more guest room updates

We did some work on the guest room in the spring (see previous post here) and finally finished up painting the trim and put everything back together in June, I think. Then Lynn (our amazing hired carpenter!) went back and replaced all the missing trim pieces, so now we’ve got to go back in and paint some more. But things are definitely starting to look pretty good in here! (especially compared with the rest of our house, haha!)

much improved

It’s great to have one room that’s almost done!! In addition to painting the new pieces of trim, we still need to put in a ceiling light and switch, which will be a bit of a project because this room has never had a light switch! we’ll need to cut a hole in the wall, run wires through the walls and ceilings, and probably do some patching and re-painting afterwards. And then it should be all set, for the moment! Someday I’d love to replace the ugly ceiling (it’s a filthy, seventies-looking dropped ceiling with those pressed-fiber tiles) and strip & repaint the floors, which have a patchwork of old lead paint colors. But that stuff can wait another five or ten years! Here’s a “before” picture for comparison:

before: yucky carpet and battle-scarred walls

electrical work!

new electrical panel, front and back.

we brought in a real electrician to put in a new panel on the 2nd floor, which will allow us to put in a proper circuit for the washing machine and dryer, and also will let us start wiring the whole second floor for electricity! hooray! hopefully this means less extension cords in our future.

springtime in the forest

morning walk in the woods. the forest is starting to turn green again!

building new front steps

before: no door, no steps

When we first got here we were using the back door (complete with “no trespassing” sign) as the main entrance; then back in November we finally installed a beautiful new door from the kitchen onto the porch, and we switched over to using the new door all the time despite a lack of steps – we would just leap up from the driveway onto the porch and in through the new door. Winter came and the snow piled up so high it reached the porch and you didn’t miss the steps at all. But come spring thaw, the absence was notable and if you happened to be carrying something big or heavy, you’d have to stop and set it down on the porch in order to hop up; visitors wondered which door to knock on, since the lack of steps was not exactly inviting. So, time to build some steps.

first cuts on the bandsaw

starting to assemble the pieces

screwing the pieces together

this was a fun and quick project! after the demanding challenge of the cabinetry project, it was nice to do something so snappy an easy. here’s the almost-finished steps in situ:

we’re happily using the steps now, but we’re not totally done here, the next stage will be to take the steps out, dig up the ground underneath and pour some proper cement footing, then fill in the area with crushed rock or something, put the steps back in and then paint them white! Maybe someday we could even add a railing.

more about cabinets

there hasn’t been too much new stuff to post because… we’re STILL working away on the cabinets (here’s the first installment about cabinets). I’m still enjoying it, though it just seems to go on and on and on… Cabinetry demands an insane level of precision, and if anything is off by one thirty-second of an inch, then it’s got to be redone. (that’s 0.03125 inches!) I think Mike is kinda over it, but I’m enjoying the adventure, and I hope Richard is too. Anyway, since we’re spending so much time on this, I thought I’d add more detail about what we’re doing.

left: cabinet case plans and plywood cut plans for under-sink cabient; right: cabinet face plans for drawers

The cabinet cases are the easiest part. We’re using nice quality birch plywood here, which comes in 4′ x 8′ sheets. We’ve drawn up plans and cut lists so I check the plans and measure out (very carefully) where to make the cuts. Richard got a cool Festool circular saw that runs along a little track, which makes impressively straight, neat, accurate cuts and is very handy and portable. We use about one sheet of plywood per cabinet, depending on dimensions. Richard has built a wonderfully handy “cutting table” just for this purpose; it’s a criss-crossed grid of scrap wood that gets nibbled into by the saw with every cut; it’s big enough to support the 4×8 sheets of plywood but it’s also easily collapsible and can be packed away when we’re done with this project.

a grid of scrap wood on top of sawhorses – perfect for cutting up big sheets of plywood. At the far end, our cabinet-making jig is sitting atop the super-flat work surface.

Richard also built a super-flat work surface that we use to do our joinery. The level of precision required for cabinets makes you realize that there is no truly flat surface anywhere in the workshop! The poured concrete floor is wavy, the tables are all slanted, nothing’s truly, entirely flat when you really need it to be perfect! We also made up some right-angle jigs that we use for clamping the cut pieces together at a (hopefully) perfect right angle while we join them. So, once the pieces are neatly cut, we move onto the flat surface and start cutting the biscuit slots with our new biscuit joiner. It’s a nifty little device that cuts little slots into the edges of the plywood, then you use flat little discs of compressed wood fiber to fit the pieces neatly together. It’s a super easy quick joint, though we’ve discovered it’s not the most precise method of joinery, and because it requires wood glue to hold the joint, it’s unfortunately impossible to back up and make adjustments if something doesn’t come out quite perfect. So we only use the biscuit joiner for the rougher work on the cabinet case. We also use pocket screws, in addition to the biscuit joints, which basically act as clamps to hold the joints steady while the glue dries, and just adds additional strength to the joints. For a 31.5″ long joint, we use about four biscuit slots and three pocket screws. This is my only photo (I’ve already posted this one previously, sorry!) showing the assembly of the cabinet cases:

cabinet sides are clamped to a right-angle jig while we glue the biscuit joints and screw in the pocket screws

The most challenging part of the cases is attempting to get everything put together at right angles. It turns out the plywood, while less prone to warping than solid wood (because of the alternating layers of wood with criss-crossed grain direction), still does warp, and that makes it pretty hard to get everything square, when each supposedly flat sheets has its own twisty, warpy, independent will! But we do the best we can.

Once the cabinet case is all done, then comes the face frame. This part requires more precision; for the cabinets with doors it’s got to be quite precise, so that the doors can swing open and shut without jamming or catching; and for the cabinets with drawers it has to be even more exact! We use solid beech wood for the face frames, .75″ thick by 1.5″ wide. Richard found that the 1.5″ stock available at the lumber store was awfully twisted and warpy, so we ended up buying 4″ wide boards (which just happened to be significantly straighter) and slicing every board in half on the band saw, then hand-planing them down to the perfect thickness. I’m learning how to use a plane and I think I’m getting better at it! It’s very easy to make things quite crooked with a hand plane; making them not-crooked is the challenge. We use a coarser plane first, then a finer plane for fine adjustments, a pair of calipers to make sure the thickness is correct (to within a sixteenth of an inch) and a little square to make sure the planed edges are square and flat.

hand-planing the cabinet face stock

Next step is using the mitre saw to cut these pieces to length. This has been problematic; our miter saw is supposed to be able to cut a perfect right-angle but the results have been unpredictable and we’ve struggled a lot to try and get the saw working with the level of precision we need. This weekend Richard just built another new jig that we hope will let us hand-plane the ends of the wood to achieve a perfectly square end.

Here are all the pieces of a cabinet face, some finished and some un-trimmed.

cabinet face under construction

Once the pieces are cut to size, we use a pocket-screw jig to pre-drill the screw holes. It’s a special kind of technique that screws the pieces together at an angle, going in from the backside. As long as your pieces are cut quite square, it’s a very easy joint to make. The result is a beautifully perfect joint without any screw heads or holes visible from the exterior!

pocket screw jig

angled holes for pocket screws

Here’s a finished cabinet face!

Again, we use pocket screws to attach the finished face frame to the cabinet case. Then comes the drawers and drawer slides! So far, Richard has been working on the drawer construction while we work on the other stuff. He’s been using a pinned rabbet joint with beautiful wooden pegs to construct the drawers. Then the drawer slides – I think this is the most difficult part of all! However crooked or out-of-alignment the cabinet construction is, Richard has to make up the difference by custom-fitting each drawer slide to compensate for the irregularity. We could’ve saved a lot of time by using metal hardware for the drawer slides, but we thought it would be a fun challenge, and a beautiful result, to do this with all wood, no hardware.

left: screwing the cabinet face onto the case. right: Richard adjusts the fit of a drawer.

all-wood drawer sliders and homemade drawer stop mechanism

It means the sides of the drawers are clean looking, without metal slider tracks down the side, and it also means we maximize the usable drawer space – no storage area is lost to metal runners. It also means the runners have to be totally perfect to ensure the drawers slide smoothly – nothing worse than a drawer that gets stuck half-way open or shut. We apply a special wax on the wooden runners to make them slide nicely, and the finished function is absolutely great, even with a heavy drawer filled with silverware! Once the slides are all set, Richard planes down the drawer faces to fit perfectly. They’re cut slightly oversized to allow us to trim them to compensate for any slight imperfections in the construction of the cabinet face frame. Then, when all the woodworking is finally done, we sand the faces and give them two coats of primer and three coats of green paint, then tidy little wooden knobs. Here’s our finished drawers in use in the kitchen:

beautiful pinned rabbet joints. homemade drawers, hard at work in the kitchen!

The whole project has been kind of huge and exciting – it would have been a lot easier to buy ready-made cabinets, but I think we’ve saved some real money by doing it ourselves, and the result is SO beautiful, I am so totally delighted with the results and overflowing with pride every time I stop to take a good look at our cabinets! I feel like they really look so special and so much nicer than the average, and so perfect for us and our kitchen! So, how much more do we have left to go? We’ve got four cabinets completed and installed in the kitchen, two with doors and two with drawers. We’ve got another cabinet box and face complete on the workbench but lacking the drawers. Once we finish that one, we’ll need to do two more cabinets and that’s it! Then we can start working on the upper shelves, which Richard promises will be much easier! Here’s hoping it’s true! I can’t wait…

new ventilation system in the workshop

the new dust-collection contraption

We’ve been spending so much time in Richard’s workshop in Gorham, building the cabinets, sawing and sanding away and generating great clouds of sawdust; Mike’s asthma seems to bother him out in the workshop and Richard’s gotten a cough out there too. So Rich decided it was past time to start installing a big ventilation system for the workshop. His plans for his beautiful workshop have always included installing a full-shop ventilation system with vent pipes running under the floor; the ultimate plan is to build a wood floor above the (current) poured-concrete floor and have the pipes running under the wooden floorboards and attaching to every stationary machine in the shop to gather up all the dust they generate. So his first step was to pick out a ventilation system, buy it and put it together! Richard spent all the cash and did all the work, we just hung around working on cabinets and occasionally helped him fit some of the tubing together. Eventually there will be a box built around the dust-collector, to reduce the noise. Anyway, all this is only tangentially relevant to our house renovation, but it is related since we do all of our woodworking in Richard’s workshop, with his help! Hopefully we’ll get to help out with building up the new floor in the shop, whenever that stage comes.

spring clean-up

yuck.

Now that the snow’s melted, the yard is looking ghastly. Mud, dead grass, all that crap and garbage we forgot about when the snow hid it in the fall. There was just a lot of flotsam and jetsam scattering the yard when we moved in last year – dozens of big plastic toys, two deflated swimming pools, all kinds of old tires, metal roofing pieces blown off from the deteriorating barn, etc. We started hauling away some of it last year, but there’s still a lot left. Anyway, we decided this summer’s going to be the summer of cleaning up the yard! Last week we made a few good trips to the dump…

headed for the dump

Definitely still need to haul a few more big truckloads off to the dump. Also next week we’re planning to rent a brush hog mower to tackle the explosion of brambles and wild jungle in the back forty (last summer we tried to tackle it with a big-time mower and had to give up as we nearly broke the machine!) and hopefully our little wilderness of thistles and burrs will become a nice soft barefoot-friendly lawn. We’ll see how that goes – although we might not be able to improve the exterior of the house just yet, I hope we can make some progress on cleaning up the land.

We also took the first warm afternoon to work on our underground dog fence, which got messed up by the snowplow near the end of winter. The dog fence is such a blessing when it works, but it’s been a hassle to maintain – hopefully we dug it deep enough this time that it won’t need to be fixed again for a long time.

digging up the driveway to replace a section of the underground dog fence

improving the guest room!

We had a few spring visitors already, which has been an excellent cure for the loneliness of the long maine winter, and a great incentive to do some more work on the guest room. The walls were really messed up (seems like this was the kids’ room – i think three boys lived in here – so the walls were covered with drawings, doodles, graffiti, red paint splatters, mysterious smears, giant gouges and craters, boogers, and god-knows-what) so the first step was to get some joint compound and some special adhesive mesh for repairing wallboard. I can’t even imagine how these walls got such huge holes in them! Wrapped the bed in plastic and emptied everything out of the room, patched the giant holes over the course of a few days – spackle, wait for it to dry, wet sand, dry sand, spackle again, repeat. Then a few days of priming everything. The window and door trim are so crappy and covered in crud – I would like to just replace them in due time, but for now I just covered up all the crud with primer. Then painted the walls a kind of purple-gray color, and the window/door trim a nice rich blue; we have some old wool rugs that we brought back from Bolivia, which are mostly red and orange, and a navy blue couch that mike’s mom gave us, so we tried to pick colors that would match with those. The paint really transformed the room! Got curtains for the windows, a new comforter cover for the bed, hung a bright tomato-red curtain in the closet door. We also recently added a door to this room. It’s starting to look kind of civilized! BUT we don’t have the finished “after” photos yet! hang in there for an update…

before: yucky carpet and battle-scarred walls

before: found graffiti, carved into the guest room wall!

half way there… new comforter cover / walls are patched and primed but still unpainted

took apart the guest room to fix and paint the walls.

painting the guest room!

“after” photos to come next week… stay tuned!

out back behind our house

beautiful photo by Dirk!

saturday seaside

we only live like 45 minutes from the ocean, so why don’t we go there more often? this summer i swear i’ll go to the beach more!!
this is Scarborough State Park beach, we went over there one Saturday morning because our usual dog walking trail through the woods got so yucky with punky crusted snow, seas of mud and lakes of snowmelt. So the beach seemed like the best place to let the dog frolic off-leash without having to slog through crusty snow and mud. Beach was indeed perfect, Laika had a great time, made new friends, played with lots of seaweed, chased gulls, jumped on surfers, and only drank about 2 gallons of sea water.

beach = best cure for cabin fever

laika met a lab puppy and they frolicked in the frothy waves together.