Back To The Hard Stuff

Well, you can't say I didn't try. I'm an environmentalist at heart. I want to do the right thing, but sometimes it is just too hard to be right. I tried the “green” environmentally friendly paint strippers and it just is not working.

I wrote about my tests with two such products the other day. It seemed like it was going to work, but in the end it was just too difficult to get the timing down. I planned to really start the paint stripping this weekend, so on Friday I applied the Safe Strip to a four foot section of base board. Four feet is short, but this was to be my real world test. The plan was to leave it on over night and then strip it off Saturday. During testing I found that it required two applications, so I would then do the second application, let it sit for 3 or 4 hours an then strip that off. I would then apply the first coat to a second area and finish that up on Sunday. There was supposed to be a system and the timing was a crucial part of the system.

Well, on Saturday it wasn't really ready. After testing a few times I finally removed the stripper. That was supposed to remove all of the latex and the second application would remove the old oil paint. The first application ended up needing two applications just to get the latex off. Since the second “first” application had to sit for a few hours before I could remove it, I didn't get the second application on until almost 3:00. That now had to sit 3 or 4 hours, so it basically took about 30 hours to strip 4 feet of base board. There is just no way that is going to work.

Tonight I tried the tried and true methyl chloride and was able to do two applications to a 2 foot long test section in less than a half hour and ended up with the same results as the “green” stripper. The first application took about 10 minutes to lift the latex paint and 5 minutes to scrape it off. The second application for the oil paint was about the same.

I use Jasco Premium Semi-Paste. It is caustic. It is highly flammable. It burns bare skin. It causes cancer in lab rats. It also happens to work as if by magic. Especially on the detailed areas and that is the only reason I'm using paint strippers this time instead of a heat gun.

What a Waste

At some point in the last 30 years or so someone put sheetrock over the plaster in the 2 parlors. So they wouldn't have to fit it around the head blocks, which extended 2.5 inches over the top of the casing, they sawed off the tops of the blocks. Today I finally took the last of them off.

Where should we put the drapes? Here? No, how about over here? No, I like them here better. How about here...

Not everyone should be allowed to use a drill with a Philips screw driver bit.

Goop factor eight! This gives you some idea of how bad the paint is in this room. That is the profile of the casing.

Replacements are standing by

On Stripping Coatings From Surfaces

In case you're just tuning in, I'm in paint stripping mode in the parlors. The woodwork is redwood and was originally painted, so the goal is not to get back to bare wood where I can do a clear finish, but rather to get rid of the layers and layers of paint to regain definition in the high Victorian millwork and to get rid of the many drips and runs from past, poorly applied paint jobs.

I have stripped coatings off wood in seven wood intensive rooms in the house. By “wood intensive” I mean all of the rooms either had a wood dado of some type going three to four feet up the walls or, in the case of the stair hall, a highly ornate banister. All of these rooms also had high Victorian fluted casing, plinth blocks, and head blocks. Using flat, unadorned wood was not something Victorian era architects normally did. It looks great, but it is a bitch to strip. The one thing I can say with certainty is there is no one, single, best way to strip coatings off surfaces. Anyone who tells you otherwise simply has not done enough of it. You really need to start by asking five basic questions.

1) What are you stripping the coating off of?
2) What is the coating you are stripping?
3) What was the original surface coated with?
4) What is your goal?
5) What can you devote to the project?

Hopefully question one is an easy answer for you. If you're not sure then there is a good chance you should not be doing the job in the first place. Metal, stone, glass, tile, wood, and brick are all going to be treated differently. In this case, I am dealing with wood. Question two may seem simple, but it is the most tricky, really. If there are multiple layers of coatings, then what is on top may be different than what is on the bottom.

Question three is where the answers really become important and sometimes difficult to determine at first. In the case of stripping off wood, which is what I'm doing now, how I go about the job really depends on whether the original surface was shellac or paint, which were really the two main choices for this area at the time this house was built in 1895. If you are working with more modern construction you could have polyurethanes to deal with.

The answer to question four makes a big difference, too. Do I want to get back to bare wood so I can apply a new clear finish or do I just want to get off layers of old coatings to regain definition. With high Victorian millwork, the beautiful detail often becomes muddied with layers and layers of poorly applied paint jobs.

Question five can refer to both money and time. If you have wads of cash to throw at the project then hire a professional and let them worry about the answers to questions one through four. If you are doing it yourself then time, money and to some extent, comfort come in to play. By comfort I mean that I'm not willing to spend hours and hours for weeks on end in a respirator and gloves in an unheated room on my knees stripping paint.

Money is really determined by what method you chose. A heat gun can be a relatively small investment and can last for years. Even the infrared heat gun can be a good investment when compared to chemical paint strippers. Personally, I don't think the investment in an infrared heat gun is worth it unless you are stripping the siding on your house.

Depending on what the answer is to question three though, the heat gun can be a slow and exhausting process. If the original surface was shellac the coatings come off as if by magic. I have had several layers of paint come off of highly detailed woodwork is sheets when it is hit with a heat gun if the original coating was shellac.

If the original coating was paint then it is a completely different story, in my experience. If it is a flat surface I will still go with the heat gun in most cases. The paint does not come off easily, but it is really just a two step process. Strip with the heat gun in one pass and then sand smooth. Because the surface is flat I can use an electric sander. Sanding is a must when stripping paint off wood because the heat gun can cook any remaining paint and leave a crunchy, uneven surface. Latex, lead, and calcimine paints all react differently to heat, and the level of heat can give you different results. Regardless of all of those factors, the whole process, all be it strenuous at times, goes pretty quickly on flat surfaces.

At least that can be the case when your answer to question four is going to be that you are going to repaint. Even still, that is not a blanket statement that applies to all situations. The answer to question one now comes in to play. In the case of wood, the outcome can depend on whether you are stripping off hardwood or softwood. This can also depend on the answer to question five. If you have a lifetime to spend on the project I'm sure you could strip lead paint off balsa wood and get back to a clean bare surface at some point. Let's face it, art restorers spend dozens and dozens of hours stripping grunge and shellac off paintings. They also use tiny instruments while working under magnification and get paid a few hundred dollars an hour to do the work.

When answering those five questions, at some point you get in to an area that can not be answered with a question on a punch list. That has to do with what is acceptable to you. Even when the original surface was shellac it is sometimes hard to get all of the paint off. With fluted millwork you also run the risk of accidentally rounding off corners when sanding. This gets in to the larger discussion of restoration itself. How far back do you go? When is it good enough? Everybody has their own idea of perfect.

So back to the parlors I'm working on now and the five questions. Here's where I end up.

1) High Victorian redwood millwork. The 2 rooms are roughly 28 X 15 with 5 large windows, one small window, and a 2 part 12-inch high fluted baseboard. The 2 stained glass windows have wood muntins, with the larger window having 41 pieces of glass. There is also fluted casing and detailed window stools. All of the plinth blocks and head blocks must be replaced.
2) I am stripping multiple layers of lead and latex paint. It is really hard to say how many layers there are. I can see 6 or 7 distinct colors, but that could represent twice that many layers, or more.
3) I'm going to say lead paint, but I haven't tested it, and I probably won't. More on lead paint below. I suspect there was a primer layer and then a pigmented layer put down in 1895, and then the rooms were painted 3 to 5 more times with lead paint before several layers of latex paint were applied. The last time the rooms were painted was in 1999 by the previous owners.
4) Getting back to a clean surface where the definition of the millwork is presentable. Some of the latex paint was applied so poorly, the painters really had no respect for their workmanship at all. On top of that, the latex paint chips off the old lead paint very easily, so in areas there are large chips missing from the top coats. The original lead paint is a permanent part of the wood now. As you will see below, even after multiple applications of paint strippers there is no bare wood revealed. I had a similar experience in the butler's pantry, where I used a heat gun.
5) Not as much as I would like is always going to be the answer, but with each passing year of working on the house this becomes even more the case. Simply put, I don't have the time or the stamina to devote to the projects anymore. Eight to ten years ago I probably still would have gone at these rooms with a heat gun because I had more time than money back then. Now, money is still tight, but time is even tighter. It is not even the time that would need to be spent with the heat gun that is the issue. It is the sanding that takes so long. I stripped a lot of the kitchen with a heat gun and I spent more time with sandpaper in my hands that I did with a heat gun. Of course, some could argue I'm overly detail oriented.

I'm going with chemical strippers this time and in the past I would have used a methyl chloride based product. They work quickly because they work through evaporation, but because of this there is a narrow window of time where they must be removed. With methyl chloride based products you also must wear a respirator, chemical gloves, and the vapors are flammable. That is not to say they can't be used safely, and I have many times.

This time I'm trying the high-end stuff. Mainly because I want a longer dwell time. You can think of dwell time as the time it takes the product to do its thing. I don't want to have to rush to take it off, so I want a longer dwell time. With some products you can cover them and let them sit for hours or even days before you take them off. One such product comes with it's own paper to cover it.

In the past I used a product called Peel Away. There are at least two types of Peel Away, and to be honest I don't recall which I used. It worked, but it was not worth the cost. Peel away comes with Peel Away paper that you cover the stripper with to increase the dwell time. I had more stripper than I did paper, so I had to buy more paper. I used this in the kitchen and what ever the original finish was, it liquified and oozed out from under the paper and on to the floor. It was a huge mess, but that may have just been because of the type of paint that was used in the kitchen originally. I have no idea.

Another product in the same category, which I tried once about 8 years ago was Ready-Strip. I had disastrous results with it. It's claim to fame is that it changes color when it is ready to be removed. I didn't keep a close eye on it and by the time I checked back in it had changed color and dried on the surface. It was a nightmare to get off. That was when I purchased my first heat gun.

This time I'm testing two products, Smart Strip and Safest Stripper. The first is made by Dumond, the same company that makes Peel Away, and the second is made by 3M. Both are surprisingly similar. Both are odorless, non-toxic, and non-flammable. They both have the color and consistency of hand cream. The 3M product says you don't even need to wear gloves when using it.

I've tried Safest Stripper with 3 hour, 24 hour, 72 hour, and 1 week dwell times and got about the same results with all four times. For periods longer than 3 hours I covered it with plastic or wax paper. The wax paper worked best. With the Smart Strip I've tried it so far with 3 hours and 24 hour dwell times. With both products I needed two applications, one for the latex and another for the older oil paint. Neither product would take me back to bare wood, but that's not really the goal.

The costs were similar, about $18 a quart, but I got a contractor's discount when I bought the Smart Strip, so all things being equal, if I chose one of these products I would go with the Smart Strip. It is cheaper by the gallon. I think around $55 a gallon. A ballpark guess would be 3 gallons for all of the woodwork in both rooms. There is a professional strength version of the Smart Strip, which I didn't try.

The biggest selling point with these products is the safety when removing lead paint. With a heat gun you are releasing vapors in to the air and with sanding you are releasing lead in to the air. Personally, I think the whole notion of lead paint being a danger is over-stated. As an adult my body can deal with a certain amount of lead. The real danger is to children who are still developing, but again, I think the danger is greatly over-stated. If you have children in the home you can still use a heat gun and do some sanding and if you take the proper precautions I think there is little danger.

So here's where I'm at.


This is the 3M Safest Stripper. This first shot shows two stages of stripping under plastic. On the left is the latex paint. It really bubbles up under the stripper. The old oil paint never really does that, even with the second application.


Here it is after two applications on the right, one application in the middle, and at the far end there has been nothing stripped. At the far end you can see how the latex paint chips off the old oil paint in large chips. There is just no way I can paint over that again and make it look nice.

On the right side of the second photo you can see 3 colors. There is an almost white color (primer or first coat?) in some areas, and very pale yellow and then a darker yellow. These are definitely 3 coats, but they are so thin that I really won't need to sand. This is moments after the stripper was removed and there has been no cleaning or sanding. This is the goal.

On the middle area where you see the green is what is between the yellow layers and the newer latex layers. This looks to be 3 layers of older oil based paint. If I stopped here I would need a lot of sanding to make it smooth. It is hard to tell in the picture, but this is a very uneven surface. Again, not good enough for a new coat of paint.

Petchhouse Forum

I'm looking for your torrid, sexy stories about stripping. I want stories with lurid details and climactic endings.

I'm talking about paint stripping, of course. When I strip the paint in the parlors I'm going to try a different approach to stripping than I normally do. Kelly made a comment on my last post about methyl chloride paint strippers, which is what I normally use. Actually, what I normally use is a heat gun. Here was my response to Kelly.

If the original finish was shellac, then it is a no-brainer for me: heat gun.

If it was originally painted and a flat surface then I will also use a heat gun. I go this route in this case mainly because it quick. I don't have to apply stripper, wait for it to work, test it, wait some more, etc, etc.

If the piece of wood is flat and has no detail then a heat gun and sharp edged scrapper goes pretty fast.

In the parlors I have wood that was originally painted and has a lot of detail. The heat gun a scrapper routine would be very tedious and time consuming.

In this situation I normally use the methyl chloride based strippers because they do work reasonably fast, compared to some of the "green" strippers. I like the semi-paste variety (think slime) because they cling to vertical surfaces.

The downside to methyl chloride based strippers is the caustic odors and potentially flammable fumes. It is not a big downside in my opinion, but it is something to consider.

In the parlors, since I'm only working on the weekends I may try one of the "green" strippers. These usually work much slower and can stay on for days. The idea is that I will apply the stripper Wednesday evening and then spend the weekend taking it off. Methyl chloride based stripper generally dry out quickly and don't like to be left in place after they have done their job.

I would be interested to hear about "green" strippers from others.

So let me hear it, people. I want to hear your "green" stripping stories. I want your stories with product names, devices, and methods used.

(Go Niners!)

The Horror

It's never too early to begin to stress about design choices like paint colors, window treatments, and woodwork finishes. This is really the part of the process I dread. Over the next few months I can look forward to countless sleepless nights and hours spent looking at paint chips. And if history repeats itself I will spend $75 on paint only to decide I don't like it after it is on the wall.

Oh, what joy.

One of the things I have thought about doing with several rooms, and then later chickened out, is to paint the frieze and ceiling sky blue and then sponge on big, fluffy white clouds. Then hire a local artist to come in a paint on a few blue birds streaking across the sky. I'm thinking about it again with the parlors, but it probably won't happen.


If I don't go that over-the-top route I do need to start thinking of a more realistic pallet. The parlors can be considered 2 rooms, but from design standpoint I will treat them as one room. While not huge, together they create a room that measures 14X28 feet. I'm not sure that I can get away with really bold colors in a room this size. Or maybe I could, but they would definitely need to be the right colors. Also, unlike the other major rooms on the first floor there will be no dado in the parlors, so it will basically be 3 colors: Field, frieze/ceiling, and woodwork.

The woodwork is really the starting point. I need to strip off the layers and layers of poorly applied paint before I do anything. If the woodwork in these rooms was originally shellacked, like it was in the foyer, stair hall, and dining room, it would be a no-brainer. I would strip back to bare wood and re-shellack. For years now I have had a very strong suspicion that the woodwork in these rooms was originally painted.

During the 1920s, when the home was converted in to apartments, the two parlors became a living room and bedroom for one of the first floor apartments. To separate the space more they added more framing to make the opening between the 2 rooms smaller and added a pair of French doors. They reused the original casing, plinth blocks and head blocks to trim out the new French doors.

They did a nice job, and you really couldn't tell at first, except that the French door hardware was definitely 1920s and not 1895. It became even more apparent when I started to strip off wallpaper and found that the area around the French doors was sheetrock while the rest of the room is plaster. Then of course, once the sheetrock was removed, it was obvious the framing was not original.

Later, when I was working in the kitchen I reused some of the casing from around the French doors for the dumb waiter style door and when I stripped back the paint I found that the original color was a creamy pale yellow. One thing I have found repeatedly when working with redwood is that if the original finish was paint, getting back to bare wood clean enough for a new shellack finish is almost impossible. I'm not saying it is completely impossible and unheard of, but it is so much work on high Victorian woodwork with all of its detail, and the results are so poor, that it is simply not worth the effort.

On the other hand, if the woodwork was originally shellacked stripping back to bare wood becomes very doable and in fact I did it with great success in the dining room. I mean, it took me 3 months and was a hell of a lot of work, but the results speak for themselves. If I tried that same thing on redwood that was originally painted I would not have nearly the same results.

So the question I've been asking myself all of this time is, was the casing I used in the kitchen really original to the parlors from 1895. There was a possibility that when they framed in the opening and added the French doors they milled a few short runs of new casing and the creamy, pale yellow paint was originally applied in the 1920s. If that were the case then the rest of the woodwork could have a nice, protective layer of shellack underneath all of the thick, goopy layers of paint that look as if they were applied by Jackson Pollock.


So yesterday I got out the trusty heat gun and did a little exploratory surgery. Sure enough, just as I expected, I found that same creamy, pale yellow pant. That means that the woodwork in the parlors was originally painted in 1895. That also means that I will be repainting.

I will most likely go with chemical strippers, as opposed to the heat gun. Not sure which product I will use at this point. To be honest, I'm a little relieved. Stripping all of the woodwork in these 2 rooms back to bare wood good enough for a shellack finish would be a lot work, even if it was originally shellacked. There are 6 windows that would take forever, especially that large front stained glass window. After nearly 10 years of restoration I just don't have that kind of stamina anymore.

Trim Marathon

I had a late invitation yesterday to a Bar-B-Q out in Freshwater. I had every intention of going, but it looked like rain in the morning, so I started in on the trim for the middle section. As it turned out, the clouds cleared around 1:00 and it turned out to be a spectacular day. By that time I was committed to the trim and there was no looking back.

The Bar-B-Q would have been nice, but now I’m glad I stuck with the trim. It took about 12 hours to get it all done, but it is done!







Before I could even start the trim I had to frame out the little door in the middle section. Then it was on to mind-numbing repetition of measure, cut, cut, router, router and install. Then the next piece. That’s if I got it right the first time. I rarely did.

Each piece took a minimum of 2 cuts on the saw and two passes on the router. If it is was off by as much as an 8th of an inch it was another cut on the saw and another pass on the router. There are 62 pieces of wood total. To make it even more interesting, I was afraid of running out. Below is all there is left from that big pile of trim I cut.





I also milled and installed the trim just under the marble. It is a two part bead and cove trim. When the fabricators came to make the template for the marble I suggested an inch and a half over-hang. I was planning on just doing a ¾-inch cove under the lip. The guy making the template told me that 2-inches is standard, so I said OK. God forbid I should not do what is standard.

For the next week after the marble was in place I cursed the 2-inch over-hang every time I saw. I was too much. It was sticking out so awkwardly. I decided he suggested 2-inches because most people do a laminate edge these days. That is were they take an additional piece of stone and glue it to the underside of the over-hang. They then finish that off and it looks like you have 4-cm thick stone when it is really only 2-cm.

In the end it worked out. I did the 2-part trim and it looks fine. All of those sleepless nights were for nothing. So now it is on to the little door in the middle section. I’m going to see if I can find the time to work on it this week and then install it next weekend. After that I will be officially done with this cabinet!

I looked back through the blog and found that I started them in September of 2008. Really, though, I first mentioned this project in November of 2005.

Three And A Half Years Ago!!!

Doing Lines

When I was still in the design phase I made the decision to bring in the sides of the middle section of the cabinet so I could have a single piece of marble for the counter. If I made the middle section the same width of the rest of cabinet, the width of the counter would have been 8’ 4”. I was told by local suppliers that stone slabs only come in 8’ widths. So I brought the sides in 3” on either side, which makes the counter 7’ 10”. I can now have a seamless piece of marble.

One problem solved and another one born.



As you can see in the picture above, I now have these gaps to fill. I’ve known about this all along and never gave it a whole lot of thought. It was always thought that as I trim out the middle section, I will just add a piece of wood there to cover the framing. {You can see a blog entry I printed up and stuffed in the cavity}

So yesterday I made up some trim pieces to cover the cap. Because I was impatient months back, and wanted to see progress, I put up the casing around the edges. This should have been one of the last things to do, but I couldn’t wait. Now, I may need to get the trim in place before the marble goes in.



I left a half inch thick space to slip the trim in behind the casing. So I planed down some scrap pieces of curly redwood and slipped them in to place, but I don’t really like it. In the picture above, the red circle marks the door and the green circle marks the stile of the face-frame. It seems like this trim piece should line up with the stile.



If I move it back, though, it will leave parts exposed that shouldn’t be. Because I only have a half inch to work with, there is very little room to get something else in there. I’m not sure what to do at this point, but I need to come up with something this weekend because the marble is supposed to be here next week.

I may try and cut a then piece of veneer to go behind the new trim piece and in front of the exposed section. It will need to be very thin, though. Remember, I only have a half inch to work with and I need to be able to fit both the trim piece and a new veneer piece.

Seventeen Down

These last four doors are the best yet. It is nice to see that I can improve with practice. They all fit the openings well. The hinges are mortised in perfectly. They were a lot of work to make, but for the most part there were no real problems.









There is just one more door to make. It will be for that small, center opening in the middle part of the cabinet. You can see the opening in the picture above, and to the left of the opening you can see the curly redwood board that I’m going to use to make the panel for it.

Before I can do that though, I need to install the marble counter and trim out the middle part. The trim will define the jamb and casing for the door, so that needs to go up first. I’m going to order the marble on Monday and there’s no telling how long that will take.

There is still plenty to keep me busy. I need glass for the upper doors. I need to build brackets and shelves for the upper cabinets. I need to mill all of the curly redwood for the trim on the middle section. There are going to be a lot of small pieces of trim for that area and they are all in odd shapes and sizes. Finally, I need to make a baseboard for the bottom. Even if I don’t get the marble for a month, I think I have enough to keep me busy.

The bast part is, I have a punch-list and the end is in sight.

Sigh of Relief

While hardly Norm caliber, these do qualify as good Greg quality. The pair on the left, which I just hung tonight, still need to be taken down, sanded, oiled, and have hardware put on. The worst is over, though. They are up and they fit.



The first pair on the right did not come out as good. The doors themselves look good and identical to the pair on the left, but they are a little crooked. They are not crooked vertically, but rather front to back. It is odd because I’m not really sure why. I think it is the cabinet that is a little off because the doors themselves are square and lay flat.

Once they are closed and latched shut it is not really noticeable. As with everything I do, this cabinet has a little folk-art quality to it. I’m happy, though. This could be going much, much worse. This is a very ambitious project for a novice cabinet maker like myself. I think Norm would like them, but he would cringe and some of the craftsmanship.

Two More Up

At this rate, literally, I may never finish these cabinets. I think when the weather gets better this spring the pace will pick up, but right now, there does not seem to be an end in site. After the issues I had with the doors on the butler’s pantry side I am being very cautious with the dinging room side. Even with that, there were still some minor issues with the first pair. Fortunately, they were minor and I was able to make due. There was definite improvement over the butler’s pantry, though, so that is something.

Now, I just need to keep from getting cocky with the relative success of the first two. These two sets of upper cabinets on the dining room side are really a focal point for the whole room. Even minor issues will be noticeable, but major ones will be glaring. I think once I get the other pair finished on the left side, the 4 small ones on the bottom will go faster. After that, I just need to do the little pass-through door.







I changed to a shallower and wider bevel on the front side of these doors, as opposed to the butler’s pantry side. This means I will be able to use the wooden stays to hold the glass in. I bought some stencils to do etching on the glass, but I haven’t decided if I’ll use them yet. You can see some of the designs here. My main concern is that they are too small. The doors are 4-feet tall and the rose stencils are only about 7-inches tall. Most of these are made for use on wine glasses and picture frames.

The other issue with these is the color. The burl and curly redwood is a much denser and darker wood than even the tightest old-growth vertical grain redwood. I haven't decided if I should celebrate the contrast of try to darken the doors.

At the blistering pace I’m moving these days, there is plenty of time to decide about both the glass etching and the tone of the wood.

Less Is More

When this is all said and done I think these cabinets will less represent fine cabinet making and more represent folk art. It looks nice, but you if get up close you can tell I’m not a trained cabinet maker. Don’t get me wrong, its reasonably straight and level, and it should be very presentable, but its far from perfect.

Upper-Center


Lower-Bottoms w/ Stiles


I have made more progress, though. I finished the upper-center section and I put in the bottoms on the lower cabinets. I also made the face-frames for the uppers (not shown), and I had just enough left over to add the center stiles on the lower cabinets. This means that each door will get its own cabinet latch on the lowers. On the uppers, each pair of doors will share a latch. This was always intended to be that way.

I am really cutting it close on this wood. The only thing left longer than 6-inches from the two big slabs of curly redwood are two end-cuts. The end cuts were the last pieces that were not full thickness. One side looks good and the other is sloped and slanted and varies in thickness from inch and a half down to 3/8ths of an inch.

These last two pieces will be used in the final assembly as almost veneer for the small inset area on either side of the upper-inset panel. I treat them like rare treasured objects which are the last of their kind. They've both been moved to a secured, undisclosed location in one of the garages. I could tell you where I put them, but then I’d have to kill you. We wouldn’t want that.

Tomorrow I’m going to put in the drawer guides and add in a bunch of glue blocks in the corners to strengthen the lower carcasses. I’m also going to glue and brad thick strips of wood behind the longer rails and stiles of the lower cabinets to strengthen them. The undulating grain pattern of the curly redwood means that you some times get grain that moves almost back to front instead of across. This makes for some very weak parts in the wood. The strips of wood attached to the back with glue and brads will add some much needed support.

Six Little Indians

As I was putting these together tonight it dawned on me that at some point I must have decided to not do a glass panel but I don’t really remember when that was. Its not that I think I made the decision at some point and now I’ve forgotten when that was. I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision to do the wood panel. So, because the decision was made subconsciously, my conscious mind has no recollection of it. The brain is a tricky little thing, isn't it?

Most of the process of building this cabinet is about how I can use the wood I have in the most efficient manner. So I had the last few pieces of the burl slab left over and I guess it just seemed like the natural thing to do. This is the same burl I used for the drawer fronts and for the single burl panel on the lower center section.



Having said that, I’m not sure this is the right way to go. The idea is that the panels, which have the same trim as the drawer fronts, will be surrounded by curly redwood rails and stiles – same as the drawer fronts. This upper panel will match in size the lower panel. Its not that I think it won’t look nice. My fear is that the design may come off as too simplistic. These are supposed to be High Victorian, after all. Simplistic was not in their vocabulary.

We’ll see.





The panels themselves are pretty spectacular. Hopefully that will make up for the simple geometric pattern of 6 horizontal panels. We’ll see.



Putting them together was a challenge because I didn’t bother to smooth out the bottoms. As I said, this is the very last of the burl slab and the bottoms are very rough and uneven because it looks like this was cut out with a chain saw. I mean that literally. When I was adding the molding on to the sides they tended to wobble around a lot.

To compound the problem, I didn’t do the best job at measuring the molding when I made it. I thought each piece would be enough to do either 2 long sides or 4 short sides. Well, when it came time to actually start cutting and assembling, each piece was, in reality, an inch too short to do either of those things. I thought I had several extra pieces, but as it turned out I had no extra pieces! It was a nail-biter. One bad cut and I would have run out. Of course, I could always make more, but it’s a bit of a process. It takes 2 different router bits and a pass on the table saw for each piece. I got lucky.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I can start putting together the panel. Then I will get some idea of how this will come out. I can always go back to glass.


Edit: After reading this post my subconscious mind just kicked me in the head. What I SHOULD have done was use this as the lower panel and made 6 small drawers and then had the tile panel on the upper section. Oh well, too late. There is no way in hell I'm going to dismantle the lower cabinets.

This will haunt me for the rest of my life, though. No question: I'm must sell this house the day I finish it.

Bottoms Up

I have many fantasies but not all of them include the beautiful bag girl at the local market. Years ago I wrote about my fantasy in where Norm Abram from The New Yankee Workshop would come and help me build these cabinets. Well guess what? Just as with the bag girl, my fantasies about Norm have gone unfulfilled. I was forced to build the cabinets myself.

So its 10:00 AM Saturday morning and I’m about to start assembling the lower cabinets. I start to feel queasy at the thought of putting them together. The palms of my hands and feet get sweaty. Suddenly I drop to my knees in the middle of the dining room. Looking up at the ceiling, and with a single clenched fist reaching in to the air, I yell out, “Why have you forsaken me Norm Abram!!!!”

I then composed myself as best I could and continued on with the assembly.

I can honestly say that everything I know about making cabinets, and carpentry in general, I’ve learned from watching The New Yankee Workshop. Even so, I don’t build cabinets the same way Norm does. In no way would I dream of suggesting that my way is better than his. In fact, I would say that Norm’s method of construction is better than mine. My way works for me, though, so that’s the way I do it.





As you can see, I have the bottom section mostly put together. I went with 3 drawers on the butler’s pantry side (Thank you Kathy). I also went with a traditional face-frame instead of beadboard. The middle part with the shingle scraps is just tacked in to place at this point. I needed to get that up there because it is important that I calculate the height of the uppers accurately. The trim work around the entire cabinet will be identical to the trim work around all of the windows and doors in the room. I need to make sure the tops of the cabinets will be high enough so the 1X6 casing will cover the gap. In order to get an accurate measurement I needed to have the middle section in place. It will come down shortly.

There is still a lot of work to do on the lower cabinets. I need to install the bottoms, drawer guides, and shelves. Of course, I need to make the doors and drawers, but that will be the very last thing. What I would like to do is to add an additional a stile on either side to separate the cabinet doors. I don’t know if I have enough wood, though.

With a center stile each door would have its own cabinet latch. With out it, the latch would be on one door and the catch on the other. The door with the catch would have an additional hook mechanism on the inside. This is the way the cabinet in the laundry room was constructed.

So the plan now is to stop building the lowers and to start construction of the upper face frames and upper middle section. Once those are done, if I have enough wood left over, I will add the additional stiles to the lowers. I can then go back and finish the lower cabinets. As with the lowers, the first thing to do on the uppers is to make the center section. So that’s the next job.

Oh, and as it turned out, the center panel I made for the lowers was a quarter-inch too wide and needed to be trimmed. Another way of looking at this is to say that if I had made it a half-inch narrower I would have been screwed because it would have been too small to fill the space.

Whew!

The Center For Panel Design

The center panel for the cabinets is done! I’m very happy with the way it came out, although the contrast in between the rails and stiles is a bit more than I would have liked. I needed wider wood for the stiles so I wasn’t able to use wood that I cut from the 2 big slabs of curly redwood.



This is for the inset section on the lower cabinets of the big dining room cabinets I’m making. The tile panel at the bottom is the same height as the doors. I had a few pieces of burl left over from making the drawer fronts so I decided to added a small panel at the top that will mimic the drawers on either side.

As I mentioned a few weeks back I need to make the cabinets a few inches wider so they will fill the space. However, I’m limited by the width of the wood I’m using because all of the wood for the face frames came out of the two big slabs I cut up. By making the center panel wider, I can now play with the over all width by exposing more of the center panel when I go to assemble everything.

Originally I was looking at a 10-inch wide center panel. With 10-inches I would have come up 3 or 4-inches short in the over-all width. With the wider wood, and the molding around the tile and burl panel, the center section is now 16-inches wide. I now have plenty of room to play with.

To date I have the middle cabinet section built. The sides of the boxes are built. The drawer fronts are made. I’ve milled all of the wood for the face frames. I now have the center section of the lower face frames built. I now need to build the left and right face frames for the lowers, and make the bottoms of the boxes, and then I can start some assembly. If all goes well, I can do that next weekend.

More Math

I sort of went overboard yesterday with the number crunching. It helps me to think things out, so that was more for my benefit than yours. Today’s math question is much simpler. It is just one simple subtraction problem, only it took weeks for me to complete.

When you take this.... (Two slabs of curly redwood)


And subtract this... (Big pile of sawdust)


You get this (Milled boards)


A few of the long pieces broke as I ran them through the planer, so I ended up with 13, 5-footers and 5, 2.5-footers. The boards are 7/8ths-inch thick and 2.75-inches wide. Ideally, face fame material would be 3-inches wide, but I’m not going to complain. If the truth be told, I mostly use 2.75-inch material for face frames because in the past I always used old beadboard to build them. After you rip off the tongue and the groove from either side you are left with 2.75-inch boards. So these will seem right at home with all of the other cabinets I’ve built.

I’ve decided to do the center tile panel section first. I forgot that I had bought some 18-inch long 1X8 curly redwood off Ebay a few years back. It is just 2 boards. Also, last week I bought one 4-foot long piece of 1X6 curly redwood from the guy in Willow Creek.



I can use this stuff to make a panel that is extra wide. Once I get the face frames made for the two outside sections, I can trim the center panel to fit so that the cabinet will fill the space. Psychologically, this will make building the face frames much easier. I won’t need to be constantly worrying about coming out ¾ of an inch too narrow.

The next thing to worry about will be if this will be enough to make both the upper and lower face frames. I’m not sure that it will be, but its going to be close. Fingers crossed.

Rectangle Amoebas

I got the 4 drawer fronts assembled today. They came out pretty good and the size is good, but it would be better if they were an inch-wider. They ended up being 4.75X17 inches. Because I split the amoebae shaped burl slab I ended up with 2 pairs of book matched drawer fronts. Pretty cool.







As you may recall, I’m putting the tiled panel in an inset in the center. The tiles are 5.75-inches wide and the wood surrounding them will be about 2.5-inches on either side. I’ll loose a little in the tile width when they are set, so I’m looking at 10.5-inches of visible face for the panel section.

The over-all space for the cabinets is 99-inches wide. Subtract the 10.5 inches for the tile section and I’m left with 88.5-inches. Divide that by 2 and I get 2, 44.25-inch sections on either side of the tile panel. Two 17-inch wide drawers in one section makes 34-inches. Plus 2.75-inch stiles on either side, and one in the middle, makes another 8.25-inches. Thirty-four plus 8.25 makes 42.25-inches. That means I need to fill 2-inches for each section, or 4-inches over-all. That’s a lot.

Some of that will be taken up by gaps around the drawers. Four drawers with an eighth-inch gap on either side makes an inch. Also, the casing that will cover the gap between the wall and the cabinet needs to be in a fairly precise location because of the trim on the raised panel dado. There is about an inch on either side I can play with, but no more than that. Let’s say and inch and a half over-all – 3/4 of an inch on either side . An inch for the drawers, plus an inch and a half at the casing, make 2.5-inches. I still need to make up and inch and a half.

I think what I’ll do is make the 2 face frames for the section on either side of the tile panel and then re-evaluate the width. It would be nice if I could just make the outside stiles of the two face frames with 6-inch wide material and then trim the whole thing to fit once it is assembled. Because I’m using all of the curly redwood I milled out of the 2 big slabs I can’t do that. The widest pieces I’m going to end up with will be 3-inches, and most will be 2.75-inches.

Its going to be close.

If I’d Known Then….

What I know now, I may not have purchased the big chunk of curly redwood. That thing was a bitch to work with and the yield was very low. It was charred on one side, which is not uncommon, but I didn’t expect it to be charred on the inside.

The trees live for a couple of thousand years so its inevitable that its going to get scorched by fire at some point. I guess this one caught fire and the tree grew around the burned part. When I cut in to it there was a big vein of charcoal, along with a little dry-rot near the outside edge of the burned area.

On top of that, I really don’t have the tools to deal with this. What I needed was a chain saw. I kept telling myself I should call and borrow one, but I also kept telling myself that I’m almost through.





I ended up with about 30 1-inch thick pieces that range from 3 to 5 inches wide and 1 to 2 feet long. There is also still one small piece left to be cut up. The quality is not as good as what I got out of the two slabs, either. It’s not that it is bad – it is very nice, tight grained curly redwood. Its just not as good as the other stuff. It is not quite as dense and the color is a little lighter.

At first I wasn’t sure what I could do with it. The pieces as so short. I will need 5 short pieces in the face-frame in between the drawers, but that’s not much. What I’ve decided to do is to use this for the trim work on the middle section. You can see in the picture below there are little 5-inch long strips of wood that separate the squares. I’m going to need close to 50 of those to trim out all of the panels, so this stuff should work well for that.



In other news, the last part for the planer came on Friday, so that is back up and running. The last piece of the tool puzzle is the joiner. If one is on sale tomorrow, I’ll probably snag it. I’ve missed out on a few used ones on Craig’s List over the past month. You really gotta move fast. Who knew they were so popular.

Also, I got the 1X6 redwood yesterday from the guy in Willow Creek. Sure enough, he brought it to my work in the back of his pick-up. It is really nice wood. Not all of it is vertical grain, but it is all nice tight grained, clear-heart redwood. I also got an additional 4-feet of curly redwood from him. He told me he has more, so its nice to know I’ve got a source.

The Chunk

If not for the Veep Debate starting in about 20 minutes I would be out the shop right now trying to cut this mother up. Its going to be a challenge







It is 85 pounds of tumorous growth sliced off the side of an ancient redwood. It looks kind of like a beached whale sitting on the work bench. Picture this growing off the side a tree with the big end at the bottom. They made a single cut with a chain saw running perpendicular to the earth to get it off.

It looks ugly now, but below is what the inside looks like….



Its wiggly.

I’m hoping it looks like that all the way through. Also, I broke down and bought some wood, or at least, I hope to tomorrow. I had pledged not to buy any new wood for the cabinets, but I think this will be worth it. Besides, its election season, so breaking pledges is par for the course, right?

I found a guy in Willow Creek that is selling newly milled, full dimensional old-growth redwood. The price per board-foot is about 20% lower the second growth sold at local lumberyards. It is un-planed and un-sanded. Right off the saw.

I’m buying about 100 lineal feet of 1X6. I told him my truck couldn’t make it to Willow Creek so he’s going to bring it to my work tomorrow. Pretty cool. I told him I need the finest old-growth vertical grain for the work I’m doing and he assured me I would not be disappointed. He even said he’d bring it by and if I wasn’t happy there would be no obligation to buy it.

You gotta love it.

Necessity is the Mother of Obsession

I sort of painted myself in to a corner with my declaration that I will consider the cabinets to be a complete failure if I’m forced to buy one piece of wood to construct them. What I really want to do is use up all of the old redwood I have laying around from the long since dismantled 2 story addition. It is not going anywhere fast, and frankly, I’m a little tired of looking at it. It is a bit of a paradox that I’m a Grade A slob, but at the same time I hate clutter. Seeing all of these piles of old wood lying around really bugs me, but at the same time I treasure it. If I can use it in a constructive manner, all the better.

On top of that, I want to use only the finest burl and curly redwood to construct the dining room side of the cabinets. Well, news-flash, they didn’t exactly use the finest burl and curly redwood in 1920 when they added the addition on to an 1895 Victorian that was being cut up in to apartments. Granted, there was a lot of nice wood in the addition, but anything that was “cabinet grade” was used up a long time ago.

So I scavenged burl and curly redwood here and there over the last few years. I could drive up the coast to one of the tourist-traps and buy some fairly crappy, yet surprisingly over-priced stuff, but I found a long time ago that if you apply yourself you can find the same thing in alley ways and garage sales for a fraction of the cost. The real problem at this point is that none of the stuff I’ve bought is 8-feet long. That is how wide the cabinets will be.

I need at least 4 pieces that will be 8-feet long or I will have unsightly seams in the middle of the face frames at the top and bottom. I want these to look authentic, and in 1895 you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Eureka without hitting an 8-foot long piece of curly redwood.

I know there are some places around – not the tourist traps - that can supply me with 8-foot lengths of the finest curly redwood money can buy. Of course, I would literally be paying through the nose for it because I would most likely see my brains dripping through my nose when they tell me how much they want a board-foot for it. (Boy, the imagery is getting gruesome in this post)

Enter the tile panel I talked about yesterday….

By doing the inset tile panel in the middle of the cabinets this will break up the horizontal lines. This means that the longest, single run of curly redwood I will need for the dining room face frame will be just under 4-feet, and I’ve got that. I’ve got 4-foot runs of curly redwood out the ying-yang. It’s a win-win situation. Below is some ideas of the new look of the cabinets. This is a bird’s-eye view of how it might look.



This is a Victorian 6X18 inch tile panel that will be mounted in the face frame in the inset in the lower section of the cabinets. The uppers would get an etched glass panel.


The real question at this point is, can I pull it off. The jury is still out.