Actual renovations!

Hey, we got some work done! How? We had someone else do it! Neat!

So, our hallway has been a bit of an eyesore ever since we moved in. It's had a bare bulb as the light fixture for the past ten years or so (still an improvement over the original), the seals were blown on the four crappy little windows at the top of the wall, the popcorn ceiling was a magnet for spider webs, the carpet was nasty, and the Silver Fox has always just hated the white spindles. Oh, and of course, given that we'd never painted it, the walls had a fair amount of mayonnaise smeared over them.

But we were a little wary of trying to do anything ourselves because we knew the job would require scaffolding and, given how long it takes us to do anything, we didn't want to try to maneuver around it for six months or whatever. So we hired someone to do it for us!

Best. Experience. Ever.

The people we hired were absolutely fabulous. Friendly, affordable, communicative, punctual, hard-working, clean, and just all-around awesome. I can't recommend them enough. Absolutely the best contractor we've ever worked with and they did really good work, too! (Seriously, when I say punctual, not only did HE show up exactly when he said he would, everyone he worked with showed up on time, too.)  

I have... absolutely no in progress shots. But I do have some before and after!

Before

Here's the stairs from the front hall:

After

And here's the ceiling and railing from upstairs.

Before

After

We're so pleased with it! 

Woodworking Bonus!

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there's no door on the linen closet at the top of the stairs in any of those shots. That was because, as usual for this house, the bifold door that was there had never been painted and needed some attention. Rather than just paint it, though, we figured it was time for me to make one of those bespoke cedar closet door sets for our own house. I'd already made a total of five doors (ten panels) for my neighbor, and she was looking for another set anyway, so I thought I'd kill too birds with one stone and make her another set while I was at it.

It was pretty straightforward, though we decided not to do the glass for the top panels on this one, and it turned out really nice, even if I say so myself.  

And the  one I made for our neighbor turned out great, too! I installed it right into our downstairs hallway!

Why did I install it in our house if I made it for our neighbor? Good question. It's because your humble blogger is an idiot.

See, I'd already made five sets of doors for her, and all of the panels were one of two standard widths: 11 7/8 or 17 3/4. When she said she needed a set for her bedroom closet and that it was the smaller size, I went ahead and made her a set with 11 7/8 wide panels. Well, it turns out there are THREE standard widths, and both of her remaining closets require 14 7/8 panels. 

I suppose this will teach me that I really have to measure first. (This will not, in fact, teach me that I have to measure first.)

Anyway, we're keeping it. And now I have to build another set for the other side of our closet...

Woodworking Project: Horse Table

Let's clear one thing up right off the bat: this is not a table shaped like a horse, nor is it a table for horses. Well, no wait. Actually, it kind of is one of those things. Never mind clearing anything up, let's go back to the beginning.

So, the Silver Fox (fka the War Department) reached something of a milestone birthday this year. But what with the stupid pandemic going on, it was difficult for me to buy something suitably impressive to mark the occasion. After some discussion, we decided that the best thing for her to do was to buy her own present, provided it was something truly special. 

And after a trip to a local artist and metalworker, she found exactly what she wanted.

Originally, my contribution to this gift was to be a shelf above the TV in the living room where this glorious piece of art would live. There was only one problem: we hadn't really counted on the sheer size or heft of the thing. (It's a hair under four feet from nose to "reins" and weighs close to 50 pounts.) A shelf capable of holding it would jut WAY out into the room, and would need some pretty substantial supports to bear the load.

After considering a few options and thinking it over, we decided that the best place for it would be right in front of the railing that separates the living room from the dining room and that, instead of a shelf, I could build a table for it.

Given that this was a special piece, I figured that my usual approach of rummaging around in the wood shed for enough scraps that I might be able to cobble into something resembling a table wouldn't work here. So I hied myself off down to the hardwood supplier and picked up a gigantic chunk of sapele:

I promise I didn't spend more than an hour or two admiring it before chopping it into slightly more manageable chunks and then into various parts and components.

(Yes, I made five legs. One for practice, and four for realzies.)

The first things I wanted to focus on were the legs and aprons. I wanted to try sliding dovetails for the joinery, so it made sense to make these pieces at the same time. And after a lot of very careful and finicky setup and lots and lots of practice at the router table:

I had perfectly snug-fitting sliding dovetails:

I'd just like to take a moment to say HOLY CRAP, sapele is the nicest wood to work with! It's dense and every so slightly soft - almost like milling up a giant bar of chocolate. It even smells nice.

The next thing I needed to do was taper the legs, and for this, I needed to build a jig. (Bet you didn't see that coming, eh?) I watched a few YouTube videos to get the idea of what I wanted to build, and then spent a gloriously happy couple of evenings and part of a weekend making what is now one of favorite jigs of all, a tapering jig for the tablesaw:

And yes, I named her Carly because I listened to a LOT of Carly Rae Jepsen while making it. It seemed only fitting. And the best part is that she works like a hot damn:

The next parts I had to make were the stretchers for the bottoms of the legs. I made a couple of minor mistakes here, but nothing outrageous. Really, the only problem was that I probably overthought it a little bit, and could have done the same thing in a much more simple fashion. But wevs! They turned out pretty good.

First I cut the stretchers to length and formed the tenons (using my micro-adjust screw advance tenoning jig - Judy - on the table saw.)

Then I drilled out the bulk of the waste for each mortise at the drill press and chiseled them square by hand.

Then it was just a matter of milling a few of the nicest pieces and gluing them into a nice panel for the top, and all the parts were done:

Time for sanding! But not before carefully putting my mark on the inside of the front apron:

Then came what SHOULD have been a relatively stress-free glue up (more on that later), two coats of Danish oil, and three coats of wipe-on polyurethane. 

I added some leveling feet in case the floor in that corner of the living room wasn't level, set it up, and carefully placed Amy's 50th birthday present on top.

Voila. The Horse Table.

Final thoughts...

Man, that could have gone better. The entirely milling and fabrication process was fantastic. All of the parts seemed to come out perfectly. The joints were snug without binding, the bookmatch on the table top was just was I was trying for, and even the stretchers worked out pretty well in the end.

The problem was the sanding and the glue up. See, I though sapele was a little.. tougher, being a hardwood and all. I carefully sanded up through the grits from 150 to 180 to 220, trying hard not to overdo it and still remove all the machine marks (of which there were in truth very very few). But it seems that, despite my caution, I still over-sanded. The sliding dovetails still slide, but now there are big gaps between the shoulders of the dovetails on the aprons and the sides of the legs. And because the stretchers were measured and made based on the original snug fit, they wound being ever so slightly too long, and pushed the bottoms of the legs out a hair's width too far, making the gaps on the aprons smaller at the top. 

All of which meant that when I went to glue it all together, I wound up over-clamping it, and making the entire thing askew. It's solid enough (thanks in no small part to the leveling feet) and it's entirely likely that no one would ever notice the tiny gaps or the twist in the frame, but I know it's there, and it really does bug me.

But Amy loves it, and the horse looks great on it, so that's the main thing. All I can do is just keep learning, I suppose.

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.

Woodworking Project: "Heavy" Mallets

Remember the balafon stand?

Shortly after I made that, my friend Karla convinced me to try making a set of quiet mallets that she could use to play her balafon without making too much noise so as not to disturb her tenants if they happened to be home. After some research, I managed to devise a way to make a set of mallets that was significantly quieter by wrapping some yarn around some sticks (admittedly, in a very specific way). She liked them so much that she commissioned a second set for her friend and fellow balafon enthusiast, so all the learning and whatnot I had to do didn't go to waste.

Then a few months back, Karla mentioned that her instructor had said it would be a good idea if both she and her friend tried practicing with heavier mallets as a way to build up their hand and wrist strength a bit, and allow them to play faster patterns with their regular mallets. Well, this was yet another interesting problem that I couldn't resist mulling over (and it didn't hurt that she promised to pay me for two sets of mallets, either).

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually came up with the idea of using copper pipe - which I thought was kind of a stroke of genius, given that they would then match the copper accents on the balafon stand. (For what it's worth, I rejected a couple of other approaches that involved using heavy weights somehow attached to the end of a stick. Mostly because they all sucked and - at best - were conspicuously inelegant.)

Also to match the balafon stand, I decided to make the new handles out of Baltic birch plywood (at least for one set - I had a couple cherry ones left over from the last batch). I cut down a couple of offcuts from the bent bookcases into strips, and then turned them into octagonal cylinders at the table saw.

This was totally safe, and not at all scary or dangerous.

Then I busted out the sandpaper and went to town. Hey, I needed to make them round and I don't have a lathe. Not even one of these ridiculously good and surprisingly reasonably-priced ones from Lee Valley

After sanding down all the edges and making my octagons round, I made some tenons so they could fit snugly into the copper pipe. I don't have a lathe (as I may have mentioned), so I had to make them by very carefully rotating them over the dado blade on the table saw.

This was totally safe, and not at all scary or dangerous.

At the last moment I had another stroke of genius (I thought), and turned another tenon on the opposite end of each handle so I could fit a copper cap over it.

Then it was on to cutting down, sanding, polishing, clear-coating, re-sanding and re-polishing (because I messed up the clear-coating), clear-coating again, then re-re-sanding and re-re-polishing (because I messed up the clear-coating AGAIN), and finally clear-coating for a third time all of the copper bits. Oh, and I also had to file down the little stopper nubs on the insides of the connections because otherwise they wouldn't slip all the way over the pipe.

Somewhere in there I also put two coats of Danish oil and two coats of wipe on poly on the wooden pieces, too. If you're wondering why there's five of everything, it's because I wanted a test piece to make sure the assembly process wasn't going to be like trying to finish the damn copper.

Then I was faced with the last hurdle in my brilliant plan: what to fill the copper pipes with?

Originally, I was thinking of using BBs because I had a bunch lying around (don't ask), but they were kind of an awkward size, given the diameter of the pipe, and there was no real way to keep them from rattling around. Then I considered using kitty litter because I had a bunch lying around (obviously), but it turns out that kitty litter is super light for its volume. (And no, Dad, I'm not going to fill them with USED kitty litter, even if that would be totally hilarious and super gross.)

So I went to Home Despot and bought 25 kilos of playground sand.

Of which I used exactly 0.64% during a rather stressful afternoon of epoxy, little wooden plugs, copper caps, funnels, swearing, and assembly. But it worked!

Then it was time to repeat the mallet-head making process which, I'm happy to say, I remember enough of from last time to make it relatively painless and easy.

And here are the finished mallets:

If you're curious, the regular mallets weigh about 65 grams each. These ones are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150g each. So a pretty significant difference and, according to Karla, already paying dividends!