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 It started out pretty ratty and outdated, obviously (and full of crap):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:

Woodworking Project: the Phone Shelf

So "designing" the bi-fold doors in SketchUp was really just replicating something in the program that already existed in real life. For my next self-imposed SketchUp tutorial, I wanted to try actually designing something in the software first, and then use those plans to build the physical object.

Well, for some time, the War Department had been wanting a little shelf in the front hall on which we could store our phones. Ever since we ditched the land line and went full mobile, our hall table (never all that tidy at the best of times) had become overrun with phones and charging cords. Not only that, but every time we unplugged one of the phones, the charging cord would invariably slip off the edge of the table and have to be retrieved from the floor or slot beside the table via various contortions.

The idea was to design a simple shelf that we could hang on the wall and to which the charge cords could be attached (or removed) so they wouldn't keep falling off onto the floor. This would also let us use the tabletop for other, more important things like receipts, wallets, half-packs of gum, keys, an old crystal ashtray slightly overflowing with coins, mail that needed to go upstairs but never seemed to make it any farther, sunglasses, gloves, misplaced remotes, address books without any addresses, flashlights, dead batteries, live batteries, feathers found on walks through the neighbourhood, expired or used up gift cards, completed shopping lists, a pen and paper for messages leftover from when the land line lived there and we might have to actually take a message, some bent nails that I pulled out of my pockets when I came in from the shop and didn't want to take upstairs, memory sticks, DVDs borrowed from the neighbours that we kept forgetting to give back, tape measures, old sore throat lozenges, six or seven assorted rubber bands, and whatever else happened to qualify for the exalted position of life's hallway detritus.

I had some pretty good ideas (or so I thought) for the overall design for this thing, and dove into SketchUp to see if I could do it.

Let's just say that it was a real learning experience.

I very quickly realized that my original plan was... not really feasible. I hadn't really thought through the joints and seams and construction of the thing and one thing I can say about SketchUp is that it REALLY forces you to work through these little details.

But with a few false starts and a fair amount of rethinking, I finally wound up with this:

The charge cords are supposed to be fed through the bottom of the shelf so that they hang from the front edge where they can be easily grabbed and plugged into the phone - which in turn sits on the shelf face up, at a slight angle, where it can easily be checked whenever one happens to be going by. There's also a slot at the back where, theoretically, one could store a tablet while it was charging, though as neither of us actually HAS a tablet, it's just a little extra feature I wanted to try. Just in case.

With the design at least somewhat finalized, I used SketchUp to make an exploded diagram that indicated all of the required dimensions and clearly identified all of the separate pieces.

Armed with my fancy little exploded diagram, and a few nice pieces of scrap alder, I headed into the shop to start building.

Which is where I learned my second very important lesson about designing stuff: thinking of something (and even laying it out in SketchUp) is not the same as actually building it. I had designed some ... er, interesting joints - especially for the lid - that proved to be exceptionally tricky to replicate in real life. I was also working with measurements that were a lot finer and more delicate than I had anticipated while designing the model. 

But I persevered, and after a few missteps (including an incorrect measurement visible in the exploded diagram above) and a couple of false starts, I managed to successfully build the phone shelf:

The back of the shelf is supposed to be mounted to the wall, and the shelf then rests on the back piece. The idea was to make it removable so we could get to the inside and remove the charge cords if necessary (to take them on a trip, for example), but easy to mount back on the wall as necessary.

Here's the back and the bottom:

Sadly, the back didn't QUITE work as intended (something of a design flaw), so we decided to just stain it, put some feet on the bottom (to keep the cords from getting pinched underneath it), and leave it sitting on the hall table.

And I have to say, it actually kind of works:

It's not my favorite project ever, but it does the job and I learned a LOT about design, SketchUp, and how unwilling I am to let my fingers get too close to a router bit.

Oh, and I got to build two separate jigs for this project, and making jigs makes for a very happy Don.

Shop Project: Crosscut sled

I mentioned a few posts back (you're forgiven for not remembering) that a generous contribution from the Top Brass (along with some of our own hard-earned savings) had help to kit out our shop a little bit to help with future projects. And when I said that, this is what I was referring to:

That there is a Canadian-built General 350 cabinet saw with a 220-volt, single-phase, 3hp motor, right-tilting arbor, and a Delta Unifence. I bought it from a co-worker's boyfriend, and getting it over to the house and set up was all kinds of trouble, and worth every minute of it. It kicks so much ass, I can't even tell you.

But it did have a few shortcomings: for one, it didn't have a wing on the left side there because it was originally in use as a panel saw and had a walk-through contraption/roller table designed to let the operator make cuts in really large pieces of material. I certainly didn't need one of those, but to get the wing we have now with a built-in router table was a long, excruciating process with a whole host of separate problems that I won't get into because I don't feel like getting that angry again right now.

One of its other problems is the fact that the mitre gauge it came with was a little ... not worky, and finding a replacement is really hard and holy hell expensive. Fortunately, one of the most common self-built tools (and a good way to get to know your equipment a little better, if you know what I mean) for any woodworker is a crosscut sled.

Crosscut sleds allow you to make short cuts across the grain of a piece of wood without the risk of trapping the offcut between the blade and the fence. They can be pretty complex, and incorporate all kinds of fixtures and hold-downs and stop-blocks and tracks and whatnot, like so:

But I really just wanted to build a simple one to take the place of my broken mitre gauge.

So I gathered up a few pieces of scrap, including some of the oak trim and 1/2-inch plywood left over from my bookcases, and ponied up for a good piece of 3/4" MDF.

The first step was to create the fences, which required cutting strips off the MDF and plywood and then laminating them together with lots of glue and anything and everything I could stack on top as extra weight:

Then I had to do some fancy work with a jigsaw and a LOT of sanding with the belt sander and orbital sander... none of which I took pictures of. Oops.

Anyway, while the fences were drying, I very carefully cut down my oak pieces to act as runners in the miter slots on the table. This was really damn finicky, but I eventually got them sized just right:

Then I glued and screwed them to the bottom of the sled, and cut off the overhang:

Then it was MATH TIME!

To make sure the fence was square to the blade, I used the five-cut method. Generally speaking, anything under .005" of deviation over 12" is considered really good. After only one adjustment, I got mine to .00175 over 18". I'll take it!

And my asshole algebra teacher in Grade 11 would be so proud; I can show my work:

Anyway, here she is, in all her glory:

And yes, I did add a safety block for when the blade comes out the rear of the fence. I didn't take a picture of that because Lucille thinks the safety block makes her butt look big.

And yes, I named her Lucille. Hey, it worked for B.B. King....

My first commission

The awesomely wonderful company that I work for runs a yearly "Personal Progression Program" that encourages employees to expand their horizons and branch out into new things. I think I mentioned it already back when they paid for me to take the woodworking course that let to this... uh, current obsession.

Well, they're offering it again this year (with prizes!), and my 3P goal is to continue getting better at this woodworking thing and - eventually - build us a nice new coffee table for the living room.

Step one in this process is finally diving in and learning SketchUp. Or at least, learning to use the bits of SketchUp I need to know - that is one seriously powerful program.

Rather than trying to design a coffee table as my very first project, I thought it might be easier to draw up something that I had already built - or at least started. A few months ago, my neighbour mentioned that she hated the closet door in her master bath. It wasn't very nice, and the louvres were always dusty and a pain in the ass to clean. Well, I jumped right in and said I could build a bi-fold door for her, no problem! (Not that I'd ever actually done such a thing.)

So I made a couple of floating panel doors with glass inserts and stub-tenon joinery, similar in overall construction to the ones I had made on the scotch cabinet I built in the Woodworking Level II course (the first time I took it). Seeing as how they were already done (except for the hardware) and while the varnish was drying, I thought I could try drawing them up in SketchUp and maybe learn a little more about the software. I had already ordered an instructional DVD from Fine Woodworking and watched it a few times through.

As it turned out I was able to use a lot of the tutorials and tips from the DVD to draw up the doors. they don't really look like much at an initial glance:

But once you zoom in and turn on the x-ray vision option, you can really see the amount of detail and the power of the software. All of this is the actual joinery I used to construct the door.

Of course, I think the doors themselves are pretty snazzy, too.

They're made entirely from red cedar, which I'm not 100% sure I'd do again. Beautiful wood to work with, but really, really soft. Difficult to keep it from getting dinged up. 

I did not make the glass panels. I'm not THAT nuts. It's a little hard to tell, what with our awful stucco behind them, but the glass IS frosted.

Let's hope my neighbour likes them as much as I do!