Due to my work commitments, we only had a couple days to work on M.T. Acres this week.

Tina sanded and got the first coat of varnish on the top corner cabinet.  Then I had to stop her progress on finishing it because I needed it to size some of the other top cabinets.

I got the face frame and crown moulding glues on the cooktop cabinet.

The crown moulding is a pain in the neck to clamp while glueing because most of the clamping surface is outside the plane of the face frame.  Thus, it has a tendency to want to roll as soon as you put any pressure on the clamps.  We found using the longer pipe clamps along with a couple cargo straps works about the best.

Once that dried, I was able to add the inlay.

The corner cabinet, the cooktop cabinet and the refrigerator cabinet all hang on a wall with 2 inside corners.  Those are always a pain in the neck because you have to get the face frames exactly the right size or there will be a very noticeable gap.

My solution was to temporarily hang the corner cabinet and the cooktop cabinet on the wall, then build the face frame for the refrigerator cabinet a bit oversized and trim it fit exactly.

So the first step was to make some wall hangers from scrap 1/2 inch plywood.

Then measure and screw them to the wall studs with the 45° angle pointed towards the wall.

The screws that I am using on the hangers are pretty good sized – #10 X 3 1/2 inches.  With the first couple, I was having some trouble tearing up the Phillips bits in my drill.  I wrecked 2 bits and 4 screws.  Then I remembered I should be lubricating my screws:

So for any of you young bucks, if you plan to do any screwing make sure you have plenty of screw lube.  It makes for a much better screwing experience.  (A wax ring for a toilet or Ivory bar soap work equally well.)

I like hanginging wall cabinets this way because it allows me to put all of the cabinets on the wall before I permanently affix them.  It also allows me to get the cabinets aligned with each other and screwed together while they still have a little bit of movement.  Then, once everything is all perfectly aligned and fitted together, I can screw the whole assembly to the wall.

Once these two were in place, I took my measurements and built the face frame for the refrigerator cabinet.  I made the stile on the right side about 3/4 inch wider than the rest of the stiles.

Then with some careful planing, scraping and sanding, we were able to get a perfect fit even though the wall is not perfectly flat.  I was also very happy that it only took about 5 tries to get it to fit.

Once we got the fit right, we took it back down and added the crown moulding and the inlay.

Once the crown moulding was on, I could not resist the urge to see what the wall would look like once they are all hung.

Tina still has 3 more coats of varnish and one sanding to do on the corner cabinet as well as all four coats and 2 sandings to do on the others.  But at least we can envision what the whole project is going to look like when it is done.

My original plan was to make all of the top cabinets the same depth and the same height.  I am really glad we decided to make some of them taller and deeper than the others.  It really makes the whole wall more interesting and really accents the crown mouldings.

The other 2 wall cabinets are done through all 4 coats of varnish but I did not hang them because we have to take these down again for Tina to finish the others.

The wires sticking out from the wall are for the LED lights that go under the cabinets.  I was more than a little concerned about those as well.  The wire needs to come out below the bottom of the cabinet but still through a hole in the back of the cabinet.  That only leaves me with about a 1/2 inch of “wiggle room” for the hole.  But after measuring the wires and the backs of the cabinets, everything looks like it is going to fit together perfectly.

Next week, it is on to building the kitchen island while Tina finishes the top cabinets.

This week started off not working on the house at all.  We helped our friend Eve with the Fall roundup of her cattle.  Having never been involved with a roundup before, I had no idea what to expect.

I knew working cattle was physically demanding and I figured we would be in a lot of pain at the end of the day from spending so much time riding a horse.  Surprisingly, I came through it in pretty good shape.  When I climbed down from the horse after riding steadily for 4-5 hours, it only took walking about 30 steps to get my knee and hip joints reconfigured back to being a biped again and I really did not experience any muscle pain at all.

I attribute it to laying all of the floor tile at M.T. Acres.  The tiling took such a toll on me physically, I think I may now be numb to anything that does not rise to that pain level.

Tina got beat up a little bit in the roundup.  But even she was moving better than I had expected.  The only thing we did notice is spending so much time in the sunshine made us both absolutely exhausted.  I slept deeper than I ever remember doing in the past.

We must have done okay at the roundup because Eve and her crew already invited us back to help with the Spring roundup.  WOO HOO!!!

We did not get any pictures of the roundup worth posting because we were both too busy rounding up to take pictures.  We were done by about noon on Friday, so it was back to work on kitchen cabinets.

I started off by glueing the face frame on the top corner cabinet.

My cradle jig worked perfectly!  It allowed me to use 2 cargo straps to hold the middle of the face frame and made it really easy to clamp the top and bottom with Bessy clamps.

Although it does not show well in the picture, I always make the stiles (the vertical pieces of the face frame) a little bit wider than the cabinet.  With a standard box cabinet, I then just use a flush trim router bit to trim the stiles to the exact width of the cabinet side.

That was not an option with the corner cabinet because the face frame is 45 degrees to the side rather than 90 degrees.  Since all of my good hand planes are still packed in boxes at the rental house from the move, I had to use a cabinet scraper.

For any of you unfamiliar with a cabinet scraper, it is just a piece of sheet metal.  The one I used for this cabinet is about 2 x 5 inch rectangle made from 24 guage spring steel.  To use it, you just file an edge until there is a burr on the edge.  Then you just hold it with both hands and bend it so there is a slight bow in the scraper and scrape the burr across the workpiece.

It is a slow process and the scraper heats up because you are basically cutting with the friction caused between the wood and the burr on the scraper.  I could only scrape for about 3-4 minutes continuously because the scraper heats up enough to start burning the wood (and my fingers).  Then, I let it cool off for a minute or two and repeat the process.  So it took a good 2 hours to get the face frame scraped how I wanted it.

Then I got the crown mouldings cut, sized and glued.  And finally, I glued the inlay.

Then I started the face frame for this nasty bugger.  You may remember a couple weeks ago when I built the carcass for this monster, it was originally intended to be three simple, separate cabinets that turned into one because of space constraints and where the studs in the wall behind it lined up.  Since then, this one has turned into a nightmare.

When building face frames for box cabinets, I usually just get the dimensions right and glue them up.  Then I can flip the face frame over side to side or even top to bottom to get the best fit and the best look.  With this one, I cannot do that because the skinny part on the left is 1 inch smaller than the skinny part of the right.  So I had to be careful to make sure I got the best side of each board facing out when I cut it.  Furthermore, the 2 stiles in the middle needed to be notched to fit the range hood.  In short, what looks to be pretty simple, turned into a serious pain in the neck!

It had to be glued up in 3 phases.  First the two center stiles and the bottom center rail (the horizontal piece).

Then the top rail.

Then the 2 bottom rails and outer stiles.

Then I dry fit it to the carcass and it looks pretty good.

That was when I noticed a glaring mistake.

On the right-side cabinet, I oriented the grain the wrong way!  The top and bottom of that cabinet are perfect square pieces and I remember thinking when I cut them that I have to be careful during glue up to get them positioned right.  Apparently I was not careful enough.

But at least I was consistent; I did the same thing on the top!

So, I figure I have 3 options:

1 – Rebuild the carcass.

2 – Ignore it and hope nobody notices.

3 – Tell the story about how Navajo women intentionally wove imperfections into their blankets and appropriate that logic into Tina’s kitchen cabinets.

I am choosing option #3.  Now that I have admitted to God, the world and everybody here on the intertubes about how damn stupid I was, I can now lie with impunity about it and keep a clear conscience.  So, I meant to do that!  🙂

Tina did the sanding on some of the top cabinets with 400 grit sandpaper and got coats 2 and 3 of the varnish laid down and it it shines like steel!

From a better light view, she is making the cabinets look great!

Finally, we have developed a routine when we are working at M.T. Acres.  The dogs get breakfast and morning pills at 7AM.  Then Tina throws out about 6-8 balls for Belle The Amazing Water Dog to fetch.  Did I mention Belle is a fetchin’ fool?  The vet calls her “ball motivated” but that is WAY understated.

The general program is that we throw balls for Belle for about 20 minutes.  After that, Tina picks up the ball most recently brought back and puts it in the evil ball storage box.  After that, Belle goes out and ranges until she finds another ball to bring back to us.  We throw that ball 3-4 more times until Tina put it into the evil spiteful storage box.  This continues until Tina puts all of the balls into the evil, hateful, spiteful storage box.

After Tina had put away the last of the balls, Belle went out ranging to see if she could find any others and she came back with this:

If you cannot see it well in the picture, it is a wild gourd.  We have them growing all over the place at M.T. Acres.  It is about the same size as her balls and it is yellow.  So I am sure her little pea-brain thought: “It looks like a ball so maybe they will throw it for me.”

In the interest of keeping Tina with some work that she can do, I decided to periodically take a few hours away from the cabinetry and woodworking stuff that I really enjoy to do some jack-pine savage carpentry, which it still fun and rewarding, but not as much as the cabinetry.  So this week, I decided I would take a couple hours and get the service door into the garage to the point where Tina could paint it.  That involved getting the brick moulding up and getting a door closer installed.

However, there was a problem.  When the builder installed the door, he did not install it plumb.  On the garage side, the door frame stuck out almost 1/2 inch on the bottom and was almost flush on the top.  Inside the house, we have the same problem but reversed.

So my solution was to clean up some of the crap with a utility knife, then to rip a 1/4 inch piece of pine to glue on one side of the brick moulding.  I did angle the rip cut a little but did not try and get an exact fit because the tapers did a heavy skim coat of mud when they were taping the sheetrock so the gap was not a consistent straight line.

The result came out pretty good but there is still a bit of a gap at the bottom of the door.  But I think Tina will easily be able to fill that in with painter’s caulk and make it look pretty good.

Then I hung the door closer and installed a door stop.  The door closer was a bit of a disappointment because of the 3 ways it could be installed, none of them were optimal.  The way I chose to install it is mechanically the best, but it does look a little weird because the closer is hanging down over the fake raised panel in the door.  Even so, it is plenty strong so I hope the inspector does not have a problem with it.

When we started this whole project, I told Tina that I would do the inside of the house however she wanted if she would leave my garage for me to decide how I did it.  Mostly I have been pretty good about honoring that agreement.  Then we came to the kitchen cabinets…

Tina has to be able to work in the kitchen every day, so it must be practical.  But it is also about the only place in the house where I can show off my woodworking skills.  My initial thought was she wanted real fancy tombstone shaped raised panel doors and something similar for the drawer profiles.  What she ended up deciding on is doors and drawers being square and having very simple rounded edges.  The doors on the top cabinets are going to have some kind of glass panels and the bottom doors are going to be simple flat panel oak.  I think it will actually look really nice, but it does not give me much to brag about.

So, the compromise was that I could do a crown moulding however I wanted (since it will not collect dust) but the doors and drawers will be simple roundovers.  Deal made!

After cutting up some samples and looking at the options with the bits I have and the bits I could order, we decided on a double stack Roman Ogee profile, and I got her to agree to a simple inlay for good measure.  I think we invented a whole new architectural style and I am calling it Southwestern Baroque.

Initially, I planned on just mounting the mouldings with a 3/8 inch by 1/4 inch rabbit.  That worked okay, but I was not happy with it because it did have some flex.  So I decided to beef it up a bit with some scrap that I collected when straightening the oak boards.  Much better!

Once I got the inlay laid down, it became a special kind of cool!  (More on that in a few minutes.)

My next step was to start on the face frame for the top corner cabinet.  The face frame was easy enough to make after cutting some clamping cauls from a scrap piece of 2X4.

But how to glue it on the cabinet while sitting at a 45 degree angle?

I farted around thinking on that one for at least an hour until I looked in my scrap wood pile and came up with these.  They took me about 15 minutes to build but about 1 hour to think of!

Once the glue mostly dried, I had to try them to see if they are everything I thought they would be.  They are!

I have not yet glued the face frame on because I wanted to give my jig a full night to dry before I put too much stress on it.  But they are rock solid!

Onto the part where all of the hard work comes together…

Tina did the final sanding and got the first coat of varnish on the top cabinets that I finished yesterday.  Holy crap!  Even with just one coat of varnish, they look amazing!

Due to my work schedule, we did not have a whole lot of time to work on the build this week.  But we were able to get the cabinet carcasses that I cut last week glued up.  I still have to cut the carcasses for Tina’s built-in ovens and build a center island cabinet for the kitchen.  Those two are going to be kind of a bugger to cut due to their size.  I am going to have to do all of the dados in them  by hand with a router because they are too big to manage on my tablesaw.  But otherwise the case work is done.

The really fun part of building cabinets is doing the face frames, doors and drawers.  This week, I started on the face frames.

The first order of business was planing down the face frame stock to fit the door hinges.  We could only get those stupid European hinges for the doors because they do not make the traditional half-lap hinges anymore in any styles that we would even consider mildly good looking.  So we are going to be stuck with the cabinet doors fully on the outside of the face frames.

The stupid European hinges do make the doors much easier to make because they do not require any hand fitting with a bench chisel.  But I really enjoy the hand work.  Plus, I do not think they look nearly as nice as the old half-lap hinges.  Oh well…

The stock that I got for the face frames and the doors is exceptionally good wood.  I bought 4/4 stock and it is a full 7/8 of an inch thick.  (Normally 4/4 stock comes home between 3/4 and 13/16 of an inch thick.)  The problem is, the hinges will only work with face frames that are 13/16 of an inch of thinner.  So I had to plane all this beautiful wood down 1/16 of an inch to get the stupid European hinges to fit it.

It breaks my heart to throw away all that good wood but on the upside, I already have 3 full garbage bags of sawdust (the most useful substance known to man) from this project.  Plus, there is no better smell than the smell of oak or walnut sawdust; The whole house reeks of it right now!  It is wonderful.

On a side note:

Before I started to rip the boards for the face frames, I decided to clean up my tablesaw top with some Boeshield.

If you have not used this stuff, it is absolutely amazing.  It was created by Boeing for use on the machines in their shop, but they started selling to the general public about 10 years ago.  I cannot imagine a lubricant for a tablesaw top that could be better.  I spray it on, them wipe it around with a paper rag and let it dry for 20-30 minutes.  That’s it.  It makes the top very slippery and does not stain the wood (once it is fully dry).

No, Boeing did not pay me anything for the previous paragraph.

Anyway after cleaning up tablesaw, I ripped and cut the face frame boards for a couple cabinets.  Then I drilled and glued them.

Yes – I am using dowel pin joinery on the face frames.  The face frames need to be strong, but they only need to be rock solid strong until they get glued to the carcasses.  Dowel pins give me enough strength and they give me the flexibility to get them absolutely square.

Finally, I got them glued on the carcasses.

I glued the first one up a bit early.  If you look real close in the lower-right of the picture, you can see where the rail and stile of the face frame pulled apart a bit on glue up.  That will not be a big deal as the final sanding will make that mostly disappear.

The second one came out perfect.

Once they were completely dry, they look pretty good.

The blue tape on the side is Tina’s note that she does not need to finish that side because it is going to be butting up to another cabinet.

Lastly, our good friend Eve invited us to help with the fall round up of her cattle the week of 10/16.  Of course we wholeheartedly agreed because how cool is that?!?  Eve’s cowboy Steve, who is in charge of the round up, wanted us to ride with him for half a day just to see how much of a liability we would be.  We apparently passed muster because he told us to show up next Monday.  So in one day (today), we got to sit on the back of a horse at the bottom of a mountain, chase some cows, and go back to M.T Acres and make sawdust!  Am I living the dream or what?

Sorry for not posting last week.  We had family come down to visit from Minnesota and spent the week being tourists.  It was a great time.  We spent 4 days at the Grand Canyon, then spent the rest of the week banging around south-east Arizona, seeing the sights (again) from the perspective of a tourist and just enjoying our kids.  It reminded us (unnecessarily) of why we moved here in the first place.

Last Friday, we picked up my mom in Tucson and took her and our guests out to see M.T. Acres.  The highlight of the day was finding a good sized Mojave Rattler on the back porch.

Mojave Rattlers are more aggressive and more toxic than our usual Diamondback Rattlers.  This one was about 3 feet long and curled up behind some pots Tina keeps on the back porch.  He rattled at Tina just about the time my mom and I were arriving.  So Tina chased him off the porch with the hose and I introduced him to Sturm Ruger.

The final score was: Ruger – 1 Rattler – 0, and that’s all she wrote.  Apparently, a .357 magnum does not care how aggressive or toxic a Mojave Rattler is.

I was scheduled to be working from home this week, but the broker who scheduled my class (and who is a VERY good friend) had some health issues the week before and the schedule fell apart.  So I found myself with an extra week with nothing to do.  That is not a bad thing from the house build perspective because it allowed us to get closer to being back on track schedule-wise for the house build.  But it does introduce a cash-flow constraint since I have now, not earned a single penny in the last 4 weeks.  But I am booked solid through the end of the year (except for the weeks I am scheduled to work on the house and holidays).  Regardless, I am very happy to trade the dollars for the time to keep moving on the house.

Our guests left on Sunday so I went out to M.T. Acres on Monday; Tina came out on Tuesday as she had some things to do back at the rental house.  The first thing I did upon arriving was to check on the status of our dead rattler friend.

In 2 days he was picked absolutely clean!  I am not sure if it was buzzards or crows or some combination, but in 2 days, they picked the carcass completely clean.

That is a very comforting feeling knowing if a hippie shows up at M.T Acres I only have to hide the body for 2-3 days.

This week was dedicated to building the carcasses of the top cabinets for the kitchen on my side and getting the insides of the bottom cabinets finished on Tina’s.

There is a varnish that I have been using for several years on my furniture projects:

https://generalfinishes.com/retail-products/oil-based-topcoats

This stuff is absolutely amazing.  It is applied with a rag rather than a brush.  So there are no brush marks.  It is also absolutely hard as nails.  The problem was, it is insanely expensive if you buy it from a retail store – about $30 per quart!  But the supplier that I ordered the drawer glides and laminate from had it for $40 per gallon, with a 10% discount if you buy 4 or more gallons!  Sign me up!

The other downside is it requires 4-5 coats, as opposed to the 2-3 coats of Minwax varnish.  Plus, it takes about twice as long to dry.

But it sure makes the grain come out.  This is after the first coat Tina did on the inside of the base cabinets.

After 4 coats, it looks like you can put your hand right through it…

The saw marks are obviously my fault.  But they will be covered up by drawer glides.

As for me, I started the week building the biggest of the top cabinets, the corner cabinet.

It was not a terribly difficult thing to build, but its size made it a bit of a challenge to glue up.  I am making most of the top cabinets 42 inches tall and 12 1/2 inches deep.  But for this corner cabinet, I wanted it to be taller and deeper than the standard wall cabinets to break up the monotony of the cabinets.  So I made it 14 1/2 inches deep and 48 inches tall.  That means, this sucker was a real beast to glue.

The next ones I undertook were the cabinet over the cooktop and two skinny cabinets that go on either side of the cooktop.  Fortunately, before I started cutting parts for them, I checked the wall to see where the studs are located to make sure I would have something solid to hang them on.  Unfortunately, as luck would have it, one of the skinny cabinets would not have had a stud behind it.  So my solution was to combine the 3 cabinets into a single cabinet.

Looking at the completed cabinet, the glue up for it looks complicated.  But since it is really just 3 separate cabinets that happen to just share 2 sides, I was able to glue it up in stages.

Part of the problem with glue up is the yellow glue dries so fast due to the thin dry air.  When I was doing this in Minnesota, I had about 20 minutes from the time I applied the glue to get everything in place and clamped.  In Arizona, I have about 10 minutes at most before the glue starts to set up.  When I get to some of the more complicated glue ups on the face frames, I may have to resort to using white glue instead of yellow glue.

This cabinet is 42 inches tall and 12 1/2 inches deep.

Then I built the cabinet that will go above the refrigerator.  It will also be 14 1/2 inches deep and will be hung 6 inches higher than the cooktop cabinet.  (I think the varying depths and heights will make the crown moulding look really cool.)  But this one was the first of 3 that were easy-peasy to make.  It is just a plywood box.

Putting them together along the wall to make sure everything fits…

The cabinet on the right goes above the refrigerator and it will be hung at the same height as the corner cabinet.

And getting a sense for what they will look like depth-wise once I get the face frames on them…

The other thing I did was make the hangers and screw strips for the backs.

The hangers are just a piece of scrap 1/2 inch plywood cut at a 45 degree angle on the bottom glued to the top of the cabinet.  When we go to hang them we can just screw a cleat to the wall and temporarily hang the cabinet from the cleat.  That allows us to get them all aligned exactly how we want them on the wall and screwed together before we run the screws into the studs to support the full weight of the loaded cabinet.  This is also how I built the cabinets for our Minnesota house and I am convinced it saved our marriage.

Then, I got all of the parts machined for the last 2 top cabinets, but I did not get them glued up yet.  (Tina left early on Saturday to go do some chores at the rental house and these are just too big and the glue time is too short to glue them up without somebody else to hold pieces in place during assembly.)  Regardless, glueing them up will go quickly when we go back this weekend.

Finally, our friend Smiley stopped by on Friday and welded up a proper cart for my planer.

This is BIG deal.  The cart that I had it on was one of those designed for hobbyist woodworking machines (I.E. machines weighing around 200 pounds).  This planer is commercial quality and weighs much closer to 400 pounds than 200.  And since I have a LOT of planeing to do in the next couple weeks, this is going to be a lifesaver!