follow his recommendations. (It turns out he was totally right - THAT sort of major calamity is not the punchline to this particular story, but I know that's what you were thinking.) He asked me how much I needed, and I talked myself through the numbers. It went something like this:

"Okay, well, the bathroom is 5 feet wide and 12 feet long, so 5x12 square feet. Yeah, I need enough to do 600 square feet then. How much can a bag of this stuff cover... huh. It says only 180 square feet per bag."

At which point the guy butts in and.. points out that it's easy enough to stretch the coverage from a single bag well over 200 square feet by cleaning the tiles as you go and constantly remixing the grout back into the bucket.

For some reason, he did NOT chime in to point out that my math was really, really wrong. Like, even for me, that's some highly wrong math.

Fortunately, Slegg has a good return policy, and I got my money back for the two bags I didn't even open, even though I did have to drive them all the way back to the store like an idiot.

The Injury Report

So, I managed to slice my finger quite badly while smoothing out one of the grout lines after I'd completed it. Which, well, was a pretty fair indication that I hadn't gotten enough grout into the joints. Sure enough, I must have started wiping up the grout too quickly after putting it down, or else the sponge was too wet.

Fortunately, I hadn't sealed the grout or the tiles yet, so I just regrouted the whole thing over again. Worked out much better the second time.

One of these days, though, I swear. I WILL do a project, just one, right the first time.

Oh, that reminds me. The Toilet From Hell has won another round against me. I won't go into details, but suffice to say that I'm more convinced than ever that attempting to replace it will result in a broken flange, flooded living room, or similar catastrophe. That thing is possessed, I tell you. Possessed.




Lots more to come about the bathroom, but I figured maybe I should just bloody well post something and not worry so much about getting it all up to date in one go, hmm? Next time, the windowsill!

Man, where did THAT month(s) (and a bit) go?

Seriously, what happened to the last two months? It seems like I just updated this thing yesterday, and then I look at the date and realize I've left all my reader(s) hanging for two months.

And then I go and drop a relatively short post on you anyway... Uh... sorry?

Where were we anyway? Looks like we had just put in the stove and started messing around with the outdoors. Well, the stove is pretty much the same (still sheer awesome), so why don't we get caught up on the garden then?

The also bad news is that I don't have much in the way of photo-editing software installed on this computer yet, so I can't do my usual before-and-after presentation, but I CAN post some pictures of how the yard looks now, and tell you how it got that way.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that the outside - pretty much all of it - is really the War Department's demesnes. I just do the heavy lifting and some of the less-precise chores, like mowing the lawn. She's the one with the landscaping background, and she also does NOT share my complete and abiding hatred of the outdoors. (Actually, it's not the outdoors I hate per se, but the creatures that inhabit it. Especially the wasps. Actually, specifically the wasps. I really hate wasps.)

Where was I?

Right, the wasps. I mean, the yard! The yard. Yeah.

Okay, I'm never going to get through this post without resorting to my second favorite method of presentation: the list!

Things we've done so far:

• Finished digging out the roots from the huge cedars we cut down at the front of the house; fixed the irrigation pipe I busted while digging out said roots; planted some heathers and rhododendrons instead; and covered the rest of the bed with bark mulch.
• Dug up the turf from the shallow spots on the lawn; filled in the shallow spots with topsoil; and reseeded the now-not-shallow spots.
• Removed the stupid-looking stones from around the front bed by the big rock; weeded out all the dandelions, foxglove, and primulas; planted some heathers, rhodos, and the azalea we rescued from the backyard; and covered it up with some decent soil and a top coat of bark mulch.
• Took out a strip of flower bed along the stone wall beside the sunroom; and reseeded it as lawn.
• Cut down a couple more cedars from along the side fence; yanked out some dead or decrepit plants that really weren't doing well there; planted a "Japanese Black Dragon" wysteria in their place (which I picked out solely because of the name, by the way); and it's still an ongoing project, so lots more to do along the fence there.

Oh, what the heck, here are the "before" shots of the yard:







And the "afters":











Here are all the stones from around the beds in the front yard, now carefully piled up on the stump where the dolphin fountain used to be (a VAST improvement if you ask me - both in terms of replacing that god-awful fountain, and in terms of moving the haphazard, random assortment of rocks from around the beds in the front):



We also...

• Built a mason bee box and put it on the side of the house. (Absolutely NONE of which was my idea, by the way. Bees, wasps, butterflies - all just brothers from different mothers if you ask me. Evil flying nasties that'll sting you as soon as look at you.) Anyway, it's kinda cute, eh?

• Made a nice home for a couple of passing ducks. Okay, so we didn't really do anything specific to attract them, they just showed up one morning and have been dropping by for visits fairly regularly ever since.

• And, lest I forget, I also drove all the way up to McBride to pick up a painting that, it turns out, didn't fit into my car. Fortunately, not only was the consolation prize a rather spectacular photograph:

But mon pere was gracious and awesome enough to drive all the way down FROM McBride the following week to personally deliver the original painting as well, which looks absolutely amazing and really helps to finish off the bear pit:



Anyway, we're currently working on Amy's office/the guest room, and I've already finished the floor, but it's late and I'm tired, and I'm sure everyone would rather I post again this weekend than waste EVERYTHING in one post now, right?

Right?

Hello? Anybody still reading this?


Bueller?

Stay-cation: Day Three

Just a quick update on yesterday before I go get started...

Yesterday was all about two things: getting the bathroom painted, and planning out the tile placement for the floor.

Two coats of Restoration Hardware's "Flax" later:



After realizing we kinda got shafted in terms of how many tiles were scratched or otherwise crappy, and having to plan out where to put the bad tiles to minimize their effect on the floor:



I'm off to Home Depot to pick up the tile saw. It's going to be a long day...

Stay-cation: Day Two

I was going to post this entry last night and actually get caught up with my idiotic scheme, but we had our little Thanksgiving dinner last night and seeing as how it was just the four of us, and two of us don't drink wine, I couldn't let such a nice bottle go to waste, could I?

Well, that and we didn't actually sit down to eat until 9pm. But mostly the wine...

As I mentioned in Day One, our primary goal of this stay-cation is to finish the downstairs bathroom. Of course, a lot of what we're doing is painting, that means a lot of waiting around for things to dry. Which means side projects!

The first order of business yesterday was to clean the walls and ceiling in the bathroom in preparation for painting. Once that was done (and we had waited for the walls to dry), we replaced the fan motor - which cleaned up pretty nice:



It's still not the quietest bathroom fan in the world, but it beats having to rip out half the ceiling to install a new one.

Unfortunately, the new fan grill we bought is slighter smaller than the original, so the War Department had to caulk the edges of the hole around the fan to pretty it up a bit. Which meant another two-hour wait before we could paint the caulking.

Given that it was unseasonably warm outside (highs of 19 degrees!), we headed out to see what we could make of the sunroom issue. Imagine our surprise when we pulled off the rotten trim to find that the room WAS actually designed properly! The roof flashing has a proper drip-edge on it, and the siding extends well past the sill plate on the bottom. We're pretty sure the trim was added after the permit and inspection had been passed - it was obviously not installed professionally, and completely compromised the overall design.

Once the trim was removed, we pulled back the rocks in the little ditch around the sunroom so they weren't right up against the siding.






I think we're still going to wrap some heavy plastic around that corner to keep any more water from getting in through that huge crack, but the good news is the sunroom should make it through the winter without too many modification.

While we were out there (and after mowing the lawn yet AGAIN), we also pulled the earth away from the wall outside the kitchen where it had piled up against the trim:



Yeah, looks pretty bad, but it'll the keep the bugs and the moisture from wicking up the stucco and rotting out the sill plate.

Well, by that time, the caulking had dried, so we painted the bathroom ceiling, went out to Rona and ran some other errands, and then came home and put a second coat on:



(I like that soft pink a lot, by the way. It's going to look really sharp with the baby-blue walls and creamy, butter-yellow trim.)

And then we watched some baseball, did some other chores and eventually got around to making our Thanksgiving dinner. Not exactly a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, I must say: pepperberry chicken and mushroom risotto:





Damn tasty, though.