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.