This weekend’s goal is getting the cabinet beside the stove to at least have a usable counter-top. We picked up a beaten up 10’x2’ glued up piece of maple countertop off of Craigslist for $50, and that’s becoming the surface for beside the stoive, and the narrow counter for under the window, with a backsplash cut from the scraps. Today I took a deep breath and cut the first pieces.

As I said, the counter-top was pretty beat up with a few gaps, so as I sanded it down I filled the gaps with cyanoacrylate, hoping that the sawdust would bond with the glue and create a decent filler. The Festool ETS 150/5 EQ Sander is not the best sander to be doing this with, I should have gotten the noisy shakey Craftsman out for this, because even with the vacuum unplugged on the Festool it still didn’t leave a whole lot of sawdust lying around, but we seem to have gotten a fairly smooth surface out off the process. I am, however, going to have to do a little bit more after the rest of the glue-up, because my work surface wasn’t as clean as it should have been and I got a few grains of something embedded in there when I flipped this to do glue-up.

I was hoping to do both sides of the glue-up at once, but it’s hot and dry here today, and that glue was going solid really fast, so I did one, waited twenty minutes, took the squeeze out off with a chisel, waited another half an hour, then did the other side. The edges are held on with floating tenons cut with the Domino, I’m going to have to do a little clean-up with the hand plane before I get the back and partial front pieces on.

(Essentially the same content over at my personal blog)

I debated whether I should put this entry here or over at HomeRefurbers, but that site really hasn’t taken off yet, and the process of coming up with our kitchen cabinets is feeling a whole lot more like woodworking than it is home improvement. Although an upgrade from the 1 person 1947 kitchen will certainly be an improvement.

My arm was good enough this weekend to play in the shop again. My main project was to mock up a prototype to some lightweight appliance lift ideas I’ve had, we want to put the toaster and the vacuum sealer and the blender on appliance lifts, but we want something small, that only takes up 8” or so of vertical underneath the counter, and we don’t need to be swinging a big heavy weight, like a huge mixer, that most of the commercial appliance lifts are engineered for. My prototypes aren’t worth showing off yet, but I also whipped together a second prototype door so that I could become familiar with these newfangled “euro hinge” thingies (kids these days, what will they come up with next, eh?).

So this is a pair of practice doors mounted on a box made of cheap exterior grade plywood.

The frames are Eastern maple that we bought for cheap off Craigslist from a local guy who makes stamp handles. This is his scrap, some of it is beautifully figured heart/sap interface, some of it is just utility maple, but we like the look. The panels are Peruvian mahogany reclaimed from box beams, these are glued up from narrow pieces because this is just prototyping to see if we like it, the actual panels will be one piece for the full width.

The difficult part of these doors is that the frame is mitered. If you’ve ever tried to get 45.0000°, you’ll understand. Also, because I’m cutting with the Festool saw on a rail rather than a table saw, ripping to width takes a little bit of care. I’m getting better at both of those things. The miters are joined with loose tenons (Dominos).

We’re trying to figure out what catch and spring mechanisms we may use, I’m pushing for a handle of some sort, either carved out of mahogany or some darker wood, Charlene’s preferences seem to be running towards the “push to open” mechanisms, but I’m not so much a fan because I think they always get stuck in the wrong position, misfire, and don’t look terribly good.

Feels good to get back in the shop.

So I went home, and the next day my shoulder still hurt, so after work I went to the emergency room and was told I had an ACJ separation, which is where the ball of the top of the arm gets rammed into the socket of the shoulder hard enough to separate the three bones which come together from the back, the rib cage, and the collar bone, to form the socket. Tears ligaments, that sort of thing. So I’ve had my arm in a sling for a few weeks, and will probably be tender for another four.

But I’m starting to feel strong enough to work in the shop, which is good, because…

Today on Craigslist I scored a 10’x2’ maple countertop, which means I’ve got no more excuses for the first two stages of kitchen cabinet. It’s sitting on top of my car right now, I have to figure out how we’re going to get it down with me only having one hand in play, but I think 4’ of it are going to go beside the stove, I’m going to rip the remaining 6’ down the middle for a narrow countertop by our window, and use the remainder for a backsplash. Hopefully I can start on that this weekend.

At any rate, we recently got a Porter Cable 7518 3¼HP router with Jessem Mast-R-Lift lift to swing some of the big bits we’ve been accumulating for the shapes we want for our kitchen cabinets, and before going out of town this weekend I built a second mock-up of what we want our kitchen cabinets to look like.

Next up, I think I’ve figured out how we’re going to do some of our light-weight appliance lifts, so on the list is building one of the more stand-alone cabinet sets in the kitchen, although our office/guest-room is also needing some built-ins, so I may put together a couple of barrister bookcase style shelves for one of the walls. Those will be cherry, which is why I’m hesitating, ‘cause our cash flow is already blowing through money like we had it.

Here’s the result of my backing off from doing through tenons after injuring my wrist when a drill bit grabbed (previous blog entry) on my backyard utility table. Went from nice joinery to glue and screws. Retractable wheels to roll around, when the wheels are up this sucker is rock solid so should deal well with stuff clamped to it for planing or chiseling, and ought to make a nice surface for finishing and glue-up.

The top is an old chunk of bowling alley, the mid-lane portion so it’s probably doug fir, as everything else is. I did have to tweak the wheel mounts a bit ‘cause they want to overextend and bind the wheel against the leg, but they work pretty darned well.

The lesson which hurt most: My Festool C12 cordless drill in low range gearing has a lot of torque. Way more than my DeWalt wall powered drill. Enough to really hurt my wrist when the 1¼” Irwin Speedbore drill bit binds and rips the drill out of my hands.

Made a quick trip out, got another 6×4, and just used lots of glue and screws to finish up the table. Pictures coming shortly, but be careful with those drills.

A few lessons learned:

I really do need to be able to visualize the chair all the way through the seat, the ad-hoc mounting here meant that the seat is a little higher than I wanted, so the backslats don’t ride on my back where I wanted.

The Domino makes joinery almost too easy. I love that tool.

For a real “Maloof” style look I need to be working in thicker wood, on the other hand, ¾” birch actually seems to be pretty darned strong.

And finally, that I should be working down my list fairly methodically rather than throwing things into the queue at random.

Having said that, I think that Charlene and I are going to work on the bathroom vanity and the kitchen cabinets together, and I’m going to try to pull out all of the stops and do a fancy jewelry case for her on my own when she doesn’t feel like being in the shop.

Nothing terribly profound to say here, just working through and learning a lot, in between assorted other projects. I’ve glued the back and the front together, I need to make the seat support so I can glue the front assembly to the back, right now that’s just a test fit. In no particular order:

• Gluing up recurves is harder than I thought it’d be, even with the jig I built to help hold the curve in the backslat. need more clamps.
• I should be less stingy when it comes to saw blade resharpenings, I expect my saw to give me a jointable edge, when it even gets close to not doing that, swap out the blades.
• Need to sand down some Dominos for test fitting, there are a couple in there I put in for test fitting that I had extreme problems getting out.
• I shouldn’t go expecting to be Sam Maloof with 3/4” thick lumber. No matter how you cut it, one axis of curve only looks like one axis of curve.

Hopefully the muse will strike for more entertaining writing with my next entry.

Sunday night we were going to start on the bathroom vanity, but Charlene didn’t feel like hanging out in the shop, so I went out to make some sawdust. We’ve got a bunch of spare birch, so I took the scrappiest of it and started to push the limits of how I interacted with our tools and wood. This is where I’ve gotten to so far.

I had a chair for my office, one of those standard el-cheapo office chairs you get from the big box stores, and it broke. Then we moved, in the process getting rid of a lot of furniture that we didn’t like the style of, and I’ve been sitting in a cloth “director’s chair”, which works fine, but isn’t really doing it for me. I wanted something comfortable, with a back that fit my back, that I could curl up and put a leg under my butt in, and that had a seat angle and size that worked well for me.

When I was a kid, I remember a day of skiing where I was trying to not fall. Towards the end of the day my Dad asked how I was doing and I said, kind of dejectedly, that I’d fallen twice, and he said “that’s great!”, I asked why, and he told me, not knowing my goal for the day, that every fall meant I was pushing my abilities. It’s a wonder that I got through my later teen years, and survived the incident that finally told me that even though I still didn’t know where the limits of my physical abilities were, I didn’t really need to find out, but I approached this project similarly: It’s all about going to places where I make mistakes, and figuring out how I can fix them.

So I started out really organically, cutting the shape of the back supports that I thought would fit my back, sitting on a stool and using the tape measure to figure out how long I thought something should be. I’ve got some bevel cuts that I’m trying to do with the Festool saw on a rail to curve the back slat supports, and obviously I need to cut those square pieces into curves and then route quarter-round profiles on everything so that I get a good organic feel to it, but it’s coming together fairly well.

All the joints are “loose tenons”, which really means I’m cheating and using the Domino (this is the first project I’ve used it for), and I’ve gotta say: That is one flat out incredible tool. With most tools, and even the router table, I’m concerned about my setup. If I have to cut two pieces to a specific length, I make darned sure I only put the stop on the saw fence once. I’ll jump through tremendous hoops to not reset a router stop between routing two pieces.

With the Domino? Oh, yeah, I forgot that I needed another mortise at 7.5° to that edge, okay, let’s dial that in and plunge it…

Anyway, just wanted to get this picture off my camera, more as the chair gets further along.

This is a cutting board. It’s not terribly flat. The boards which make it up are all different sizes. As you can see from the picture, it doesn’t fit in at all with the general decor of the kitchen it’s made for. I didn’t put in the “projects” section because… well… frankly I’m not terribly proud of it, but I had to show it off to someone because…

Nearly 9 years ago, the woman with whom I shared my life for the previous 7 or so, rolled over one morning and told me she was moving out. We parted as friends, in hindsight I admire her for being willing to recognize it was over and do what was the right thing for me, even if it meant some more struggles for her.

A few weeks later I was at a pot luck at an acquaintances house on the Tiburon peninsula, hanging out in the hot tub, and I met Charlene. We talked that first night, late into the night. She didn’t want to be the rebound girlfriend, I didn’t know what I wanted, and… well… we had a rough few first years. We broke up several times, tried couples counseling, in one case got a “heck, I don’t know what to do, seems like you’re coming from different places” sort of reaction, but for some reason we stuck with it.

Friends actually took me aside and asked if my “rescuer” complex was coming into play. Charlene and I tried to start a business, which burned through a lot of money (even by Northern California computer programmer standards). Charlene struggled with money generally, but finally found a job that gave her serious benefits and a career path, as a special education instructional assistant, and we were getting along fairly well.

Several years ago I was laid off, I played around with starting a company of my own but couldn’t figure out what the market for the software I wanted to write was, joined another company, didn’t like their ethics or methods of doing business, so when a friend came along and said “I’ve got a product, I just need a few people to help polish it for market, I can’t pay a salary”, I gave my month’s notice, got them to the next demo, and lived off of savings for a while.

We noticed that a friend had a house that she wasn’t living in but still had her stuff in it, we told her we’d move in, help keep it from falling down, rearrange her stuff, and pay a minimal rent. We learned to live way lean. The bank account dwindled. Charlene got really good at keeping me from spending money, we ate a lot of rice and beans.

A year ago, we were visiting Charlene’s family in Fresno. Her brother is an accomplished woodworker and works in a place that sells Festool products. We went over to visit his shop, got the tour, and Charlene said “you know, we’re always doing projects, this would let us have tools we could break out and use in the living room, we could actually do high quality stuff”, and, as close to zero as my bank account’s been since my early 20s, we scraped out a few thousand dollars on a whim, tied stuff to the roof racks, and drove back with a shop’s worth of Festool.

Somewhere around this time, too, we started to realize that living in the rented house wasn’t working for us. I’d started drawing a salary from the startup at this point, but it wasn’t much, but the market was starting to soften, so we made it our two year plan to buy a house.

In a market where a starter home is half a million bucks.

We scraped and saved and took odd jobs, and except for the few projects posted here, followed by the 200 day pause in posting, the tools languished. Somehow, though, the bank account grew.

In late summer, the CEO of an extremely well funded startup asked me to be CTO. It would have required moving, not far, but far enough that Charlene would have had to give up her job and start again at the bottom rung. We went out one Sunday to go get the pitch from the CEO, and as we were driving home she said “I can see why you’re so excited, but this would totally mess up my work.”

I said something on the order of “well, if this is going to be as good for me as we think it is, then we need to write up a contract so you feel comfortable with moving, because you mean a lot to my life”. She said something like “I think you just proposed to me, and I thought we both agreed that we weren’t interested in marriage.”

I ended up turning down the job, but at the end of November we got married, in December we made an offer on a house, in January we moved in, and in February I gave my notice at the startup to take a job with a real salary again.

This cutting board, this non-flat with burn marks where I tried to make the router bit dig too deep for the pinned cutting board edge, that I’ve had to take all sorts of glue marks off with 80 grit sandpaper, made from scrap maple that we picked up off of Craigslist and, incidentally, finished in walnut oil, is the first finished thing to come out of that shop, and the first step in updating the kitchen from (as you can see from the pictures) well-maintained but 1947 original ancient painted pine or fir cabinets to something we like.

It’s also my first project using my home-built router table and my first cutting board end.

And that’s why I had to share it.

Oh, and as I was struggling with trying to get those scraps flat enough to work into a cutting board, Charlene, now mistress of fiscal responsibility, said “we’re going to get you a planer and a Domino”. So we did (DeWalt 735 on the planer), adding to the many reasons I love her.