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!