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.