Weekend Work

House Update: This weekend my mother in law visited on the weekend and some good friends visited Sunday and Monday night. As a result I didn’t get a lot of wood working done, but had a great time with the various guests. I did finish routing and pre-sanding the base boards for the family room. The house we are fixing up is a 1900 row home and has real brick walls with plaster (in most cases). The plaster stops short of the floors by 6” or so. They left this space to run electrical wires etc. The base boards are about 10” tall and are made of 3 pieces of wood. The bottom piece is about 7/8×1-3/4” it has one corner rounded over and has a groove. This bottom piece is attached to the floor and supports the bottom of the main piece which has a tung on the bottom and a lap cut in the top. The top piece is 2-1/2” tall molding and is attached to the top board via the lap joint. I was thinking of making these two from one piece of stock but I’m limited to router profiles and the profiles were all too small.

We also got the family room carpet rough cut. The carpet is not intended to be a long term addition to the family room (less than 5 years). The long term plan is to have bamboo floors in all the non-wet spaces. With the recent addition to the family we elected to postpone the bamboo and to carpet the family room.

In a happy woodworking note I got 2 pieces of crotch walnut I’m going to use some of it on a music box. I’m 99% sure I’m going to scrap the original plans as well as the modifications to make it fit in the wood joinery contest. I’ve modernized the design a lot. Basic idea is a tiger maple box with hand cut dovetails. The top will be frame and panel with a tiger maple frame and walnut panel. The one piece of walnut is FABULOUS I would really like to re-saw it and use it as a book matched panels in a small jewelry case. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can use the straight parts of the walnut for the frame…

More later.

-- Che.