Out of Plumb

Stair landing and treds have been coated and except for a final coat that they and the hall will get we are done. Rock is up and textured and the little linen closet has a primer coat. Not much else to say. Be cool stay in school.

One is of the ugly dresser in it’s new form and the other is of the stair landing with a coat of poly on it. My energy is really flagging for this project but it is closing in on the stopping point. I just hope the light I see isn’t a train.

This is called kickback. It is when the table saw blade catches a piece of wood between the blade and the fence and flings it at a high rate of speed, in this case embedding it in 1/2 MDF. Normally kickback means your an idiot. I am not an idiot. I made it kickback for my own amusement. This means I’m a dumb ass.


It was all supposed to be so simple. Just install a few small pieces of sheet rock at the foot of the stairs and the whole hall is done. Yippee! Well then my wife thought how nice it would be this time if I finished the floor before building or sheeting the walls on top of it. So we have to ask ourselves, what do we want on the hall landing? Wood would be good to match the hall floor. What do we have on the landing right now? Green and orange foam back glued down carpet. Mmmm, yummy. Well lets just pull up the carpet and sand the boards down and rock on. Huh. Well lets scrape off the foam padding, sand the boards and rock on. Huh. Well lets just use some solvent, clean the glue off sand and rock. Huh. Well lets just sand off the glue, huh. Lets just rip out the entire landing, install new staircase bracing, turn the blank space under the landing into a storage area, give the inside of the storage area a shiny coat of white pant, cover the landing with new flooring that matches the hall and call it a night. That's just what we did. If we had decided to carpet the landing I’d be done by now.

I am so hot. No I don’t mean like that. (well between me and you I do mean like that but I digress) It has been so hot here the last few days. 107 degrees according to the bank thermometer. The windowless, walk in closet wannabe that I use as an office/junk depository is like sitting in a dry sauna only with more junk and less naked. 92 degrees in here. I am well on my way to leaving a sweaty ass print on the chair. I can post pictures if you’d like.

The Rat-Hole crew stopped by and I almost talked them into hauling home a bunch of stuff but didn’t quite make it. If I had more time I might have gotten rid of the old furnace that has been sitting on the front porch for almost a year. So close!

All I have accomplished is striping and panting the old sideboard/dresser thing we use as crap storage. Its that place were the half dead batteries and dried up pens are carefully preserved for future ah... use? It got me thinking about the importance of the American junk drawer. Some guy on TV this morning called it an epidemic. Like you could catch a bad case of junk drawer.

Doctor: “Nurse, notice the proliferation of hand panted roosters and dried up pens from local dairies, what we have here is an advanced case of Pennsylvania Dutch Drawer Disease.”
Nurse: “Oooo are those batteries any good, the purple ones with no english writing?”

The cabinet I am working on is to be totally honest butt ugly. Type of thing you might find in a meth house. So why you might ask yourself am I trying to save it, well it has six gorgeous drawers. The guy who built it may have had no sense of proportions or style but he knew his drawers. These things could hold a preschooler. They have no roller slides, no fancy Teflon just wood on wood. Rain or shine, hot or cold you can open these things with one hand and close them with one finger. I took one out and weighed drawer and contents on the bathroom scale and it was over 50 lbs and still slid like a dream. Its the one saving grace of the USS Ugly. We could just get rid of it but God forbid we toss out our dried up pens, broken party noisemakers and my ever growing collection of paper scraps with the phone numbers of people I no longer need to call. But what if someday I need to call my study partner from my film and lit class in college? She still lives in that dorm, right?

Before:





After:



We salvaged the old doors because it wasn't in the buget to replace them. I was realy pleased with how they turned out. The hall is done around the corner but the trim is not on yet because I am not sure how we are going to treat the bottom of the stairs. The bathroom door has yet to be transformed. Oh baby I rock.

Seems like no mater what I have been doing in the last few days it has involved slicing and dicing some poor tree. We didn’t really get to running the sawmill as the sub-floor work on the log home my father is working on took longer than we thought. Ran the mill mostly because it is fun to open logs and see what they are like in the inside. Here are some shots, when we cut the bigs ones I will try to get pictures of that too.




Other than that I have been working on the house exclusively. The floor has been stained and has 2 coats of sealer. I am much happier with it now. I have been working on trim but I didn’t make enough last time to do the hall and all the doorways in it so I had to make some more. I made a little photo montage because I find the process interesting even if you don’t. Jerk.

Started with some of the very best floor boards I got for the hall. Picked out and saved anything that was clear, no knots, splits or cracks. The one on the left is what we are shooting for, the one on the right is the starting point.


Trimming off either the tongue or the groove is the first step. It doesn't mater which side.


Now trim the other side and get the board to its final width, in this case 2 inches.


Plane the boards to the right thickness, 1/2 inch works for me. Thicker than that and the trim looks clunky, thinner and it doesn't seem to cover well.


The molding cutter. This is a 3 cutter set up, I love it, very smooth results, sort of like Tony Danza on a cruse ship full of single seniors. Oh baby, its that smooth.


Shaping the trim. The various boards you see clamped to the table are called finger boards. So named because they let you keep your fingers. They have little 'fingers' of wood that apply constant pressure down to the table and sidewise against the fence in a way that it would be unsafe for your wee digits. Not that you would try, the noise the cutter makes when it is spinning is hard to describe but it is between a huge vacuum and a turbine starting up. The sound alone lets your inner monkey know this is no a place to be poking around for a snack.


Changing the cutter from the three grooves to the wide dado. Always put this wide groove on the back of your trim. It makes it so the trim only touches the wall on the edges and greatly helps in keeping things flat and smooth. Irregularities in the wall can be eased by hand planing the back to match. It is how you play with the big boys.



Hooray! The final product. Shot of the front and a shot of the groove in the back. I mean I next had to sand the stuff then stain the stuff and then seal the stuff but that is all kind of normal and needs no explanation right? I mean c’on this is a dial up connection, what more do you want from me?

Well the floor is down in the hall. It was a slow and frustrating thing due to all the shimming but it IS down. I would put my satisfaction level with the job between Eh, and Hmm. The Rat Hole Crew are stopping by later this month so they can give an unbiased opinion. No matter how hard I tried it still isn’t quite right. My wife maintains that it is because I put it down I see all of its shortcomings. If we had the right sander I could have evened it out more but oh well. The nearest place I can rent one of the 2 sheet orbital floor sanders was 120 miles away, for a hall.... couldn’t make myself drive there and back. The old floor sander we have was gouging and unable to work in the close quarters. I had to do it with my POS belt sander and a 1/2 sheet random orbit. Good advice if you are looking for tools, a cheap belt sander is WORSE than no belt sander. Spend a little more than I did on my B&D and you will be ever so much happier. After I write this I stain. Tonight I will give it its first coat of poly followed by a second tomorrow morning. Then I am out of town running the sawmill. Cutting up some awesome cedar. I will post pictures of that when I get back, maybe tues.

Or that's what we decided to name it. I wanted to name it The ‘Bitch’ but my wonderful wife questioned the wisdom of angering such a machine with an insulting monicker. It is an old Milwaukee 3/4 HP angle grinder. I cut a disk of wood that fit behind the blade and limited the cutting depth. I was able to slice right along the walls with relative ease, at least on the long straight runs.

Also found a neat trick to do with the sawz-all blades that works real well. About 3” up the blade bend it off to one side a little. This allows you to get in close to the wall. Not as quick as The ‘Beast’ but had I figured it out ahead of time I never would have bothered with The ‘Beast’ in the first place. The ‘Beast’ was neither as dangerous or as hard to control as I thought it would be. Found out later what I constructed is called a “flush cut saw” should you ever need to rent a proper one. The ‘Beast can not be borrowed, I have already taken it apart as a deterrent to keep me from ever using it again. A picture of the work in progress.

With the floor removed we needed to find a source for fir flooring. It is not something the hardware store stocks locally. They had the tongue and groove but it was the fancy Blue Pine and would not match. One of the guys who work the yard recommended a local sawmill who might have some in stock. The place was Silcox Ranch and Lumber out of Thompson Falls. Great guys who gave me a much better deal than the price in town. for $120 I bought 3 times the lumber I needed to do the floor. This way I can be very selective about what I put down, matching the old floors as best I can and still have lumber left over to do trim and build things to sell in the co-op.

I just want to end with a shot that proves just how good I am. The ability to drive a nail through the sub-floor down into the floor joist and bisect the main 3/4 inch hot water line is not something you can learn. Your born with it.

Yay back to house stuff. Started on the hall floor so that I can actually finish something. First we had to strip off all of the old vinyl flooring to expose a disappointing find, the fir floor underneath is crap. I had visions of a simple sanding job and finishing fast and easy, no such luck.


Now it was choice time. As you can see the hall floor is something of a fun house attraction. It slopes 1 1/4 in its 36 inch width. That sucks big time and is very noticeable.

If I was just to level it off and put a new fir floor on top we would be looking a a 2 inch step down into the bathroom a 3/4 step up into the hall and a 3/4 step down into the bedroom. Not a very satisfying choice but relatively simple. The other option was to cut out the first layer of old floor and instal new. This will give me a 1 1/4 step down into the bathroom but no steps into the hall or bedroom. Not perfect but better. The hard part is carrying this out. Not only are all of the renovations I have done sitting on this floor but all of the original house is as well. This means flush cutting through the flooring right up against the walls. Now a smarter person than I might have pointed out that had I done this before finishing the walls the process might be less traumatic. Not me, I like to work this way keeps things interesting. Its like my own personal fung- shui, that means ‘dumb ass’ right?





The Skill saw cuts it like butter but the blade guard keeps the saw 1 1/2 off the wall so that is no good. Using the sawz-all was a simple choice but since I am only cutting with the first inch or so of blade I can only get a foot or so before that one inch is too dull to cut. When I mounted the blade in the machine upside down I was able to get a better angle and doubled the blade life but I am still looking at 20-25 linear feet of wall to cut and it is going to take forever.

I am blessed with all sorts of big tools I’ve picked up at auctions over the years and I have a devious modification idea that might turn one of them into a floor cutting god. I will show it only if it works and I keep all of my fingers, okay, I will show it if it works and I keep most of my fingers.

***Sigh***



I am a glutton for punishment and so in order to make my tools pay for themselves I have rented space in a local co-op gallery to sell stuff. It is like e-Bay but with out the shipping hassle and lacking the omnipotent power rush that comes from canceling deadbeat bids. Just call me Nasgourd of the planet lotsofshit. Now I can go and watch my stuff not sell locally rather than on line. Apparently the way to sell dull, rusty saws is not to clean and sharpen them but to paint flowers and possibly elves on them. Elves... I am going to put some rat traps in my space and bait them with Lucky Charms. Who’s frolicking now!

Well we are back from the trip. I thought it was a blast, my wife less so. Seems there were too many rocks and too few shops. Oregon was hot and the Madras rock digs were uneventful. Some of the sites to dig are only open once a year but the average age had to hover around 64. It was spec-geriactric-ular! Once we got off by ourselves at glass butte it was more interesting. Mountain of volcanic glass, but no, sigh, it does not twinkle in the sun. I was so disapointed. I now have hundreds of pounds of rainbow, green sheen, silver sheen, gold sheen and mahogany obsidian. If anyone has any ideas about what to do with hundreds of pounds of obsidian drop me a line. Suppository jokes will be forwarded to the proper religious authorities. All pictures of the trip are on high resolution and so I will not be posting them on my dial up connection. I do have cute shots of the dog helping us unload the trailer. Turns out that if you just wiggle under the couch and around the rocks you CAN see what everyone is doing!




As it was the first day back I didn’t do anything on the house. Lazy boy. I had a dresser sitting around that we were up in the air about keep it or sell it... It all hinged on how it looked refinished. We decided not to keep it, just didn’t fit with the rest of the real old stuff. I still have this feeling I will see it on Antiques Road Show some day and one of the twins will ask “do you want to know how valuable it would be if…”
Bastards.