So I haven't done much around the house lately. I'm not even sure what my last "real" project was.
Today I cleared off the concrete countertops and put a new layer of wax on them and polished them.
Does that count for home improvement?
If I had a free weekend & Atticus was truly old enough to help, what would I do?
1. Sleep. And then take a nap. Read a book and sleep some more.
2. Attack the garden and make it look cool.
3. Finish varnishing the kitchen cabinet doors.
That's probably a bit ambitious for one weekend.
Maybe the nap and mowing the lawn would suffice...
There was a cool (short) article in the Real Estate section of this Sunday's Seattle Times about a company called "Tiny Texas Houses". They build small houses (think 10'x16'') out of reclaimed materials. You can buy one for $30K to $60K.
Tiny Texas Houses
Trissa's brother has property in Winthrop, WA, and has a "tiny house" on the property. It's roughly 10'x12' and has a kitchenette, a bath with shower, and a sleeping loft. We call it "The Love Shack".
This would be my dream job, I think: to design and build tiny houses out of reclaimed lumber.
I'm still unemployed and have a bunch of free time, so last week I worked on a project I've had on the back burner for a while.
Nick's Graphing Mortgage Calculator
There are a zillion mortgage calculators on the web, some of which are similar to this one. Mine is written in Flash, and has a graph that updates to show you the amount of principal and interest you are paying over the course of your loan. It's fun to play with, I think.
Bookmark my calculator and check back once in a while - I have some additional features in mind that I'll hopefully add soon. Show your friends too!
Here's what it looks like:
Week two didn’t feel as productive as week one. The dent in the sofa cushion is definitely more pronounced. Here’s the list:
1. used up left over insulation I had laying around in the shop, to insulate a portion of the shop ceiling. This took all of 10 minutes.
2. glued up the two large 44”x48” window sashes. One of them came out slightly out of square and I’ll have to figure out what to do about that.
3. picked up all of the glass and channel balances from White Center glass. I carried all 12 sheets and they’re now hanging out in the wine cellar.
4. helped our neighbors install a ceiling fan they had laying unopened in a closet for the last two years.
5. lots of job applications, resulting in a variety of phone calls, tech-screens, and recruiters jamming up my inbox.
Oh, and Atticus and I built a box together in the shop, at his bench. He decided to decorate it with marker:
I spent some of my time last week repairing the workbench my dad sent, which was busted up by UPS. The repairs involved fabricating new pieces for the top, a new piece for the frame, and fixing the side panel. I also re-fastened the plywood bottom which had broken loose, and re-glued the stops that determine how far the drawers can slide in. When it was all back together I scraped down the top, applied few coats of Varathane, and reinstalled the vice. You can clearly see which pieces are new in the photos, but overall I dont think they detract any from the bench or its history. If anything it now has a more colorful story.
Atticus didn't need much prompting to know that it was his. I stashed his hammer and measuring tape in the top drawer and once he found them there he knew it was his. He'll definitely grow into it - at the moment he needs to step up on block of 4x6 to be able to work at it.
Being unemployed hasn't helped my stress level much, but it's starting to have an effect on the various projects around here:
- I've got
three four window sashes glued up. nine eight more to go.
- I glued up two remaining cabinet doors for the kitchen
- Also the door of the island garbage pull-out
- Cut, assembled and glued up the two drawer fronts for the nook
- Fixed my old (now Atticus') workbench. Thanks, UPS.
- Listed on Craigslist, and sold, my old benchtop router table, to a 14yo kid who'd mom brought him over. He's going to make signs with it.
- Listed on Craigslist, and sold, my folding portable mitre-box stand. I didn't have room for it anymore and now that major construction is done I don't need the saw upstairs anymore.
- Cleaned my shop, in preparation for the new cyclone dust collector I ordered a few days before getting laid off.
The dust collector is an Oneida Portable. It was supposed to arrive today, but didn't. Here's a picture:
Well, it wasn't a great day. My company notified me this morning, along with the engineering team I ran, that they decided to lay us off effective immediately and move the positions overseas. There have been a number of layoffs in the past few months so this didn't come as a huge surprise. But it was still a surprise. My team was awesome.
I'm employable. We'll be okay here at Pigeon Point Project.
Maybe now I can get some house projects done?
A quick update about this topic.
The morning after my previous post on the subject, a man from U.P.S Store HQ contacted me. He had read my post (is he a Houseblogger? Is it his job to mine the internet for words like "U.P.S." and "destroyed"?) and said he wanted to investigate our claim further. He passed us off to another employee who called me on the phone, as well as my father. After a few days of phone tag and investigation, U.P.S. agreed to refund our shipping cost ($175). We asked for consideration for the damage but didn't get it. My understanding is they felt that because the U.P.S. Store had offered to my father to alternatively ship it via freight (for $475), we had passed on an option that may have avoided the damages.
Whatever. I'm satisfied, and I'm impressed that U.P.S. followed up the way they did. I'm not impressed with the original service, but at least they paid attention to our situation.
And, I'm well underway to repairing the damage. I've reproduced one of the missing pieces and started two more. I'll post pictures soon.
01/18/2008 Update: I have an update to this post, which I've placed at the end.
01/23/2008 Update: I've made a second post about this, here.
Once upon a time, when I was 3 or 4, my dad made me a workbench. People are always asking me how I learned to build all the stuff that I do, and I can only attribute my skill to that workbench. Some of my earliest memories involve hammering, sawing, and building various projects on my bench, while my dad worked at his own, taller bench.
My bench was 4 feet long, 2 feet tall and about 26 inches deep. The top was made of laminated strips of wood, like a butcher block or any “real” bench. The base was painted green and had three drawers and a cabinet with a door that automatically sprung itself shut. One birthday my dad bought me a vice for my bench, so I could clamp things while I worked on them.
This year my son Atticus will turn 2. At 20 months, his favorite activity in the world is to be in my shop with me, ‘working’ with scraps of wood and the tools I let him use. Not only does Atticus know the names of all the tools, he can say most of them. And he can use them too: Atticus can pick up a screw, place it in a hole in a piece of wood, and screw it in using either a screwdriver or the Bosch driver. Oh, and he can swing a hammer and hit a nail. This is scary stuff – a 20-month old who can hit a nail with a hammer and drive a screw. Seriously. Watching him in the shop makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, and now I’m determined for this prodigy of mine to have my old bench.
My dad and I began talking about how to ship my old workbench from Wisconsin to Seattle. I assumed it would have to ship freight due to the size and weight (it weighed 150lbs). But dad called a few places, and UPS said they could ship it for $175, delivered to my door. (Which is no small benefit seeing as we have 33 steps up to our house from the street.) We decided to ship UPS.
A few days after dad took the bench to the UPS Store in Madison it showed up on my stoop…broken to pieces.
The top was busted into three pieces which were now haphazardly screwed to the base, and it was clear that at least 3 pieces of the top were missing. One corner was crushed, and one side panel had broken out. Other structural parts of the base were out of skew. It is clear as day to me that the bench had been dropped from a considerable height, and had landed on a corner.
I called my dad with the news, and then I called UPS to complain. UPS told me they would send someone to my home to investigate, but instead they called back to perform a “telephone investigation”. This investigation involved two questions: Describe the item and how it arrived, and describe the packaging. I described the workbench and how it was broken. And I described that there was no packaging, that the UPS Store had advised my dad that due to the size, weight, and solid construction, there was no need to package it. The woman was clearly unimpressed with this and informed me that the investigation was over, and that we could call the UPS Store after 24 hours for the result. She wouldn’t give me the result herself because UPS is “the carrier” and the UPS Store is the “shipper” and only the “shipper” can know the result of the “investigation”.
When my dad called the UPS Store tonight they informed him that UPS would not be taking any responsibility for this broken shipment due to insufficient packaging.
In my opinion UPS and the UPS Store share blame. UPS Store advised my dad that the bench should / could ship sans packaging. And UPS dropped the bench in shipment, and delivered it with missing parts. UPS says the bench had insufficient packaging, but their subsidiary advised us that packaging was unnecessary. Since UPS Store didn’t damage the bench, they are not to blame, and since UPS only damaged it because it was insufficiently packaged they are not to blame either. How f-ing convenient for them both.
01/18/2008 Update: The morning after I posted this I received an email from Rich Hallibrin who works in public relations for UPS Store. He put me in touch with another representitive who is now reviewing our case in further detail. I'll post more information when I have it.
Nick's got all the pieces cut for the rest of the first floor windows and has done a dry fit. This week he will order the glass and after that comes, he will begin assembling them.
I've been thinking about the backsplash in the kitchen and how high I want it to go on the wall next to the stove and in the baking center. I can decide, so we're holding out on a final decision and what to do on the edges.
Our next non-window related project is to build a mock "Learning Tower
" for Atticus. Basically it's a fancy stepstool that has a railing all around it so he can't lean back and accidentally fall over. He loves to help and see what we're doing, and he's pretty insistent about what he wants. (I don't know where he gets that from! :) )
We've drawn up our own plans, but ours is a bit different. The platform
wouldn't be adjustable and it would have two steps leading up to the
platform. We're afraid that once we make one, we'll need two. One so he
can help out in the kitchen, and the other for the shop...
So, we're hoping that if we let him help when it makes sense, then he'll grow up liking to cook us meals,
wash our dishes,
and build us things!
I found these ABC wall art cards at a local store (Georgia Blu) last week and had to buy them.
When Atticus is ready for a big boy bed and we change his room, we'll put these up.
Here are some of the letters. I love the classic look of the drawings.
EBoo has some other great products, but I just had to have these. You can check it out on Amazon if you want:
Hardware Store Alphabet Wall Cards
(Several of these are left over from 2007)
- Replace all the windows. (One down, six to go on the 1st floor. Eight on the 2nd.)
- Kitchen 100% done.
- Pay someone to replace the roof.
- Finish removing the asbestos siding.
- Strip, prep, and paint the exterior.
- Living and dining room built-ins.
- Laundry chute.
- New wiring upstairs.
- Attic insulation and cleanup.
- Anything that can be called ‘progress on landscaping’
One down, six to go. The “prototype” window is installed and fully functional. The exterior is primed but not painted; we have to wait for slightly warmer weather for that. We have a test color picked out and purchased – ready to go.
Mom and dad came to visit for the post-Christmas week and Trissa was determined to have the Window installed. Recall that the Window was mostly built by my dad and I in November during Thanksgiving week. It’s been sitting in my shop since awaiting installation. It really is a two person job, and while Atticus was ready and willing, I don’t let him up on the ladder yet. At least not while using tools.
We decided to remove the old window without completely destructing it. This was pretty easy; in retrospect I’m pretty sure the only nails holding it in were from the outside trim boards. We carefully pried these loose and cut the nails with a sawsall. With only a little bit of coaxing the frame popped out and we lowered it to the ground.
Next we prepared the opening. The old window had cast iron weights which I’d removed when we drywalled (I’d insulated the pockets with fiberglass), and this created a space which needed to be made narrower so we could attach the sides of the window frame to the house. I screwed a 2x4 on each side to the existing framing, holding it out about an inch with some plywood. This left us with about a 3/8” gap on each side of the new frame.
Unfortunately the house has settled quite a bit in the front and the living room isn’t level – it drops about an inch over 10 feet. (This is an improvement from what it was; I raised it as much as I could a while back when I addressed the crumbling foundation). For the 4’ span of the window we noted that the elevation changed nearly half an inch.
The crux of this is that the new window will be level and plumb, but will be out of square with the exterior siding, which has settled along with the house. We ended up ‘cheating’ some of the trim to make it less noticeable, but it’s there all the same. The window needed to be level and plumb to operate well, so really there was no other choice.
Installing the window went pretty smooth. Raise it into place from the outside, lock one lower corner in with a 3” screw, then level it and lock in the other lower corner. Then plumb it using shims and lock in a third corner. The forth corner should be plumb so shim it and double check. I think we ended up with 4 screws per side, into the framing. We hid the screws beneath the parting bead so they don’t show.
Next the exterior trim. This is about the point when it began to drizzle. We reused the original exterior trim, which has a few layers of paint still on – it will get stripped with the rest of the house in ’08 (if we actually get to painting). The trim went on with construction adhesive and 2 ½” finish nails.
Now the fun part – installing the sashes. The upper sash first, since it’s in back. The trick with my design is to hook up the balance cord. The sashes have a block & tackle balance recessed in each side, and they’re spring loaded. The cord needs to be pulled out of the balance, under pressure, and screwed into the side of the frame. The upper sash isn’t too bad – each balance has about eight pounds of lifting force. The lower one is harder since each balance pulls with about 20lbs of force.
With the top sash in place, the parting bead goes in. This is a 3/8 strip of fir that separates the sashes and creates tracks for them to glide in. It slides into a dado that is cut into the frame. The fit is tight, but not too tight. The bottom sash is then installed in front of the parting bead.
Lastly the interior trim, including the sash stop. These are all installed with finish nails. Some double-hung windows screw in the sash stop, but mine are to narrow. We haven’t made a final decision on sash-lock hardware, so that will come soon. Right now we’re leaning towards hardware from Rejuvenation.
That’s it. The prototype is a success – it opens and closes smoothly, is air tight, and is great to look at (and through). I made the sashes entirely from salvaged fir, and the frame from new fir and cedar (for the sill). The trim is all original. The glass is double-pane insulated, without any coatings. Total cost came in just shy of $400.
One down, 6 to go. As of now I have all the parts cut out for all 6 and I’m in the process of fitting them together (fine tuning all the joints) in preparation for glue up. Still, I’m not going to make any predictions about when they’ll be done…
Merry Christmas!
Today was a wonderful day. We stayed in our pajamas most of the day and got to watch Atticus open his presents. Without a doubt, the best present was the one that Nick made him.
What do you make a toddler? Something that has everything that they love to do: an outlet to plug things into (no power to the outlet), buttons (these cause lights to light up and a buzzer to go off), a light switch, door knobs and a lock with a key that works, and an old laptop keyboard. Put this together with a bit of creativity, and what do you get? A "control panel".
Nick has been thinking about this for quite awhile and it turned out great. The locks work, there is a plexiglass window so you can see the light inside as well as all the cords. There is also a lever, connected to some bungee cords inside to give it friction. Nick is the genius behind all of this. I helped sand and varnish it, but other than that, it was all his doing.
Here are a few pics:
And a picture from the top so you can see more of what it does:
This will provide hours of fun!
Boy is Christmas fun with kids...
Or... "You can never own too many clamps."
Nick's been busy the past few weeks using up all the salvaged fir we had left. There's enough wood for the sashes, but we'll have to buy wood for the frames. He glued up all the pieces, put them through the planer, and then cut them to size. He then started milling all the joints and there's more milling to do.
I count 15 clamps in the picture above, which I guess is still not enough. Not taking a clue, I did not get him more clamps for Christmas.
(If he starts asking about his smaller clamps, don't let him know that I'm using them to keep the eaves on our dining room table from slipping apart!)