A working vacation....

Well, I got everything in Maine put to bed for a few weeks and we hit the road on Monday, driving about 850 miles to Pittsburgh where we enjoyed the hospitality of my cousin. She just managed the construction of a good sized industrial plant near DC, so we discussed industrial processes until the wee hours of the morning. After five hours of sleep, we rose to an early breakfast at the Dor-Stop Diner, which claimed home cooked goodness, but only offered non-dairy creamer for the coffee and neglected to give me any butter for my French Toast. A diner is a diner though.

We blasted across Ohio and Indiana making good time, even through Ohio's abundant construction. I would vote for any provision that would raise their speed limit to 80mph. As for Chicago traffic, I cannot say enough about how much 'open road' tolling has improved the drive around the city. We made it from Gary, Indiana to Gurnee, IL in less than two hours, and with an EZ-Pass you don't even have to slow down on I-294.

We spent a pleasant evening visiting with my brother's family near Gurnee. By 10pm we made it the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee where we are staying with another one of my brothers. I'll post some pictures from the drive soon.

In order to keep the bills satisfied, I'm spending this trip working for friends and relative's businesses like Outdoor Living Solutions in Milwaukee and possibly BrownSmith Restoration in Minneapolis. I'm also trying to drum up some sales for the Cathance River Stools that Paul Baines and I build in Maine.

In a week.

Sometimes it feels like you don't get anything done in a week, and other times, it all falls into place and you get a lot done. This week Paul and I finished assembling and sanding all 60 stools and 40 chairs for a new restaurant opening up in Freeport, ME. Our part is done now; all that's left is for them to go to the finish guy to get a few coats of lacquer. Then we deliver the product. What a relief to be done with them. May God be praised for sustaining us through it. We've been hard at it six days-a-week for over two months.

Finished Cathance River Low-Back Barstools waiting for delivery.

I took my first Saturday off in months to get a few things done around the house. I started with coffee, bacon and pancakes. We finally got the last of our stuff out of the attic of our old apartment, and we're finally settling in at our new place. Many thanks to our friend Ivan the Mechanic for getting me a new muffler on the Honda in a about 45 minutes flat.

I guess I need a muffler. My car was starting to sound like the Fast and the Furious.

And right after dinner yesterday, I got the dryer all hooked up and working. We've never had our own washer and dryer, so this is a big deal. (And I got to buy a 4" hole saw out of the deal.)

Not bad for $140 on Craigslist.

An army of Cathance River Side Chairs awaits our command ( or the finish guy )

More good news: KT's job has assured funding through the end of September, so there's now time for the state legislature to make up their minds about whether or not they will fund early-childhood home-visiting programs throughout the state

Sanding the curved backs of the barstools with a 5" random orbit sander and 120 grit.

With a few things around here to wrap up in the next week or two, I'm hoping to make a trip out to the midwest to visit with family and friends who I haven't seen in a while, that I might not see for a while if I don't make the trip soon.

Finish sanding the last side chair with 180 grit paper. The culmination of 8 weeks of work.

I'm also pretty excited about my new drill and driver combo. Paul is always harassing me for using his impact driver, so I had to do something about it. We had a Home Depot gift card and did exactly what they want you to do: spend twice as much money as your gift card. So when I saw this combo for just over $200 I couldn't pass it up.

I needed something to drive that 4" hole saw, as if the other three drills I own weren't going to work...

Ch-ch-ch-changes......

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

Bowie didn't know how right he was. Or maybe he did. At least in the chorus.

We are going through out own set of changes. We're moving to a new place on short notice this week in order to position ourselves better for our next move, which hopefully will be to a home I build with my own hands at The Land of Goshen on the Egypt Road.

KT still hasn't heard about whether she'll have a job at the end of June.
I sold the motorcycle.

I'm selling the boat and the big truck.

And I've been basically retraining for a related but largely new career in fine woodworking and furniture making. Carpentry is still a backup source of income, but not a place I want to be stuck forever (life's length still seems like forever when you're only 27). I'm just old enough to wish I had done a number of things differently, but still young enough to do a a number of things differently.

Today is a good day to start.

Here's to the new morning tomorrow. I hope its about more than peeps and bunnies and spring.

Happy Easter.

By popular demand.

By popular demand, I have taken some photos of the mangled and maligned right rear of the truck.


Fortunately I mashed the other tail light not too long ago, so I had the innards to zip tie onto the damage and get a temporary light on there.

I just can't seem to keep from putting holes in mah jeans and dents in mah truck....

(sounds like a terrible country song about a string of bad relationships....maybe I should move to Nashville.)

In other news, it looks like spring might be just around three or four more corners. I'm doing some more work in collaboration with Paul Baines Fine Woodworking. You can see a new barstool prototype on his Facebook that we are doing for a restaurant in Freeport, ME not far from L.L. Bean's.

And, I got the Honda Civic (henceforth to be called the Swamp-mobile or SM due to its ambient odor) running again after doing emergency surgery one evening last week. All she needed was a distributor transplant. She's scheduled for an elective O2 sensor-ectomy and transplant this spring but that can wait until excess funds are available. For now though, SM will convey me to work while the Dodge can stay home and think about why it should avoid stationary objects in the future.

Thats the news from the Country Estate.

custom.

One of the reasons restoration and period remodeling is sooooo expensive is that every single piece of trim, molding, casing, etc is customized in some fashion because you just can't get this or that molding profile from your local lumberyard. So you get whatever is close to what you need then you turn your tablesaw or router table or even your handplane into the appropriate tool to mill up the profile that matches the rest of the house. In this case, the window and door casing in the rest of the house has a molding on its outside edge with bead on the inside edge and we need to match it.....make sense?


So I set up this conglomeration of clamps and festival of featherboards (actually there's only two) to hold the stock in the right spot as I run it over one third of a triple bead cutter on this here old makita table saw in the basement of the house we're working on.


A little closer up. Fence on the right with a featherboard holding the stock down and setting the location of the bead. Featherboard on the left holding the stock against the fence. You can see the cutter head of the 'blade' on the saw. I'm only using the right third of the cutter.


A top view maybe gives a little more clarity. Or maybe not.


The finished molding with the extra bead added on the right. When its finished and installed, it will be indistinguishable from the original.

Bamboo and Mahogany

So a friend Paul and I were messing around last spring with using unfinished bamboo flooring for various furniture pieces and here's a table we put together. It was a collaborative design with me doing most of the actual woodworking. The top is 'solid' bamboo flooring glued up like a regular table top with the 'frame' being made of mahogany (sipo) mitered and biscuit joined at the corners. A typical wood panel would destroy the mitered corners with seasonal movement, so this was a bit of an experiment. The bamboo has nearly zero seasonal expansion and contraction. We recently started using the table as a computer desk in the living room, next to a fir bookshelf that I made a few years ago from timber cut-offs and rips (and unfortunately stained a dark shade).


I love two things: 1. the bamboo flooring is wicked hard, so no worries about writing on paper on the bare surface and 2. the fact that we still use my teddy bear lamp from when I was a kid. I'm saving it for our own kids some day, until then it will be in the living room. Below, a closeup of the leg-apron detail.


In front of the table, a maple 18" Cathance River Stool. A birthday gift for KT from its maker.


I was a little skeptical about the colors matching well, but after a coat of wipe-on poly they seemed to go together well enough.


Work continues on the remodel project as well. Here is a counter-top (remember the glued up panels from a week or two ago?) installed (yet unfinished) on one of the built in units. A window-seat of the same material will be installed in the foreground this week.


The counter top meets up perfectly with the window sills and then continues into another counter top at the same level.

I had to perform surgery on the other counter top because one of the quarter-sawn planks decided to check for half its length. A little West-System epoxy, a heat gun and some clamps solves the problem. What epoxy has joined together, man nor nature cannot separate.

In other news, we're back from all the Christmas/New Year's traveling. The house is somewhat back in order after my bachelor week. The snow is melting again. The days are getting longer, just a little.

May you all find contentment and peace this 2011.

more and more

Well the job continues, working with more and more interesting and beautiful pieces of that Longleaf Southern Yellow Pine.

Above you can see the rough framing and cabinet carcasses for the cabinetry, window seats and counter-tops.


Stock for the bookshelf sides glued up, scraped, planed, sanded, jointed and rabbeted....some of them are book-matched sort of. The wood came from the same timber.



Bookshelf vertical divider stock glued up.


Counter tops and window seat stock in the rough, waiting for finish cutting and installation.

I have to miss all the fun tomorrow while I go take Maine's residential building code exam.....

glue-ups

Raised panel stock glued-up and ready.


Counter top stock glued-up.


I had to call everybody I knew to get enough pipe and bar clamps to glue all those panels and counter tops. The counter tops are made of 6 or 7 quarter-sawn longleaf pine 5/4 stock, planed, jointed, biscuited and glued. There is one more counter top to glue up. its 24" wide and 12' 6" long. That may be a two man job.

Oh the places....

Another day at the office. This time, the office is in Berlin, Maryland, just west of Ocean City. Raising a 24x48' high-posted cape with a 10x24' kitchen addition.

Lifting the first bent (in this case Bent 5) off of the assembly area in the grass. We assembled on the grass to avoid messing around with the plumbing stubs sticking out of the slab.

Bent 4 coming to meet bent 5. Bent five is temporarily supported by two diagonal kickers to the mudsill and two come-a-longs to my truck, out of frame on the left.

John, master crane operator.

Bents 4 and 5 up and connected with lower connectors hung with their braces by come-a-longs from above. Bents 3, 2, and 1 assembled on the ground.

Bents 2,3,4, and 5 raised, connected and joisted. End of day 1.

Last bent (bent 1) raised and connected.

Flying in a daisy chain of purlins.

Shed Rafters and collars hung from main rafters, waiting for shed wall section.

All done. Homeowner (right) and I nailing on the traditional evergreen sprig on the gable.

Completed frame. Trailer packed. End of Day 2. Next stop: Ocean City beach.

Post/Girt/Connector Joinery

Queen Post, Collar, Rafter joinery seen thru the stair opening.

The Strip, Ocean City, MD: 8 miles of high-rises, t-shirt shops, bars and traffic.

George Washington Bridge. New York City.

After two days of work and two days of driving, I'm quite happy to be home in Maine where things aren't quite so crazy and the weather is perfect.

Guillotine Tree

I saw this goofy tree scene this afternoon while traipsing round the woods on the Wagner Estate. Off with its head!

The guillotine tree.

Earlier in the day, I was turning reclaimed lumber into window and door trim, like this:



You can read about the rest of that story here.

Other than that, Winter drags on, slowly here in Maine.

News from the Country Estate August 31

Greetings

Instead of flying, next time I'll just ship myself home in a big box. Now that would be a fun package to open on the porch!



Despite the so-called economic crisis, we've been keeping busy. Here are some pictures from a shed now dubbed the "studio". Note the custom plexi-glass gable windows.


I had the pleasure of trimming out a room for our friends over at Tandem Glass Studio and Gallery.
And the hens are finally laying eggs in earnest. A size comparison from biggest to average size egg.
I went out to find ELEVEN eggs in the coop this morning. I couldn't even hold them all, I had to put three in my pocket.

Well, we've got about 10 days of nice weather ahead, so if you need us, we'll be outside.

w

News from the Country Estate July 26

Greetings from the Country Estate:

Summer made a cameo appearance this week with temps in the 80's and high humidity. The gloomy skies of clouds, fog, and rain more typical of this year's summer returned however, with today barely reaching 70 degrees and intermittent rain showers. On Friday we received more than an inch of rain in five hours during a 'nor'easter'. KT and I did some rainy day shopping and saw the latest Harry Potter movie for a matinee price. An ok film. Just ok.

During a break in the rain last week I was finally able to install some relatively hard to find shock absorbers on my sailboat trailer. They are actually snowmobile shocks, but they're just the right size for minimizing radial oscillation due to cornering. They were about $20/a piece and non-returnable, so I was pretty glad when they did the trick.

After strapping the boat down, I was ready to bring the vessel home. The drive was relatively uneventful and boat, truck and driver arrived in good spirits.

Now in storage under a tarp next to another in progress boat project, she waits for some more time and money to tackle a few projects before she is seaworthy once more.

The end is in sight for the building project that never seems to end. Here we see the 34'x51' timber frame home after two days of raising work. There are only about 8 lifts left, just four dormer assemblies, four rafters and a dormer truss on the far side of the building. The second floor has 19 feet of headroom at the peak of the roof. That's a great height if you are going to house the raptor exhibit at the zoo....We'll build whatever they want.

A hen left a peace offering of a single egg on our deck after both roosters spent the afternoon digging up my tomato patch and fouling our deck. I immediately fried the peace offering to over-easy and partook of it with salt and pepper.

Probably the freshest egg I have ever eaten.

Inspired by my fresh egg experience, I went out to the garden and harvested a bunch of lettuce, some scallions, and a turnip for a mid-afternoon feast. I chopped and fried the turnip and scallions, adding two fresh eggs to make a country scramble.

I regret not planting four times as much in the garden, but who knew the weather would be this wet?

I spent the afternoon studying poultry slaughter techniques in preparation for the next time the roosters decide that its a good idea to hang out and crow by our window at five in the morning or dig up the tomatoes again.

Tomorrow its off to work again thankfully and hopefully all week.