M.T. Acres

Working on the house this week was a lot of odds and ends.

I continued building the shelf for behind the wood stove in the living room.

I decided to glue up the shelf top first then glue the back pieces to it.  My primary reason for glueing it in that order is because the mitre joint on the top is the weakest joint in the assembly and it is the one that must be glued perfectly or the defects will show.  So I decided to use a biscuit to strengthen it some.

The biscuit will not make it super-strong, but it should provide enough rigidity to be able to turn it over a few times as Tina finishes it.  Once it is hung on the wall, physics will take over and the strength of the mitre joint will not matter.

Glueing the top of the shelf together ended up being a lot easier than I expected.  a clothespin clamp on the corner made sure the tops were aligned properly and a plywood gusset allowed me to clamp it perfectly square.

Next up was glueing the back pieces on.  They required a lot of clamps, but were really not too bad to get the miters to line up and keep them square.

I wanted to let it dry overnight before I unclamped it but could not resist test fitting it after about 4 hours.

It came out exactly as I wanted and seems pretty strong.  The next day, after it had a full 24 hours to cure, I lifted myself up on it and it did not even creak or groan.

The next day, I made the moldings for the edges of the tile and Tina finished them.  They are just a simple “L” shape molding with a round over on the corners showing.

I had to glue them in place with construction adhesive because neither one was anywhere close to a stud.  One side, I had to hold in place with blue tape, the other I was least to rig up a couple clamps to hold it while the adhesive dried.

The final product came out looking pretty dang good I think!

With that, the true woodworking on the house is done – kind of a bitter-sweet moment for me.

I spent the rest of last weekend finishing up the molding.  First on the pocket door in the master bedroom…

Then the rest of the baseboard in the rest of the house.

I finished the baseboard about noon last Saturday.  As soon as it was done I got a cup of coffee and went out on the back porch and sat down and realized M. T. Acres is done.  We do still have the tile backsplash to do in the kitchen, which we are doing this coming weekend, plus a bunch of other stuff.  But for all intents and purposes, our home is as complete as it needs to be to support us comfortably.

For about the first 5 minutes I was sitting there, I was basking in the glow of a job well done.  Then, all at once, every ache and pain that I have been ignoring for the last 14 months came upon me (with interest).  My entire body hurt like hell but I was still grinnin’ like an idiot.  We did it.  We built a home.

Epilogue 

I will continue to make posts to the M. T. Acres blog as we continue our transition to a MUCH better life in rural AZ.  But the frequency will be less.  I will post the pictures of next weekend’s tile job of course.  But then I am taking the monsoon season off, so you may not see much for a month or so.

After that, Tina has more than a few project planned for me:

And those are just for the house.  She did not include the “outbuildings” which include an “Art Shack” for Tina to do her sewing, drawing, painting etc. (that is the next one), a “Cook Shack” for us to smoke and grill meat, make sausage, and entertain friends and ourselves and a chicken coop.

So stay tuned, there is a lot more detailed woodworking and construction coming up, plus a bit of commentary.

But thanks for following us through this adventure.  It has been my dream and Tina’s nightmare.

Tina spent the weekend back in Minnesota this week so she could attend our younger daughter, Katie’s, baby shower.  Katie and her husband Mark will be giving us twin grandsons on September 28th.  Needless to say, the whole family is very excited.

The glass people got the glass cut and installed on all of the top kitchen cabinet doors.  However, when I picked them up, I noticed one that I was not happy with.  The stile on one side of the door had warped a bit before Tina got a chance to varnish it.  So rather than clamping it flat before they glued the glass in, the glass people just fit as best they could and filled the gap with silicon.  Needless to say, it looked like crap.

So before we did anything, I cut the glass out and redid it.

They are just glued in with clear silicon so I was not too worried about the warped stile cracking the glass.  I let it dry overnight to make sure the silicon was good and dry, then I unclamped it.  It worked perfectly.  The glass held the warped stile almost perfectly straight and once I got the hinges screwed to the cabinet, the hinges pulled it the rest of the way straight.

Before Tina left she got the base cabinet doors finished.  So I was able to get all of the cabinet doors hung.

I think they came out looking pretty dang good.

The last thing to do to complete the kitchen cabinets was to make moldings for the toe-kick.  Those were real easy to make, but time consuming to finish.  I started by planing some stock down to 3/8 inch thick.

Then I just cut them to size and finished them.

Finally, I installed them and the kitchen cabinets are done!

While I was waiting for the finish to dry on the cabinet moldings, I decided to put up some more base moldings.  That also turned out to be a slow and time consuming process because the living room is now filled with furniture.  So for every stick of molding I put up, I had to move several pieces of furniture.  But it came out looking good.

I still have quite a bit more base molding to do, but before I go much further in the living room, I need to make some custom moldings for around the tile behind the wood stove.

The moldings for the sides will be easy to make, but on the top, Tina wants a shelf.  I guess she thinks we just do not have enough flat surfaces to collect dust in the desert.

I had an idea for how to do the shelf, but am not sure how well it is going to work.  I started off by making some cleats that I could screw solidly to the wall.

Then I planed the back part of the shelf to 1/2 inch thick and glued a cleat to the top of it.

The top of the shelf will be rabbited and glued to the top of the back.

I do not know how solid the shelf will be once the top is on.  But worst case, I can run some decorative screws to hold it up if need be.  Although I really do not want screws to be showing if I can avoid it.

I test fit the back pieces and they seem solid enough.  They do not seem to have a tendency to “roll forward”.  I will let you all know how it turns out in next week’s installment.

Living the bachelor life for the weekend, I have also had to cook my meals and such.  For me, that means BBQ since that is about the only cooking I am good at.  But I was very proud of myself, I was even able to load up and run Tina’s fancy new dishwasher without incident!

I was not even tempted to eat the Tide Pod even though it looks like candy!

Last weekend I continued my work on the kitchen cabinet doors by cutting and sanding all of the flat panels for the base cabinet doors.

Then I glued up all of the doors for both base and top cabinets.

Before I started to work on the outside edges of the doors, I wanted to get the pocket holes drilled for the stupid European hinges as well as the holes for the handles.  I wanted to do them before I did anything with the outside edges because cleaning up the outside edges does change the dimensions of the door slightly.  Since I want stupid European hinges to be positioned exactly on the frames of the cabinets, I thought it best to machine the mechanical parts of the door first.

When I drilled the holes for the handles on all of the drawers as well as the doors on the bathroom vanity, I just measured them by hand with a machinist’s rule.  Although that works, it is a slow process and is given to slight inaccuracies that needed to be reamed out when I installed the handles.

For these, I decided to break out my trammel points to position the holes.

Why I did not think of these for all of the other handles I drill, I do not know.  It made the process considerably faster as well as much more accurate.

In the end, I got the holes drilled in about 1/4 the time it would have taken me doing it by hand and when I test fitted the handles, they fit perfectly.

When fitting the rails and stiles together during glue up, I had to trim and adjust the mortises and tenons a bit to get the inside of the joint nice and tight.  That left the top and bottom of the stiles standing a bit proud of the top and bottoms of the rails.

So, the next step was to spend some quality time with my belt sander to get all of the corners nice and flush and square.

The next step was to put the final profile on the outside edges.  We used a real simple 1/2 inch round-over for the outside, primarily because of the dust in the desert.  I think we should be able to get away with a simple edge because of the glass and the fancy crown moulding on the cabinets.

My last effort, last weekend, was to get the hinges installed and test fit the bottom cabinet doors.

Getting the hinges positioned on a door for any corner base cabinet is always an effort in frustration.  I made two of these for our kitchen in Minnesota and neither one came out very good as far as I was concerned.  Since this is going to be our “forever home”, I wanted it to come out right.

So, I took a couple of perfectly square plywood boxes that normally hold nails and screws in my workshop and used them as a template for holding the door parts square while I drilled the holes for the hinges.

Then, I went ahead and drilled and screwed the piano hinge on.

Note: You may notice, the piano hinge is a seriously heavy-duty beast.  Amazon claimed it is designed to hold over 600 pounds.  The reason I bought such a monster is that is was the only piano hinge I could find that was also a full 3 inches wide.  That, plus it cost me a whopping $8 as opposed to $48 per hinge for the ones that are designed for corner cabinets.  So, not only did I save $88, I got a door that is many times stronger than if I had gone with the “correct” way of doing it.

The end result came out better than I had hoped.

I had to step away from house building Monday through Wednesday this week to be able work my normal job and be able pay the taxes and insurance on this dump, so Tina took over working on the cabinet doors.

Our original plan was finish the bottom doors first and leave the finishing of the top cabinet doors until after we had the glass for them.  But the estimates for the glass came in at about 1/3 the cost we expected!  So we decided to let the glass people install the the glass instead of us doing it ourselves.  The big reason being, they have the tools to do any fine fitting whereas we would have to fine fit the glass by carving away at the doors.

So Tina’s big push this week was to get the top doors sanded and finished while I was working on work stuff, with enough time left for me to test hang them and get them back to the glass shop before close of business on Friday.

Sanding and finishing is a pain to begin with.  But sanding and finishing furniture joints is MUCH more work than sanding and finishing traditional cabinetry joinery.  Even when the joinery is machine cut, nothing ever fits perfectly flush.  Inconsistencies in the wood as well as differences in the temperature and humidity make a HUGE difference in how tightly the parts fit together.  Sanding, especially with the courser, low number, grits is a LOT of work.

She spent 3 1/2 days sanding and sanding and sanding, then finishing and more finishing and more sanding.  But the end result was absolutely outstanding!

I marked the worst joint that I had on the top doors and this is what it looks like now.

Today, I had the day off from work so after Tina put the last coat of varnish on the top doors and they had a chance to mostly dry, I drilled them for hinges and we test fitted them on the cabinets.

Tomorrow, we will take the drive to Tucson to pick up the last of the base moulding, a few more red oak boards to finish off the custom moldings I need to make and drop off the doors with the glass people.

We are nearly done with the house.  We basically, have only 3 more main efforts to complete – moulding, a shelf behind the wood stove in the living room and the backsplash behind the kitchen counter.  I am finally ready for the construction to be done.  But I am also not sure what I am going to do with myself when it IS done.  Today, waiting for the last coat of varnish to dry on the kitchen doors, with nothing to do, I was crawling out of my skin!

This week has been HUGE at M. T. Acres!

It started with Tina getting the baseboard moldings varnished for the guest bedroom.  Then I got them installed, with the help of Belle of course.

Tina varnished a few more sticks of molding than I needed for the guest bedroom, so I decided to just use up what she had varnished in the guest hallway and part of the main hallway.

I think I did a pretty good job getting the outside corners to match up as well.

With the guest bedroom done and my office done, Tina was able to spend the rest of the week attacking the big pile of stuff we had stored in the living room.

When we got the occupancy certificate for M. T. Acres and moved from the rental house, we did not bother to unpack many boxes since we are still working on the house.  So we just made a great big pile of furniture and boxes in the living room to keep the rooms we were working on empty.  Most of the boxes had not been opened since we packed them in Minnesota.  We literally had a path about 18 inches wide going from the door of the master bedroom to the kitchen/dining area.  The rest was pretty much, floor-to-ceiling boxes and furniture!

With two good sized rooms now done, Tina was able to work her butt off to get things actually unpacked and moved into my office and the guest bedroom, and more importantly, get the pile in the living room gone!

This is wonderful!  It is the first time M. T. Acres has felt like a “home” rather than just another “work in progress”.  As I write this, Tina is sitting in the living room, which is empty except for the stuff that belongs in living room, watching a DVD on our real TV connected up to our real sound system!

For my part, I started on making the doors for the kitchen cabinets.  Normally kitchen cabinet panel doors are pretty easy to make because the stiles (the vertical pieces) and the rails (the horizontal pieces) joined using a cope & stick joint.  That joint only requires a matched set of router bits and 2 passes on the router table to make the completed joint.

https://www.mlcswoodworking.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/smarthtml/pages/rail_and_stile_router_bits1.html

The problem with it is you can only give the doors a profile of one of the 6 or 8 profiles they make router bit sets for.

We want to minimize the fillets and ogees (grooves, etc.) that can collect grease and dust due to living in the desert.  Also, since all of the top doors are going to have glass panels, we need the doors to be strong.  So I opted to use an old furniture-maker’s joint called a mitre & mortise joint.  The mitre & mortise joint is a complex joint, but it can mostly be cut with the table saw and only requires hand work with a bench chisel to clean up the cuts and do the final fitting of the joint.

Before I started on the doors however, I decided to make jig to make it easier to cut the joints.  I decided to call the jig Barbie because she loves to be accessorized.

Next, I decided to make an “accessory” to allow me to make cross-grain cuts with a stop on the left side of the saw blade.  This allows me to use the same setup regardless of how long or short the rails and stiles are.

The next “accessory” was a fence to allow me to make very accurate rip cuts.

Finally, I made an accessory for cutting tenons.

As you will in next few minutes, Barbie turned out to be a great thing.  However, I am left feeling pretty stupid for not figuring out to make it 15 years ago!

On to doing the joinery…

The first thing I did was cut the mortises in the stiles.  This is one of the few cuts in this joint where I had some wiggle room on cutting it accurately.

Next I cut the mitres on the stiles, then the rails.  These have to be exactly 45 degrees and the depth of the cut has to be exactly 3/8″.  Also the location of the cut on the stiles has to be exactly 2 3/8″ from the end of the stiles (because the stock is a total of 2 3/8″ wide) and 1 3/8″ from the end of the rails (because I am using 1″ tenons).

Then I set the saw blade to 90 degrees and cut the shoulders for the tenons on the rails.

The placement and depth of the cut must be extremely precise.  Anytime I need a cut to be extremely precise, I always cut it a little bit short and do the final fitting with a chisel.

Then I changed the saw blade to a rip blade and setup Barbie for the vertical cuts.  I started by trimming down to the top of the mitre on the stiles.

Next I cut the outside, then inside haunches around the tenons on the rails.

Finally, I dressed Barbie with her tenoning “accessory” and cut the tenons.

After spending a day and a half cleaning and fitting each joint with a bench chisel, I was able to dry fit the joint together and see how they are going to look.

Obviously, I am pretty dang happy with how tight they came out!

Once I was confident all of the joinery is going to fit together, I was able to cut the dados to hold the flat panels on the bottom doors and the rabbits to hold the glass on the top doors.

Finally, I routed the decorative edge on the insides on all of the rails and stiles and did a final dry fitting.

I am pretty pleased with myself for how these are coming out.  I have not done any “fine woodworking” in about 2 1/2 years and the last time I did, it was sloppier than what I like.  So I was concerned that maybe my skills were diminishing.  But after doing these, I am confident that my skills are still there.

Hey acre heads!  Sorry for not writing anything for so long.  It really has not felt like we accomplished much in the last month but as I look back through the photos, I guess we have done quite a bit.

Tina got the last of the three bookcase carcasses varnished.  But we did not dare try to move it into the room because we had pretty severe winds.  We have to carry them outside the house and feed them through a window because each section is too big to make it through the doorway.  But we eventually got it moved into place and got them squared using the cabinet jacks I made.  Those made it a LOT easier to try and square the sides.

Then it was on to making the face frames and moldings

The face frames were a serious headache because they are too big to glue up in my wood shop and move indoors.  So they had to be glued up in my office.

Let me tell you… doing 10 foot clamps in a 12 foot room is not fun at all!

But we got it done

And got them hung on the bookcase.

Then I made and installed the moldings for the top and bottom.

I did an inlay on those as well.

I bought this inlay from a different place than the ones for the kitchen.  This was great stuff to work with!  It is thick, more than twice the thickness of the inlay I used in the kitchen.  Also, it is a lot more consistent on the width which makes it much easier to work with.  The woods in this one are Black Walnut, Ebony and Holly.

I had a week out of town for business so Tina was able to get the bookcase sanded and varnished.  She did an amazing job of covering up my mistakes.

I could not be happier to have this bloody thing behind me!  I like building cabinets, but this one was a pain in the neck due to its size!  Also, because it is built in, there was no good way to clamp the face frame when we glued it.  So we had to hold it in place with finishing nails while the glue dried.  I hate having to nail cabinetry or furniture.  It just seems wrong.

Next up was making the shelves for the bookcase, all 22 of them.  Since I made the bookcase primarily for practicality and it is in my office, not a public part of the house, I decided to just use oak plywood as the base for the shelves.

I have had a horrible time finding decent quality plywood.  I do not think it is due to being in Arizona because I recently talked with my good friend Harold back in Minnesota and he mentioned he got some Baltic Birch that was crap too.  Somebody could make a killing if they just came out with decent quality hardwood plywood.  I would be happy to pay a premium for plywood that is not crap.

Unfortunately, it seems I forgot to take any pictures of making oak edge pieces for the shelves.  I am sure that was due to the fact they were completely miserable to make!  They are only 1 inch tall and required  3/4 rabbit, then running over a chamfer bit in the router on 3 corners.  At the end of the day, they were extremely boring and very painful to make.  I ended up blowing out the tendon in my right elbow making them.

But they are done.  Tina is just finishing putting the varnish on the last 5 now.  But the rest are all in the bookcase and already piled with books.

I also got the last of the baseboard molding in my office.  So my office is done!

My next goal was to get the guest bedroom done.  But because all of the books for my office were stacked in boxes in the guest bedroom, I found myself with an empty day while Tina varnished enough of the the shelves to move the books into my office.

So I decided to do some cleanup work on vanity for the master bathroom.

First, I finished making the drawers.

Then I glued up the pieces for the vanity doors.

Gluing up quarter sawn oak is never fun because the wood tends to move around a lot and it has a lot of imperfections just due to how it was cut from the log.

As I have mentioned here, numerous times, I really do not like those stupid European hinges that are so popular on cabinets now.  However, I had to use them since nice looking half-lap hinges seem to be an extinct species now.

After my first time drilling them, I completely understand why professional cabinet shops are so high on them.  They are insanely easy to fit.  They require no special jigs or fixtures to get them exactly right and when you install them on the cabinet, they are the easiest hinge you can ever adjust.  In short, from a cabinet maker’s perspective, they are the greatest thing ever.

I still hate the look of having the entire door sitting outside the face frame of the cabinet.

Once I got the doors made, Tina was able to get them finished in a single day.  Yes, it really IS that dry here.  You can get 4 coats of oil-based varnish on something in a 14 hour day.

Again, Tina made them look outstanding.

As a side note, we were really careful to make sure we kept each pair of doors book-matched.  If you look at any pair, you will notice the grain on the door on the left is an exact mirror image of the door on the right.  (Obviously, when we designed this cabinet, the whole purpose was to highlight the grain of the quarter sawn oak.)

Tina only took a day or two to get enough of the shelves for my office done to move the books out of the guest bedroom and be able to get started on the getting it done.

We have a few books…

Getting started on the guest bedroom took a couple days.  First we moved the books from the guest bedroom into my office.  Then we had to move my office furniture from the living room back into my office.  Finally, we moved the rest of the stuff from the guest bedroom into the living room.  (It was a whole lot easier working here BEFORE we moved all of our crap here!)

Once we got the guest bedroom emptied, the first order of business was to get the vapor barrier down.

This stuff is pretty neat.  It has a thick plastic sheet on the bottom and about an 1/8 inch of foam on the top.  Once the flooring goes over the top, walking around does not echo at all.  Plus the padding makes it very comfortable to walk on.

I got all of the flooring laid last Thursday and got about 1/3 our base molding on Friday.  Tina is presently finishing the rest of the molding to be able to finish this room off.  The flooring is the same as my office.

While Tina is finishing the base molding for the guest bedroom, I got started on the kitchen cabinet doors.

This one is going to be one HELL of an adventure!  Making the cabinet doors is the part of the build that I have been most looking forward to and most dreading at the same time.  I’ll save the gory details for my next post.

I have not updated the blog for a few weeks because we had not done much on the build for a few weeks.  I had a business trip to Providence, Rhode Island for a week.  Then Tina’s sister came down to visit us and give us an excuse for a much needed break from construction.

So what does a married couple that have spent every free minute for the last year doing heavy construction, do with their time off?  The answer, of course, is we go punch cattle!

Our friend Eve owns a cattle ranch about 3 miles from M. T. Acres.  She invited us to help out with the spring round-up.  We were involved with her round-up last fall as well.  So now that I have both under my belt, I think the fall round-up is a lot more work.  But the spring round-up is harder physical work.

We were done this time in three days, whereas last fall took a week and a half.  Part of that was due to the fact that one of the “cowboys” (I use that term loosely in this case) last fall had a slightly difficult personality and caused a great deal more work than was necessary.  But that aside, there is quite a bit more to do in the fall than in the spring.

Rounding up cattle is really hard work.  But it is good work.  When the day was done, we really felt like we had accomplished something worthwhile.  Hopefully Eve will continue to invite us back for many round-ups to come.

We did get started back up on the house build yesterday.

Prior to our break, I had gotten two of the three sections for the built-in bookcase for my office glued up.  But I ran out of plywood so I could not get the third one done.  Tina also got the insides of them varnished.  (More on that in a few paragraphs.)

Yesterday, we started by getting the two completed carcasses moved into my office.  We had to take them in through a window because they will not fit through the door.

A problem quickly became evident.

Because Tina varnished the insides (but not the outsides) about 2 weeks ago, the plywood for the sides warped like crazy.  The one on the left of the photo above is the worst.  The sides in the middle are full inch narrower than they are on the top and bottom!

I had a few ideas on how I could fix the problem, but they more “work-arounds” than a good solution.  Sometimes it is better for me to just think on a problem for a while so I decided to spend the rest of the day building the third carcass.

I got the sides machined first.  As with the first two, I had to do all of the machining by hand because they are too big to handle accurately on a fixed machine.

I was very pleased with myself because I was able to get it sanded and glued the same day too.

Today, Tina needed to use my workshop to finish the inside of the third part of the bookcase.  So I could not start cutting the wood for the face frame as it would raise too much dust.  So I decided to get as much of the baseboard moulding installed in my office as I could.

There are still two more pieces of baseboard to install but those cannot be done until the bookcase is complete.

While I was doing the baseboards, I was hit with the inspiration to solve the problem of the warped sides on the bookcase.  I decided to make a cabinet jack.

Pictured above is just a prototype I cobbled together in 10 minutes just to prove the idea worked.  I drilled it with a hand drill so the holes are not straight and it was a bit of bugger to get it fit well enough to push out evenly.  But it worked!

So I set about building 3 more, this time taking my time to get everything straight.

These babies are going to work great!  They are still not perfect, but they are close enough that I will be able to glue the face frame on and make the final adjustments with clamps.

Tina has been busy the last few weeks getting her gardens started.

We do not have time to do anything permanent for a vegetable garden this year, so she is just using the cloth pots we bought for the rental house.  But the potatoes are doing well, as are the peppers and tomatoes.

The neighbor even gave her an old rusted out stock tank which will work perfectly as a planter!

So adios until next time Acre-Heads!

I got the last of the shelves made for the kitchen cabinets and Tina was able to get them finished.  So at least she was able to get things put away in the kitchen.  We do not have doors for the cabinets yet, but shelves are a HUGE improvement.

We also need to get some more shelf pins because we bought out all the stock that Homie Despot had and we still need about 14 more packages.

But hey, we can see the countertops for the first time in two weeks.  That is a big victory for both of us.

Then we discovered another cabinet needing a shelf that we had both forgotten about.  Oh well, we have plenty of material left.

For me, my plan was to cut the tile we wanted to use for the baseboard in the master bathroom and get it installed.  The tile is the same tile we used for the floor, but I wanted to cut it to be 4 inches wide rather than 6 and use a schluter to cover the unfinished edge.  Of course, I decided to do this on Easter Sunday and the very first piece I cut, I burned up the tile saw blade to the point it was red hot and throwing off pieces of liquid steel at me.  Bad plan.

Monday we went and picked up a new tile saw blade and also picked up the flooring for my office.  The guest bedroom will also be done with the same flooring as my office, but we did not get that as we have no place to store it until we get some of the other rooms completed.

The flooring had to “acclimate” for a couple days before I installed it, so I got the baseboard installed in the master bathroom.

Tina obliged to grout it in the next few days which I am eternally grateful for as I am about done in with tile and grout.

I started on the built-in bookshelves in my office.  These babies are going to be a full 8 feet high and almost 9 feet long, so I decided to built them in 3 sections.  I am building the carcasses in my workshop, but will have to build the face frame and assemble them completely in my office because they will not fit completely assembled, through the door.

Because they are so big, I am having to cut the panels and cut the dados for the top, bottoms and sides by hand.  That is not fun, to say the least.

Because they will be built-in and there is no way our kids will be able to get them out of the room when Tina and I have assumed room temperature, I decided to build them using cabinet style construction, with oak plywood and solid oak face frames rather than heirloom quality solid oak construction.  That saves me about $1500 and it will look okay, but not heirloom quality.  Oh well…

Note to kids: Any books behind glass or housed in an obvious heirloom quality bookcase should not be given away or sold for 25 cents each.  Anything in the cheap-o built-ins, just get rid of it.

I also got the “cookie drawer” done.

As you may recall from a previous post, the cookie drawer was an afterthought.  I had not planned on building it, but I found some space in a cabinet and needed to figure out what to do with it; hence the cookie drawer.  By the time I figured out that I needed to build the cookie drawer, I had already ordered all of the drawer glides that I needed for the kitchen and bathrooms.  But I had some cheap, crappy drawer glides from homie despot that I had bought (and not used for obvious reasons) for out kitchen in Minnesota.

As soon as I tried to install the drawer into the crappy drawer glides, the glides literally exploded.   They shot berings and crap everywhere.  So I bought some decent 100# drawer glides from the company I bought the rest of my drawer glides from, they worked perfect once I got past the holes I had drilled for the crappy glides.  It does not sound like much of a task, but it was a serious pain in the neck to install 24 inch drawer glides once the cabinet was (almost) completed.

Finally, the flooring for my office acclimated enough to install it.  The first step was to put in the vapor barrier and a thin foam pad.

Then the flooring.

The flooring is commercial grade.  It is about 1/2 inch thick and made from some kind of dense black material.  It is supposed to be waterproof for up to 30 hours.  I found out, after we bought it, it is the same flooring many of the Cabela’s stores have, so hopefully it will hold up.

Installing it was extremely easy.  I was able to get the entire floor in my office done in about 4 hours.

The downside (there is always a downside) was that it absolutely destroyed my saw blades.  I had a $90 blade in my mitre saw that was almost brand new and after I had cut the flooring, it will not even cut red oak without burning it.  I am going to try cleaning the blade and see if that helps, otherwise I will have it resharpened.  I really do not want to replace it.  I also used the rip blade in my tablesaw for a few pieces.  I have not tried it with wood yet, but I expect it is going to also need some work.

The lesson I took away from the whole exercise is that when I do the floor in the guest bedroom, I am going to get a cheap throw-away blade for my Skilsaw and cut them with that.

Tina spent a lot of time and effort getting boxes unpacked and furniture sorted out in the main part of the house.  It is difficult because I am still working on many different areas in the house so space for storage is extremely limited.  But she has done a great job in minimizing the clutter as much as can be expected for the circumstance.

I do not have the shelves for the kitchen cabinets done yet, so she has had to be very innovative to find storage in the kitchen.

We have had so many of our books packed away for so long, I had forgotten how many books we actually have.  This is just Tina’s cookbook collection in the kitchen.

When we left Minnesota, we got rid of some of the cheap crappy bookcases we had bought when we were first married.  Thus, I knew I would have to be making some bookcases once we got here, but I did not realize how many.  As near as I can estimate, we have about 35 more boxes of books than we have bookcases to store!  So I think I am going to build some 7 1/2 foot tall built-in bookcases in my office.  That will slow the build down a bit, but we are past the time constraints now and it will look nice and give us some additional storage that we desperately need.

After moving everything from the rental house, my workshop was piled wall-to-wall with boxes and furniture, so the first order of business was to make enough room to start working again.  I did find a box with my wood racks, so I was able to also get those up and get some wood moved off the floor and hung up properly.

I also was on a push to get the data lines punched down so we could get real internet into the house.  (For the last several months our internet has come via the hotspot feature on our cell phones.  Although it works, it is very slow and not terribly stable.)

Since they strung Cat-6 cables throughout the house before they put up the sheetrock, I wanted those lines to be live using a hardwired router.  But I also setup a wireless router for our laptops and phones.  The end result is I actually have 2 networks in the house, the wireless network is behind 2 firewalls and running some additional security software.  The hardwired network only has the basic firewall that came with the router so it will allow me to experiment with some of my network cracking tools.

I had not punched down a network in about 20 years and I never was very good at it to begin with.  I was pleasantly surprised when I punched down the patch panel that I got everything punched down and tested and it all worked correctly the first time!

Then it was time to figure out how to mount the hardwired router to the patch panel because it did not come with any mounting holes.  I ended up taking the whole thing apart and drilling a hole in the case and just screwing it to the patch panel.

Once the case was mounted, I just reassembled it in place.

Once I got the rest of the components installed and connected to the internet, I patched it all down and I am pleased with how neat the cabling job looks.

The guys from the phone company that came to punch down the internet connection even said it was the cleanest cabling job they had ever seen.  They even took a picture of it!

We had some extra parts left over from the closet organizers Tina had bought, so I hung a couple shelves and a small hanging rod in the laundry room.

Then it was time to start the shelves for the kitchen cabinets.

Making shelves, although simple, is a very tedious process.  I will not bore you with the details of cutting the oak plywood or laminating the tops.  But I decided to make a custom moulding to cover the front edge of the shelf and also provide a lip on the top to keep things from rolling off.

I started by cutting rabbits in the moulding to fit around the shelf.

Then I sliced the moulding to width using the tablesaw.

I wanted a routed profile on all 3 corners of the moulding.  But since routing thin moulding is kind of a difficult process if it left full length, I decided to cut them to length before routing them.

A router is not a tool that is likely to cost you a finger, but will take the corners off, which hurts like hell, and more importantly, gets blood on the wood.

On a tangent, my very good friend Harold, who is at least a 3rd generation master woodworker and taught me almost everything I know about the craft, called me one night about 15 years ago.  He had caught his thumb in his tablesaw and cut it lengthwise almost down to the first knuckle.  Harold is not above using the occasional “shit”, “damn” or “hell” in a conversation to liven it up, but I had never heard him string them together in a blue steak of profanity.  That night, he called me and cussed the paint off the walls!  His big complaint was not that he hurt his thumb, it was the $%^& @#$ *&^ tablesaw sprayed blood all over his best cherry lumber, ruining it!  The sad part was, I completely understood and agreed with his assessment.

Not wanting to get blood all over my half made mouldings, I decided to make a push block to feed them through the router.  I just took a piece scrap 1/2″ plywood and drove some wire brads about halfway in, then nipped off the heads with a pair of dykes.  It worked perfectly!

Then it was on to sanding and glueing.

They came out pretty good.  I still have about 8 more left to make, but at least the mouldings for them are done.

Lastly, I needed to order a couple extra sheets of laminate to have enough to do all of the shelves.  So I also ordered another gallon of contact cement.  I did not realize there were different kinds of contact cement.

I had been using the old fashioned Weldwood solvent-based contact cement.  It is miserable stuff to work with.  It is really stinky and the fumes are explosive.  That required me to always use it with the garage door open since the water heater and furnace are in a closet in the garage.

They shipped me a new kind of contact cement from 3M.  It is water-based.  Therefore it is does not smell nearly as bad or as strong.  It is also safe around open flames.

When I started using it, I was not too sure about it because it a lot more runny than the old kind.  But once I stuck the parts together, I became an instant “true believer”.  Not only is it easier to work with than the old kind, it is stronger and because it is water-based, cleaning it up is MUCH easier!

So if you still have kids at home and have the need to stick them to the ceiling, the 3M contact cement is definitely the right product for the job!

For the 3Mers that subscribe to M. T. Acres: ‘atta boy guys!

Hey Acre-Heads!

I apologize for going so long between posts, but I did not figure you cared too much to see pictures of our piles of crap as we moved everything out of the rental house and into M. T. Acres.  Plus, those photos would have included items that would have convinced about half of you that we are crazy as hell and convinced the other half that we are the sanest people on the planet.  Regardless, we finally have all of our stuff moved over to M. T. Acres!

We definitely have stuff.  So much so, that we bought a 20 foot shipping container to hold some of it while we finish the build.

Thankfully, our friend Danny came over with a tractor and leveled a good spot for it before it was delivered.  But in hindsight, I should have bought the 40 footer.  After moving everything from the rental house, this one is absolutely filled floor-to-ceiling, front-to-back, and we still have too much in the house for the work that remains to be done.

The move has slowed down our building efforts somewhat.  But Tina still found time to get all, but one, of the kitchen drawers finished.

And I got them fitted.

Plus a few other kitchen accessories.

In the middle of all of this, we took a break to smoke a rack of really outstanding ribs.  Tina figured out the rub for this one and I just did the fire and they came out incredible.

We also got a bunch of little stuff done – medicine cabinets hung, closet hardware installed, etc.

But the whole house effort is kind of bittersweet as we also had to have our good friend Jack put down last week.

\

He could no longer get up on his own, so I think it was time.  He made it 17 years which is a good while for a 100 pound dog.  But that does not make it any easier.  Godspeed and thank you good friend.

This week was all about drawers.  I got the bottoms made for all of the drawers requiring 1/4 inch bottoms.  Then, I got all of the drawer bodies glued up.

Even after making literally dozens of drawers over my woodworking life, it always spooks me when I glue them up, how absolutely awful the joinery looks until it is properly sanded and finished.

I really do not like the style of drawers we had to make for this kitchen.  But because we had to use the stupid European hinges for the cabinet doors (because we could not find decent looking half-lap hinges), we had to build the drawers as basically a wood box with a face panel glued on it.

The problem is, the stupid European hinges hold the door fully outside the face frame of the cabinet.  With the old-school half lap hinges, the cabinet door edge actually sits halfway inside the face frame of the cabinet – I.E. It only protrudes 3/8 inch outside the face frame.  But because we have to have the front of the cabinet doors and the front of the drawers protrude the same amount in front of the face frames, this was really the only way to go.

After making all of the drawer bodies, I was able to begin making the face panels.

In this case, Tina chose a really simple design for the drawer fronts.  It is just a Red Oak panel with a simple 1/2 inch roundover around the edges.

She chose this style due to the high amount of dust in the desert.  Anything with any type fillet or ogee would collect an insane amount of dust.  But this incredibly simple design does nothing to showcase my woodworking abilities.  And frankly, the whole reason for having kitchen cabinets (or even an indoor kitchen for that matter) is to show off my woodworking skills.  After all, Tina has done just fine for the last 8 months cooking our meals on a propane camp stove and storing her cooking stuff in plastic bins hidden away in a closet somewhere.

Figuring out how to glue the face panel to the drawer body and keep it straight was also a bit of a challenge.  The problem is, wood glue is extremely slippery when it is wet.  So, keeping the drawer body straight with the face would be a challenge without some kind of process in place while the glue is wet.  I have to admit that I was proud of myself for the solution I came up with.

I started by cutting some scrap wood to the width of the inset I wanted for the drawer body and clamping it to the face panel.  Then I drove 3-4 wire brads about 1/4 inch into the face panel.

I nipped the head of the wire brads off with a pair of dykes about 1/8 – 1/4 inch proud of the face panel.

Then I coated the front of the drawer body with a good amount of yellow glue and spread it around into a nice even coat with a rubber roller.

The wire brads allowed me to get it perfectly positioned before I clamped it down.  Since the cut ends of the brads were embedded into the drawer body before the glue surfaces ever touched, I had no problems with slippage.

Of course, some of the more odd shaped drawers required us to come up some unusual ways of clamping them.

But in the end, I am pretty happy with how they came out.

Before Tina started the finishing process, I did rough fit all of the drawer glides and made sure we could at fit them into holes they were built for.

Presently they are awful tight on the drawer glides and will need quite a bit of fine adjustment.  But I will do that when we do the final fitting.

But they sure look plain.  I really pray the finishing and hardware dresses them up some because right now our kitchen looks like it was made by a 3 year-old from crating lumber.

The real killer this week was a drawer that I had not even originally planned on making.  It is a very and deep drawer, but also very short.  It is under the double ovens.  It is one of those things that was not part of the original plan, but I found myself with some extra space and did not know what to do with it.  So I decided to make a drawer that is 24 inches deep, almost 30 inches wide and only 4 inches tall.  I figured, under the ovens, it would be a great place for Tina to store her cookie trays.  Thus we dubbed it the “Cookie Drawer”.

I had a set of cheap 100# drawer glides left over from building our Minnesota kitchen.  I remember I did not like them which is why I chose to go with another brand, but I could not remember why.  Anyway, I thought the cookie drawer is something Tina is going to opening at most, once or twice per week (except during Christmas) and it is never going to hold much weight.  So I decided to use the cheap drawer glides I had rather than paying shipping for a good set.

Bad idea!

When I was trying to rough fit the drawer into the glide, I was not even pushing hard, the entire bearing assembly on the left side blew apart into hundreds of pieces!

Needless to say, I was not happy!

I’ll get a new and better set of drawer glides and somehow figure out how to make it work, but damn this one is depressing.

Beyond that, Tina got started finishing drawers.

The joinery does come out looking nice once Tina gets done with her magic.

And I got all of the towel racks and mirrors up in the bathrooms.

Once we get the drawers done and fitted, we are going to take a week or two off from building, to move all of our stuff from the rental house.  Our lease is up at the end of March and we really do not want to extend even though the house has quite a bit of work left.  So this week we are going to pick up a 20 foot storage container that we can store some of our stuff in while we complete the build and make sure we get our stuff moved out of the rental.  Therefore, I may or may not make posts over the next couple weeks. – Building is cool and folks like to read about that; moving, not so much.