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...

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.

Heart Pine.

Heart Pine or < 3 Pine as the kids would type these days, means more than just that I like it. It means the heavy dense wood of the Longleaf Southern Yellow Pine that we are using for floor at our current remodel job.

Here are some pics:

From the one side

By the fireplace. Any guesses on how much a piece of slate like that costs?


And from the other side:


That is indeed radiant floor tubing right underneath the floorboards in a specially designed sub-floor called "warm board." It is 1 and 1/8" thick, basically two sheets of CDX plywood with the channels routed into it and then a layer of aluminum stamped over the top of the sheet. It goes down just like regular sub-flooring.

And tomorrow, more building code testing. This time on Residential and Commercial Ventilation.

Adios

---w---

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.