1 day ago
by mcgriffith |
0 comments »
Lets see, where do I start?
A lot has changed since I was last on here. I cannot remember the last time I was on here, and I have not looked.
Since I last was on, we sold our home, moved to another one and in some ways I think it will be better for my wood working addiction.
We sold our home in 5 days and closed on it at the end of November. We moved into my wife’s childhood home, we are doing a Rent to Own, and will eventually buy the place.
We now have a 2552 sq ft house...
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2 days ago
by Serradura |
13 comments »
Yes, I do know that when you are building a house or a barn you normally start at the foundation, lay your brickwork until the first window and than well… it makes sense.But in this case, the recycled materials and the old walls are pulling the strings. Some friends decided that they didn’t want to paint their windows every year and bought these plastic ones. Some of the old ones were in good shape, and they didn’t mind me taking them. These windows would decide how big of a...
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3 days ago
by Serradura |
5 comments »
Now I could have finished the roof, I could have finished the back wall, but… I’m always having a bit difficulty with switching between the woodwork and the work with cement and stones. So, when the first section of the roof was on, I decided to make the front door on the second floor. Now, it’s not a door that you can go in and out, it’s about 3,5 meters above the street. I just wanted to have the possibility to load bigger items from the street.
Now it might n...
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10 days ago
by Serradura |
10 comments »
Finally we could order the roof plates. And yes, this was 90% of our budget. It seemed to make sense putting the money in the most important part. Now here in the middle of Portugal the temperature goes from 45 (or even more) degrees Celsius down to almost zero at a cold winter night (we never had frost up until now). So a good isolating roof is one of the first priorities. It wasn’t that difficult to put the “half plates” up. With a little bit of help from my wife it just ...
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15 days ago
by Serradura |
5 comments »
June 2011, finally we started building something. Now for garden walls etc. it’s obvious to use a dry stone techniques. However for the walls of the “workshop to be”, we decided on a hybrid system. This means putting up a mold for the inside, laying the stones in cement (is easier to fill the gabs) and the backside is filled up with concrete and little stones. This all makes it easier to have some rendering on the inside.
We decided way back that we wanted the...
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16 days ago
by Serradura |
6 comments »
The view, the reason for buying a 200 year old derelict cottage at this place in the rural heart of Portugal, is sometimes scary. Bush fires are common during the summer. In this case our view from the hilltop became a dark spectacle.
After a few years you get use to it, and it makes you carefull with fire. Sometimes it’s the only way to get rit things, so at the first rain fall in october….
To show that there is some woodworking involved during the first years of th...
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16 days ago
by Serradura |
6 comments »
The more you dig down into the history of Portuguese building methods, the more respect you get for these craftsmen that made the dry stone walls. I’m not totally inexperienced in the matter. I’ve learned the process of looking for the stone’s face, how to stack them and fill the gabs in between, from a Turkish friend during my stay over there. We did get the all the wood out, and cleaned out most of the space. Just one corner was still filled with stones and dirt. We just d...
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17 days ago
by Serradura |
6 comments »
And there he was, our friend from the Netherlands to help us out. Just for a week or so. Soon we found out that it’s a big advantage to be 22, big and strong. Did we had thought of making a hole in the wall to get everything to the back yard? Yes, we did, but making a hole, where you can go through with a wheel barrel, into a 70 cm thick wall of stones, made us thinking about it, thinking! It must have been about 6 hours later, and there it was, our future door opening all the way up t...
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18 days ago
by Litrenta |
6 comments »
I’ve been wanting to build a new router table for a while now ever since I got rid of my old one. I’ve always like the Norm Abram style router table, I just needed some time to build one. Since the weather is getting nicer and it’s not below freezing up here anymore, I finally got a chance to start this. I used the plans that were available at: http://www.crestonwood.com/router.php
They were a good set of plans to start with and best of all they were free! I’ve comp...
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20 days ago
by Serradura |
3 comments »
It all started in 2007. After selling our Dutch Art & Frame shop we were looking for a new challenge. We traveled around the globe a bit looking for a nice place to settle down and make a new start. (something you should consider every 10 years or so..) Yes, we’ve seen the wales at the coast of British Columbia, lived in a cabin on the beach of Roberts Creek for a while, but to start in the beautiful vicinity of the sunshine coast takes more money than we could ever come up with. We...
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