Tweeked back, oak cabinets and more paint removal.

Flat on my back with a heat pad underneath feeling shocks of pain in my lower spinal area if I move wrong. It is a good time to write, a bad time to work. Of course this happens nearly every autumn. It seems like it is either my knee or my back that is giving me problems lately. As soon as my knee started feeling better from that skate session at the Eureka skatepark my back started acting up and I don't think scraping paint from the ceiling helped it any.

Smokey September Sunset

Before getting back to scraping paint I started building upper cabinets out of white oak. They are supposed to match existing cabinets in an Arcata rental house. I haven't used oak much, it seems very stable... and smells good too. The face frames are glued up and the side panels are made. Doors are next, they will have curved top and bottom rails so I will have to divise a jig for a flush cut router bit to get smooth curves in this hard wood.

Oak Mortise and Tenon

Whenever I came to a good stopping point on the cabinets I went down to the house to hang drywall, spread some mud and strip more paint. I have a new heat gun just like the last one and I am nearly finished with the ceiling in the music room. I probably would have finished today but I decided to take a break before I cripple myself, I feel pretty  close to it right now. I think I want to sport a cane for support and to be able to stand up straight. Or just lay here and listen to Pandora.

Just a bit more paint to remove.

Burning Wood and Stripping Paint

I was turned on to an excellent blog that takes you on a building crews adventure erecting the Newport Ranch Inn along Highway 1 near Fort Bragg, CA. I usually check it while eating breakfast. These guys are pros and skilled craftsmen, and the redwood they use is amazing. Makes me wonder why I work alone, these guys get a lot of work accomplished in a short amount of time.

I torched the Doug Fir from Dave with a propane torch... that was fun. It would be real easy to burn down a barn with one of those. I kept a hose nearby and burned it over dirt. I burnt three sides of the board and then wire brushed every single stick. It took some time but now it is over and ready to install.

Of course there are a few things to do before installation. We figured the hearth for the wood stove should go in before the wood floor and it seemed like we should finish all the dirty work before starting on the hearth. The dirty work I am referring to is removing the paint from the redwood bead board ceiling. That is almost as much fun as torching and wire brushing a huge stack of wood.

The heat gun finally gave up the ghost. It has removed almost all the paint necessary on our house, it only had about two more days to go. My focus instead went to finishing up the drywall. As you can see this wall doesn't have any and the opposite side of the room needs it too. We have decided to keep the ceiling bare instead of painting it which will save us some time, that means this room is nearing completion. The last room to finish is the kitchen. Unfortunately I am pulling away after Labor Day to make some money building upper cabinets for a house in Arcata. I also have cedar shingles to install for a client nearby. 

Rough Fir Flooring

We finally found wood to use for the floor in the kitchen of the Gothic Farmhouse. Wife and I searched the woodlot/homeless camp at Recycled Lumber in Arcata, nothing that would really work. Almquist had piles of flooring of all varieties of wood but not what we were looking for. Most boards were 3 inches or less in width. We wanted something that was rustic, having the saw marks from the mill would be preferred, wide plank would be even better. On the way home we stopped at Valley Lumber, I love the people that work there, they are all so friendly. We saw some rough milled Redwood 1x12 that looked interesting but it was already 3/4 of an inch and was full of knots and flat wide grain, definitely second or third growth logs. We talked to Troy and he suggested talking to Dave Short. Dave is the guy that milled the curly maple I am working with now and also the cypress I used in our bathroom.

Locally milled douglas fir

Sure enough Dave had what we had been looking for, full one inch Doug fir boards ranging in width from 4 inches to 14. Some boards have knots, some have patches of a blueish/black stain. That is okay, we are thinking of torching the wood with a propane torch, wire brushing it, then oiling it before it even gets into the house. That should make it look old and also help to preserve it for centuries to come, this is a Japanese technique for preserving wood.

Window sash glue up

In the shop I just glued up a couple sashes and now need to make stops. Old growth redwood is amazing wood! I am building a redwood deck for a shower for my sister's funky metal shower and hopefully I can jump back onto the kitchen soon. Although I forsee myself focusing on the flooring next so that it can go down before the cabinets. I promised to build the Arcata rental cabinets the first couple weeks of September so the last couple of August weeks are going to be busy pushing ahead on the house.

Redwood shingles and door repairs.

Last week I built a jamb for a small stained glass piece and then shingled the wall around it. The wall was a pain to shingle especially under the 2 foot roof over hang that was only 1 foot above the roof below. I had to squeeze into the tight space to mark the shingles to be cut then squeeze out of the space to cut the shingles and then squeeze back into the space to hammer them in place. I am glad to be done with that, although it was a pleasure to be installing redwood shingles again.

redwood frame for (ebay find) stained glass

Two of my clients doors were sagging and coming apart so I eased them apart more and slathered glue into the gaps and clamped them back together. One door needed a new latch, a door shoe, and stops. The other needed a threshold and one side of the jamb to be replaced.

A bit of metal flashing for the roof and some corner trim details and the building is starting to look more like a finished structure instead of a work in progress that hasn't changed in years.

new shingles and window

Now I am getting back into the shop to build a couple sashes and a window jamb. I have some beautiful old growth redwood boards to work with. They used to be a fence but now will serve as a window jamb. I also will be cutting into more of those amazing redwood 3x12's.

cabinet face frames

My kitchen project is sitting on the back burner for another week. Luckily the face frames don't take up too much shop space. I will be looking at some locally milled 1x4 fir today that hopefully will work for the kitchen floor. We might treat the wood by torching it, then wire brushing it, then oiling it before it is installed. I will do a test piece first to see if we like the result.

Clean Slate

The shop is cleaned out and many of my recent projects are complete. I started to pull slabs of maple out of the storage area in the barn and I am thrilled to gain empty space, I'm sure it won't last long. The maple will be used to build the kitchen for the Gothic Farmhouse. I have stopped calling it the Yellow House because there are at least three other yellow houses here in Petrolia and I know that two of them are also referred to as the "Yellow House."

One of my recent projects was stripping paint off of redwood beadboard that covers the ceiling of the Gothic Farmhouse. The kitchen space was once two rooms and in one of the rooms the paint on the ceiling was better than the other so I only had to strip half of the large room which now measures 14 feet by 30 feet, plus a bay window. Becky is painting the ceiling now and is nearly finished. Next to do is the floor, we are hoping to reuse the old flooring that was removed,  unfortunately there is not enough to cover the entire room so we are hoping to use 1x6 fence boards that are the same thickness and vertical grain.

Tools for removing paint.

Upcoming projects include more windows (jambs and sashes) for a shop, I will be using salvaged fence boards for the jambs and those chunky 3x12's for the sashes. One of the windows will be a stained glass unit that will be single hung with weights and pulleys and drop down into the wall framing.

Another project is building upper cabinets for an Arcata rental to match the existing cabinets. Whoever built these had fun with a simple carving under the sink and the shelf brackets that will be coming down.

Maple slabs to dissect.

Off to the shop to begin cutting cabinet parts out of two inch maple slabs that I had milled from our last home nearly ten years ago.

Curly Maple

The maple slabs turned out having a fiddle back, curly grain pattern.  It took two of the stickered stacks of 2 inch slabs to get all the parts. The curly grain tends to chip no matter which direction the wood is fed through the jointer or planer.

fiddle back maple

I switched out the blades in both tools and put a sharpened blade on the table saw too. My tools received a beating building sashes for a shop with salvaged redwood. Everything is sharp and the surfaces are waxed and working the wood is more of a pleasure now than a hindrance. I roughed out the parts using the dull knives and saw blade and it was noisy, the table saw left burn marks and the planer struggled to pull the wood through.

Maple slabs marked and ready to cut.

After roughing out the wood an (eighth of an inch over size) it was jointed again and planed then all the wood was sent through the thickness sander. This removed most of the chips that happened even with sharp knives.

Rough cut tenons.

The last few days have been spent cutting the tenons and then drilling the mortises. Now I am cleaning out the mortises and fitting the tenons. It won't be long now until all the face frames will have taken shape. At that point I hope to switch gears and make some money. Hopefully one of my upcoming projects will be ready to begin.

Fitting mortise and tenons.

Mattole Craftsman?

Why do I call myself Mattole Craftsman? I don't claim to be the only, or best, or fastest, or most precise or any of that. I learned my craft in the Mattole Valley, Petrolia to be more precise. The Mattole valley is long and windy and provides homes to many talented craftsmen, most you will probably never hear about. These craftsmen reside deep in the remote stretches of this beautiful land surrounding the Mattole River. From Petrolia to Honeydew to Ettersburg and further to Whitethorn and beginning in the Sanctuary Forest. The Mattole River travels through the most pristine, untouched, rural land in all of California. You can be sure to find many fine craftsmen in these parts, living self sufficient lifestyles and only improving on their impact on this precious land.

I call myself Mattole Craftsman because my journey began here and continues to take me on adventures. Everyday it is something new and exciting, sometimes it seems like a project will never end and then suddenly it is as if you just reached the summit of a grand mountain and over the edge is an endless view of possibilities waiting below you. It is downhill at this point, with the wind at your back, all one must do is make careful decisions and the adventure continues in a positive direction.

I worked in the printing industry before making shavings and saw dust. A stripper was my title. My job was to create the film that would be sent off to press to be burned onto plates. It was a day spent mostly hunched over a light table or under an exposure lamp positioned over a vacuum table. It was precise work using a loupe to register film separations, cutting windows with an exacto knife into rubilith, and matching colors by exposing the proper screen percentage on either the cyan, yellow, magenta or black film negatives. It wasn't long after I worked in the industry that computers started to be used. First it was digital cameras, then it was digital layout sent directly to film. There were a lot of problems in the beginning and soon all that we strippers were doing was positioning the digitally created pages onto large sheets of mylar. No longer were we using our artistic talents to create printed work. It came to the point were we either learned how to use a computer or find another profession.

I learned how to use a computer and I hated it. My days were spent sitting in an arm chair clicking a mouse all day waiting for the computers to crunch the complicated data. A lot of the time was spent trying to figure out why things were not working correctly. My arm started to always get numb and I started gaining weight and feeling shitty all the time. All the jobs that came in were wanted to be completed yesterday and I was working 10 to 12 hours a day. I rarely went outside and I was eating fast food every day, not a healthy lifestyle.

My computer knowledge got me a job in Eureka, California so we packed up and moved from our hometown where my wife and I grew up, we were young and ready for a change. Humboldt county was a huge change from our Pleasant Grove, Utah (sheltered) upbringing. We were 23 and ready for the challenge. I worked for 3 months for Eureka Printing struggling on PC's and not having our own calibrator to check our film. It was an hour and a half commute over a windy road from Petrolia.

My aunt was dating an architect/builder Jim Groeling and he had an opening on a job building a cabin in Petrolia. I took it and have never looked back. The only building experience I had before this was building skateboard ramps as a teenager. That first summer in Petrolia was unforgettable! I will always cherish the opportunities presented to me by Jim Groeling, the greatest craftsman architect alive. From the beginning I learned the value of recycling lumber, especially redwood. He turned me on to many great architects and builders like the Greene brother, Frank Lloyd Wright, Maybeck, Krenov, Maloof and many more. I spent many evenings browsing his book collection.