August 1, 2015

This is definitely my favorite time of year. I love the filtered light caused by far off wildfires, the semi still hot air, the new growth on the fruit trees and even the thought of projects to accomplish before winter sets in. One project I have in mind is a firewood shed / garden shed near the Yellow House.

Last week I finished the restoration if the staircase and balustrade in the house. Yesterday Becky and Oliver began to stain the stairs an ebony hue. The small test places they did look amazing. They continue to stain while I work on the exterior of the bay window. The wall beneath the sills has been covered with plywood and partly wrapped with tar paper for too many years now, I am embarrassed to find out how long it has been in that state. The scaffolding is down and progress is being made by covering the lower third of the bay window with salvaged Redwood from the house.

I am amazed how much painted Redwood I have, even though  I reused as much of the original material in the renovation/restoration of the house I still have a hefty collection of dirty, nail infested with failing paint old growth Redwood. I am against planing painted boards because of the paint particles that are released and also because of how the paint and dirt dull the knives.

Well I needed to take the material thickness down and eighth of an inch plus some and I planned on only planing the back side. Unfortunately the painted side was the nicer side and the paint was in terrible condition so I flipped them through the planer and got my three quarter thickness I needed to have enough of a reveal under the drip edge of the window sills.

Under these boards I covered the plywood and tar paper with three inch bead board that I fabricated from two by fours that were once a deck at the Mattole School. After wire brushing them I sliced them in half on the table saw and then planed this fresh face. The boards were jointed then ripped then a bead was cut with a router set up in my table saw. The last step was cutting rabbets to make a half lap so that the water won't slip in between them. These were  nailed to the wall and then Oliver primed them while I prepped wood for the frames. That is where I am now, enough time spent on this device. It is to crank some DRI radio on Pandora and make the  vertical boards that make up frames that cover the bead board. Time to get dirty and wire brush these bad boys.

July 27, 2015

I have conquered a project that I have been putting off for many years. Now that we are living in the house I must walk up and down the stairs several times a day and often with bare feet. The staircase and banister was ready for restoration. The newel post sat about a half inch off the floor and wiggled back and forth with ease. Nearly every visitor would grab the banister, discover it was loose and shake it back and forth just to see how loose it really was.

I took some photos of the process but keeping up with technology is endless, wasteful and expensive. The computer I use to download my pictures to is outdated now and I am constantly reminded that this computer won't support the applications that need to be used in order to tap in to the world wide web, the internet, the biggest waste of time since the invention of the television. I use it, we all use it, very few have never logged in to this information sucking tool. Sure there is plenty of useful information at the tip of our finger. Truth is we all spend too much time checking our Facebook, our email, our Snapchat or Instagram. It is a wonderful way to keep in touch with friends and family, and so was the telephone. We don't even know for sure what will happen to a human race living amongst radio waves of all kinds. At least we won't need so much copper to make all those cords, its cordless now... Bluetooth. Does that mean we won't need to mine so much material from the Earth? We are making small gadgets using less material but making these gadgets disposable. Everyone will have to upgrade and buy the next thing. Throw away the old and purchase the new. It is the way it works these days. Not long ago we would by a quality tool and take care of it, knowing that if properly taken care of it would last for many generations. It was made from the finest material and crafted from the hands of skilled craftsman. Now most items manufactured are disposable, sad but true.

Many people still think like this and won't buy into the wasteful economy trap we are being forced into. In order to do anything these days you have to have some sort of insurance. Our local volunteer fire department needs to raise $20,000 a year to cover costs, a large portion of these costs are to insurance companies. Insurance costs are what put most small businesses out of business. I see it happening over and over again.

Enough ranting, the staircase project was a pleasure. I replaced about half the treads, turned four of the broken spindles and reused a couple that Becky found at an antique store. They were the same exact pattern but only worked for the short spindles. I had to turn the longer of the pair. I made molding to match the original to replace molding that was split or broken. It seemed like the staircase had been repaired once before, maybe around 1959 when the PG & E electrical hook up was done. The repairs were done with wire nails with thin heads. The original work was done with square cut nails.

At this point we might shellac the fresh wood and stain everything a dark color to match the original. Under the molding the wood was sealed with a white primer. Becky found traces of green paint when cleaning out the grooves in the newel post.

I have moved on to wrapping up the bay window. Now I am about to go through my stash of painted Redwood that I have left over from the house. Hopefully the material will guide me in finishing the bay. Time to get dirty.

July 8, 2015

Now that we are in the house I am not tempted to go online as often. We have no internet in our newly restored home and I think that is a good thing. However now I have not been keeping up on my craftsman journal. Even now I feel that I should continue working on this shelf for the CP office but I thought 5 minutes wouldn't hurt.

My main focus lately has been our house. I built the doors and drawer fronts for the kitchen and installed them. I only have one more door to install which will hinge like a transom window and have a chain that holds the door in place like a desk.

Making and install installing thresholds for the house doors made a big difference in air infiltration. The last air leak is around the sashes downstairs in the kitchen. I milled, oiled and fit the stops but didn't yet nail them in place. First I want to mortise for the window latch catch plate before nailing them so that I can mortise on a horizontal surface and keep dust and chips out of the house.

My time is up, next time I will write about other projects for clients. Chiau.

Drawers, Doors & Pinewood Derby

There is a lot going on these days, more to do than what I can make time for... well it can't all be done at once so the test of patience begins once again. I have started building drawers for our kitchen and for Tony and Julies. I owe Tony for making the brick wall behind our wood stove, we are trading hour for hour. I glued up a third of them today.

After the drawers are glued up I am anxious to do my first zinc countertop. We have all the materials now; the zinc, solder, flux, contact cement. sponge rollers (for spreading adhesive) and a good quality soldering iron that I use for stained glass. My trial top will be an office table for the radical left newsletter and website CounterPunch. I have done a bit of research on the internet and am ready to give it a go. I feel like pulling a late nighter....  maybe another night. The drawers need to move on first, after glue up they get the edges chamfered, then the first coat of shellac. The front edges need to be trimmed flush too.

Kitchen counter to cover with Zinc

A project I wrapped up recently was the pair of French doors for the Cockburn residence. The original doors were made of Pine and faced the South-East direction with no overhanging roof protection so they saw a lot of direct sun as well as the pounding rain. The bottom rail was toast on one of the doors and the other was not far behind. I used old growth redwood that was salvaged from a wharf on Humboldt Bay by Jim Groeling and Associates. The glass on the original doors had been painted on with gold leaf by ceramic artist Jim Danisch. I was asked to preserve these eight panes of insulated glass into the new doors. This was another project where I had an opening dimension, and the glass dimension, and I had to make the wood fit between the two. I think I am getting good at this because the glass fit perfectly, every single one.

Cockburn's Doors

The Pinewood Derby came and went and with it was an evening of track maintenance. We built the track four years ago, we being local Petrolia volunteers most with kids in the elementary school but some without. From the very beginning there was a flaw in the plywood in one of the track seems, this year I cut about four inches out of the track to remove the flaw. This meant disassembling about four feet of track to get to the bolts to move the pieces around. It was fairly simple and I am really happy with the track design. It is a combination of plans that I found online combined to make this particular track design. We are still combing out the computerized finish gate, we had technical difficulties this year. Possibly because kids were playing around the track earlier that day and a witness had seen one of the young boys pulling on the wires that go to the switch at the starting gate. Something was amiss with lane three so we had to figure out the results by hand, thank you Becky.

11th Annual Mattole Pinewood Derby

My little book.

This is my brains external hard drive, it fits into my pocket and is one of three items that are pushed into my trouser pockets every day. Ear plugs, Atlas Nitrile gloves, and my book. I have often thought it would be fun to take a photo of a page from my book and then accompany that with more photos and a short explanation connecting those photos to the list from the book. This page doesn't have a date but I know from surrounding pages that this was the first week of March 2015.

one of many little books

On the right is instructions I wrote down from a website by Antique Gas Stoves that explains how to remove the Oven Control Knob on our O'Keefe and Merrit cook stove and range. This is our second stove by this company and we are looking forward to using it in our home that we have been working on since June of 2006.

broken oven control knob

This TO DO list is just before a town day. I hadn't taken the truck to town in several months and recently I had to replace the battery. I purchased a new battery but still haven't installed it because I had robbed the battery from the Belvedere when the old battery stopped holding a charge.

1962 Plymouth Belvedere

The Cut List for plywood is for two kitchens worth of drawers made with Baltic Birch plywood, a kitchen sink cabinet for Ruthie and countertop material that gets covered with zinc.

Sink cabinet to replace.

The stools (or sills) are from the house, they have been covered by blue tape for at least a year to protect them from paint. Underneath the tape they were pretty funky, water stained and covered with dust, bird shit and bug droppings. I have know idea how the tape even stuck.

Window Stools Finished

Our water comes from a small pond dug by the old timers with  a rock wall stacked around it that I discovered last summer when I decided to pull plants out around the perimeter to enlarge the waters storage area. The 12 volt low flow pump sucks a lot of sediment in the summer when the pond can't keep up with the 1.8 gallons per minute suck of the pump. Becky discovered a neat drop down filter that is easy to clean out by just closing a valve after the filter and opening a valve on the bottom of the filter cartridge. This flushes out the sediment trapped in the filter and the filter is made of stainless steel. It is installed now but I haven't tried it yet, we aren't using much water at the house. However we hope to be moving in before summer, we only need to get our kitchen functioning. It is getting close, cabinet carcasses are installed and ready for the zinc. For plumbing we only need to plumb the gas line and get the old stove working.

Flush Down Filter

Finishing Wood

Finishing is not one of my strong points, although I have tried several different products and also have read numerous articles and books on the topic. It seems that my finishing techniques are constantly changing. When I was an apprentice in my early twenties I was taught to use General's tung oil finish applied with a sponge brush and then wiped off if there was any finish left on the surface after twenty or thirty minutes.

Soaking with tung oil/urethane.

Then water based finishes starting to emerge so I began experimenting with those. I didn't like how you couldn't go back over what you had already brushed on, I was used to applying the finish heavily and then going back over it with the brush to even it out. I remember using water based urethane on a set of nine sliding doors for a house in Oregon. I am sure that this finish didn't hold up because a decade later I went back to using water based finishes and noticed that the finish didn't seem to stay on the wood for very long at all. It was almost as if the finish itself just evaporated away. I discovered this by using it on three different kitchen cabinet projects and seeing for myself how what seemed like a well covered finish when the cabinets left the shop, only a month later seeming like raw wood with no protection at all.

I read a book given to me by Alex Cockburn called Adventures in Wood Finishing : 88 Rue de Charonne by George Frank,  about a French chemist who worked as a wood finisher in the early 1900's. He made his own finishes and being a chemist experimented with many different chemicals. I followed this path for a bit making my own linseed oil mix and even using a double boiler to make a wax and oil finish. Sam Maloof also talks about concocting finishes this way in his book Sam Maloof, Woodworker. It was messy process and the finish took a long time to dry.

I discovered how to make my own shellac when I took some summer classes in Fort Bragg at the fine woodworking program started by James Krenov. I bought shellac flakes and had a concentrate that I would thin and apply with a rag. I did this for a few projects but the super thin coats took too long to build up and I longed for something more durable, long lasting and non-toxic. I used fast drying polyurethane for a bit but the toxic fumes were unbearable. I tried spar varnish but it seemed impossible not to have drips.

I went back to using water based finishes after our neighbors used a w.b. finish on their floor in their newly constructed cabin. I liked that it didn't have a particularly bad smell and it dried really fast. I got used to just going over the wood once without doubling over what I had already applied until after it had dried and was sanded. This is when I used water based urethane for the three different kitchen projects I already mentioned.

Finishing carcass parts before assembling.

I decided to try something new, I browsed the finishes at Pierson's Building Center, our local hardware store. I started using a penetrating tung oil by Deft. I really liked how the finish soaked into the wood and the smell was much better than Watco's oil finish. The only thing I didn't like was how it took so many coats to build up the finish.

A woodworking friend told me that he had read an article about someone who used the pre-mixed shellac by Zinsser, by cutting it one to one with denatured alcohol. I decided to try this out since I felt I still had not discovered the ideal finish for my work. I liked this very much, it dried fast, left a solid finish after two coats on wood and smelled good. I started using it on everything, however my wife felt that it might not last and needed to be more durable especially for outdoor applications like windows and doors.

Thinking back to all the articles and books I had read I decided to add the penetrating tung oil to the wood that was first sealed with two coats of shellac. This is what I do now, what a beautiful result! Of course there is more to finishing that just applying the product, there is sanding. Who likes to sand? I like to sand as little as possible, it is just another particle that could damage my lungs.

Redwood Door finished with two coats of shellac and two coats of Deft Oil.

Before applying the first coat of shellac I sand to 150 grit, if it is plywood I only sand once with 150 on an orbital sander. If it is wood I will start with 80, then 100, then 150 grit. Apply the first coat of shellac with a sponge brush, it dries fast and raises the grain. Then sand with 220 grit with a palm sander, hitting the corners and edges by hand. Apply the second coat of shellac. Then sand with 320 grit with the palm sander and this is the last time I need to sand. With a sponge brush I apply a liberal amount of Deft penetrating oil, let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes and use blue paper towels to wipe it down. One (or better two) days later I rub the wood with fine steel wool and use an air compressor to blow away the steel wool particles as I wipe it with a cotton rag. I apply one more coat of the Deft oil, wipe it off after 30 minutes, a day or two later rub it down with steel wool again and buff it with a cotton rag. The result is stunning. For plywood carcasses I only use shellac and four coats are applied.

Back to Work and Baby Goats

This week we had two baby goats born from two different moms a day apart. I heard a goat crying as if something was tearing it apart, I grabbed my jacket and ran out to the stable, as I got there the baby was already half way out of the white mama and then the rest of the kid slipped out before my eyes. I have seen this before and every time it reminds me of watching the television show V when I was a child when a woman gave birth to a slime covered lizard like creature. In the stable the slimy creature suddenly popped to its feet looking to nurse... it amazes me every time. The following evening I had already put the newborn and its mom inside but I heard a baby cry that was outside the goat shed. I thought that maybe the baby had slipped through a crack in the barn siding so I grabbed a torch and investigated. Just outside the stable was a different goat and another baby, just a day later, I guess the phase of the moon was just right. A waxing crescent was the phase of the moon, about a week before a full moon.

Baby Goats

The kitchen cabinet carcasses are all down at the house now, except for one because I ran out of 3/4 plywood and one of the shelves needs to be doweled to the inside of the face frame before the back can be attached. These cabinets have taken me much longer than I expected, I guess because I didn't have a helper and doing all the figuring, cutting, joinery, sanding and finishing took a considerable amount of time. It is time to get back to work so I have several small projects lined up.

Carcasses in their new home.

Tomorrow I will be measuring for drawers for a kitchen that was built by the patron. I plan on building the drawers for our kitchen at the same time. I haven't advanced my skills to making kitchen drawers out of wood with dovetail joinery. Instead I use baltic birch plywood and use a tongue and groove joint that holds the pieces together. I have always made drawers for kitchens this way, it is fast and fairly simple. I don't mind the way the baltic birch edges look either.

Patron built kitchen.

Another project I will be measuring for tomorrow is a sink cabinet for a neighbor of the drawer patron. She is embarrassed for me to come over because her house is a wreck and she says she lives in squawler and is ashamed of it. Her current sink is funky and she is ready for an upgrade. She has another sink I can use somewhere out in her field.

Sink cabinet to replace.

Last night I was asked to repair a broken window that a different woman's cat had broken from the inside. I guess the window is double paned and it happened last April. She told herself that she would at least ask me before it had been a year since it had been broken.

After driving around measuring for projects I hope to permanently install our kitchen carcasses so that they will be ready for the counter top installation. We are doing a zinc top that will be glued to two layers of 3/4 plywood. As soon as I have my measurements for several different projects I will take the truck to town to get rid if trash and pick up materials.

Another way to build carcasses.

The family should be home soon so that gives me a chance to think back on this week. What would you do if you had the week off and you could do whatever you wanted with no distractions and no supervision? I built cabinet carcasses, I started out attaching the plywood sides to the face frames. Usually I make face frames that are roughly 3/4 x 2 inches and the frames are screwed and plugged to the plywood sides. Isn't that how most cabinets are made? This time I oriented the frame stock so that the edges would be the face. This meant that I had to devise a different way to fasten the face frames to the plywood. I made the corner posts square, 2x2, some places I made them 2x4. This gave me enough wood to cut a rabbet and left plenty of wood for screws to penetrate.

Fitting plywood sides.

A couple of cabinets had dividers so I ended up drilling holes for dowels. With some white glue and clamps this was squeezed together to make a clean joint and one side of the divider I could easily force flush with the drawer opening. This will make installing the drawer slides simpler. One thing I thought of was to cut out for the toe kick on the divider since I decided to drop it all the way to the floor. Usually I would have it sit on the cabinet bottom. What I wish I would also had done was cut out the notches to receive the webbing, but at this point I wasn't sure how I was going to do the webbing.

Doweled joinery clamped.

Once all the cabinets were assembled that did not have wood panels for sides, I switched gears and worked on the frames that needed wood panels cut to fit. I resawed these panels back in July and they have been sitting on the floor stickered next to my drill press with cypress slab offcuts sitting on them, hopefully discouraging the panels from cupping. The panels turned out gorgeous and flat... it is always a bit nerve racking cutting such beautiful wood when it is so easy to make a wrong cut. The wood god was watching over me and everything worked out beautifully with no casualties.

Curly maple panels fit into their frames.

At this point it was time to start sanding and finishing the panels before glueing up the frames. Before the fitting process I sanded the panels with 80 grit then 100 grit with the orbital sander. After fitting the panels they were sanded with 150 grit and then shellaced. Only two coats of shellac were applied before glue up. That seemed like plenty of shellac, when it is all installed I will probably coat everything one more time with some sort of tung oil finish, not sure which magic product to use yet, I haven't come across the ultimate finish yet. (besides shellac) I used only shellac for the cypress cabinets in the bathroom and for the wood countertop I coated it with a few layers of thinned down spar varnish over the shellac. After the panels were finished I glued up the frames and then sanded and finished the frames.

Finished curly maple frame and panels.

I decided to make the bottom of these cabinets removeable. That will not only provide a nice hidey hole but also will make it easy to clean or replace if something were to happen down the road. To do this I used my 3/4 plywood scraps and cut them into strips that I screwed to the inside to the carcass and the plywood sits on these strips. It makes the carcasses lighter to transport because the bottoms can be removed. For the webbing I also used my scraps of plywood and ripped some two inch strips that I fit into the carcass space. One direction of the webbing is flat and the other direction is on edge, the edge strips have notches cut from them so that the flat strips can easily be fasten to them from the top and then the edge strips can be screwed flush to the top from the inside, except on the back I screwed through the back into the flat strip.

Installing webbing, clamps are essential.

Right when it seems like the cabinets can go out the door there was one more thing to do. The drawer slides need to attach to something that is flush with the inside edge of the frame. In some cases the divider is already in the correct position, the other side needs to be built up. My plywood scraps and some redwood scraps came in handy for this. I used redwood as the three vertical strips that the horizontal (half inch plywood) strip could attach to. The redwood was planed down to the proper thickness so that the two layers were flush with the inside face of the frame. Now the carcasses can go, I like to fit the drawers and doors to the carcasses before they leave the shop but in this case I want to get the kitchen functioning before the doors and drawers will be built.

Bottom strip and built up strips for drawer slides.

Yellow House Kitchen

This week I am home alone, Becky and Oliver are attending a CounterPunch retreat in Long Beach. I was invited but I really want to get this kitchen of ours finished. Besides we have animals to look after and the weather has been heavenly.

Goats and Alpacas

Sometimes I wonder if I just like to do things the hard way. The way that I am building the kitchen is more like a mix of furniture construction and cabinet construction. If there is a visible side to the cabinet it is made of wood and involves mortise and tenon joinery and frame and panel construction. All the wood for the frames and panels are cut from two inch thick maple slabs that I had milled about a decade ago.

Frame and Panel construction

Last July I milled all the wood for the face frames and panels and also cut all the mortise and tenon joinery so that the frames could go together and not be mixed up while they wait for phase two. This is phase two, (six months later) the back edges of the frames are rabbeted for the plywood (backs and sides) and the parts are sanded and finished before being glued up. The frames that get panels are  dadoed with a router and the panels are cut to fit and then sanded and finished before being glued up. Plywood is cut for the sides and backs (that aren't exposed) and sanded and finished (4 coats shellac) before assembly.

Dado cut with a router.

The end of this phase will be installing the cabinet carcasses and preparing the countertops for zinc. Phase three will be making the doors and drawers but I will have to go back to work before phase three happens, unless of course I receive some sort of perquisite to cover the cost of living.

Mother Nature Rules

Mother Nature seems to be on a different schedule than the one I have been trying to make. As a New Years Resolution I have been trying to make a schedule and keep to it. It seems that whenever it is time to work on my own projects a big storm comes through and knocks the power out for 4 to 5 days. Last week a whopper came through, we received 12 inches of rain in 48 hours. The creek was flowing higher than I had ever scene it, the volume was so great that the culvert that goes under the county road was tweaked and the water was restricted. When we got down to the creek to see what was happening the creek was backing up at a rapid rate. Becky went to tell the neighbors and I went to fetch Oliver so that he could see this rare event. By the time we got back to the creek near the culvert the creek level was so high that it started flowing over the road. What was a creek seemed now to be a lake. We watched in awe at the mighty power of nature and water.

East Mill Creek

We try to live a self sustainable life here on our humble homestead. The only utility that we don't manage ourselves is power. We take care of our own water, waste and fuel. This time I couldn't wait another 4 days to get back to work so I cleaned the bench on the north wall where the lathe lives. That bench has the best light in the shop, it sits under a window but was covered in a thick layer of dust and bat shit. I unbolted the lathe and moved it out of the way and cleared the bench so that I could use it to sand the parts to the curly maple kitchen I am building for the Yellow House. The last I worked on this project was August 3, 2014. I made a To Do List on that day so that I would know where I left off.

Reclaimed work space.

With the aid of fossil fuel and a generator I was able to sand the parts under natural light and Becky helped by applying the first coat of shellac. Last night the power came back on and our candle lit evenings came to an end. (It was out from Thursday to Monday) Today all the parts were sanded and a second coat was applied, then the face frames were glued up. My goal is to get a few of the carcasses installed and out of the shop to make room for the rest of the cabinets.

320 sanding after second coat.

Doors and epic weather

Doors, doors, doors...three doors now glued up. The Buxbaum door is ready to be sanded and finished, the redwood panels were beautiful straight grained old growth redwood, a full eleven inches wide. I believe a lot of this Wharf wood was milled from beams that were sixteen inches by sixteen inches. An inch was cut off all the way around so lots of the boards ended up fourteen inches wide. This is why the Hawkin's Bar doors had seven inch wide stiles. The bottom rails of the Buxbaum door was just under thirteen inches wide.

Buxbaum Door

Some evidence of the Wharf wood is still exposed on the stiles of Daisy's doors. These French doors were built so that the old glass from the doors being replaced could be reused. Hopefull I will be able to get the glass out without breaking it. I am hoping the steamer will relieve the adhesion between wood and glass. Today I glued up both doors, I love how the doors come together with the use of mortise and tenons. Adding the element of miters makes it a bit trickier but with the use of a mitered block with forty five degree angles cut on either side makes it easy to cut and pare the miters.

Daisy's Door Joinery

It has been two weeks since my back was totally tweaked and now it is feeling much better. I have been doing yoga in the mornings and then try to get out to the scotch broom with a machete just to get my muscles warmed up, then I get to work in the shop. It is not one hundred percent but it is getting there.

Enjoying a warm January evening.

The weather these days has been heavenly, high temps in the low seventies with no wind. Low temps in the low forties. The sun is working its way toward the tops of the Cypress trees and soon the barn won't be in the shadows from 11:00 to 3:00. We have pruned all the fruit trees and olive trees during this epic spell of perfect weather.

In the shadow of the Cypress trees.

One more week of work for a client, than it is back to our kitchen, it has been on the back burner since August. My goal is to get the carcasses installed and the counter tops ready for zinc within the first two weeks of February. Then I have a drawer project waiting for me so hopefully I can make ours at the same time.

Bad back and Doors

Four days stuck in bed, incapable and powerless. My lower spine felt like a vertebrae had shifted out of position and it must have been pressing on a nerve. During that time if I moved, my back would seize up and I would uncontrollably writhe about until the pain ceased. I couldn't leave the bed even if I wanted to. The urge to pee is what got me out of bed the first two times which were spread out by a whole day. I could only get as far as the edge of the bed and had to relieve myself in a bucket with saw dust. By the third day I could straighten myself out on my feet and move around on crutches, I even fed the cats. Later that day I laid in a position that made my back spasm for longer than ever. I was afraid to move after that. By day four I made it to the bathroom and even took a shower. Today, day five I put the crutches away and the piss bucket and even watched Oliver's first ever basketball game at home.

Low winter light.

I walked home from the school and then down to the house to see how the newly finished floor in the music room turned out. Becky has been hard at work cleaning up the floor and sanding it, being careful not to sand away the saw marks on the wood and not get down to bare wood. Alex was here for a couple days and spent a morning applying the first coat of shellac. It looks beautiful, even where there was some sort of tar like scum on the wood that wouldn't come off.

Buxbaum Panels

I am hoping to get back to the shop soon, I have started three doors now and would like to wrap those up. While I was down, the panels for the Buxbaum door arrived, I have two pairs to choose from.

Daisy's Doors

Daisy's door material is planed and ripped to rough width but I want to remove one of the pieces of glass that I will be reusing so that I can measure the thickness and exact dimension before cutting the wood any further.

Winter, curly redwood door and shop clutter.

Winter time... short days, long nights and a cold shop. There were a couple days when we got back from our LA trip that I refused to work in the shop. When it drops below 40° F in the shop it is just too cold. My shop has no heat source and this time of year the sun is behind a long row of cypress trees from about 11:00 to 3:00. 

Amazing architecture down at USC, where winter temps were in the 70's.

I built a window jamb with some reclaimed fir and a repurposed redwood sill that my client found at a salvage yard. It will house a fixed insulated unit of glass and the surrounding wall will get shingled.

Window Jamb

I started on one of the doors I have to build. This one is made with curly redwood that was milled from a wharf on Humboldt Bay. The mortise and tenon joinery is done and I am setting that project aside for now until I get the redwood panels.

Curly Redwood Door

I still have the French doors to make, but I also have an anxious wife that wants to see some progress on our kitchen that I started last July and put on the back burner in August. It is taking up a corner of the shop so I would love to get it built and installed.

French Doors to replace.

Another house project that is taking up shop space is four closet doors. I can't remember when I built those but the frames are leaning by my dust collector and the panels are stacked on the floor between the thickness sander and shaper. Not much left to do on those except dado for the panels and make the molding that matches the houses existing doors. I had a shaper cutter ground to match but haven't used it yet. Sometimes it is the smallest thing that will prevent us from moving on and finishing what was started.