The Perception of Doors

You may remember we wanted to make use of the awkward space in the "knee walls" in the corners of the bathroom. Because this room is directly under the roof, the ceiling slopes at 45 degrees all the way down to the floor. That leaves you with very short triangular spaces on the sides of the room, and I didn't want to waste that space. So I made storage cabinets.

They're framed in just below the rafters and above the floor joists, as you can see here. I used oak laminate for the "floor" and "walls" of the cabinets, and pine for the face. (Forgive me, Dr. Hart, for not using redwood.) There's also some stranded board visible in the picture, but that's just backing for the bead board to come.

Of course, nothing was at right angles (or even a solid 45 degrees), so there was a lot of guessing, fitting, tweaking, and swearing involved. This was made all the more awkward because the bathroom is on the 3rd floor and my table saw is on the ground floor. And the lumber is in the garage, one floor down from that. So the process works like this: Down three flights of stairs, cut, up three flights with cut wood in hand, test fit, back down three flights, cut again, upstairs again, swear, repeat.

Eventually, I got everything to fit well enough to nail it all in place and insulate around the back sides. There's one cabinet on the right side of the room (shown) and a matching one on the left.

Then come the doors. They're also pine, with bead board inserts to match the walls. They're a stile-and-rail design using pocket-hole joinery, with trapped panels. If you do much woodworking, that's no big deal, but I'm pretty proud of them.

I started with select pine (no knots) and ripped it down to the size I wanted, then cut rails and stiles to length. I cut them each in pairs so they'd match exactly. Then I routed a groove along the inside length of each piece to "trap" the bead board insert. The insert isn't glued, so it can expand and contract slightly with changes in temperature or humidity. Since I don't have a dado blade, I just made multiple passes over the table saw with a standard rip blade. The trick here was to remember which side of each piece will face outward so that the grooves will all line up when the door is assembled.

Before assembling the doors, I routed a stopped chamfer on the inside edges of the doors with a simple 1/4" cove bit. After some experimentation I decided it looked best stopped 2" from the ends of the stiles and about a half-inch from the ends of the rails.

That done, I drilled pocket holes in the backs of the rails using a $19 jig (new tool!), inserted the bead board pieces, and screwed everything together. There is no glue. After the doors were all assembled, I went around the outside of each one with a Roman ogee bit to make the little edge detail you see in the photo above. 

Remarkably, each of the doors is square and true. I'm getting better at this. This photo shows one of the doors taped into place. Now I just need to source some hinges, paint it all, and we should be all set.

Plants vs. Turleys

We've never been much for gardening. We've never had the time. So the neighbor's vegetation has, by default, become ours as well. And the neighbors are big on ivy. Very, very big fans of ivy. I've got nothing against ivy, but we'd always imagined something different for our yard.

Starting about six months ago, Kathy began the task of removing some of said ivy from the back fence. To be honest, we didn't know we had a back fence. Turns out it's about 8 feet high, painted white, and runs the whole length of the lot line, but it was so completely covered in ivy it was invisible. It took Kathy several weeks (and several more garbage cans) to uncover it all.

I think of ivy as a thin, spindly little vine, but this stuff had trunks. They were thick and stout and hard to chop down. When the hand trimmer failed we got the tree saw. When that failed, we swung an axe at it. And when that failed, I got out my angle grinder and ground its little fibrous legs off. It made a funny smell but by golly we killed the thing. "Take that! And stay down!"

Kathy is becoming the Rambo of the lower phyla. Have trimmers, will eradicate with extreme prejudice. Plants fear her.

Having denuded the back fence -- which promptly fell over, having lost all its biological support -- she turned her attention to the side yard. Again, we didn't know anything about a "fence," per se, just another wall of ivy separating us from the house next door. This time the ivy was only about waist high, so we could chop it back without resorting to power tools. As before, removing the ivy revealed a white fence we didn't know we had, although this one was a cute white lattice design. It must have been nice, oh, 40 years ago before the jungle absorbed it. Now it's rotten and unable to support itself. I've driven a few rusty lengths of rebar into the ground to hold it up.

See this four-foot stump here? We didn't know that was there. It was completely obscured by all the ivy, too. In fact, we found a total of three old stumps that had been lurking in our yard, unseen by mortals all these years.

Our plan -- and we do have one -- is to replace all the ivy with flowers or flowering plants. Right now, the whole yard is green, as in no color. It's healthy and all (or it was before we killed it), but also kind of boring. We'd like a bit more color and the first step before planting was to remove the invasive ivy to make room. Naturally, this all comes just a few weeks before the Historic Homes Tour, so we may have to apologize to our visitors for the condition of the yard. Maybe it'll be dark that day.

Safety Tip

Listen up, kids. Here's an important safety tip from your friend Jim:

Tip: Don't stick your fingers in the spinning 12,000-RPM blade of a router. It'll mess you up quick. And it hurts.

Actually, it didn't hurt at all. Not at first.

It was the sound that tipped me off.

There I was, minding my own business, routing some pine boards to make half-lap joints. These will eventually become the in-wall cabinets in the 3rd-floor bathroom (more on that later). Routers have a remarkable capacity to generate enormous piles of wood chips and sawdust. Honestly, it's like working on a British car: you wind up with more pieces left over than you started with. And since I'd neglected to hook up the shop vacuum to the router ("how much sawdust can this possibly make?"), the wood shavings really piled up. So much that I couldn't see the blade or the piece I was working on.

So naturally, I brushed the wood chips away.

Actually, first I blew on it. I leaned in and put my face right up close to the whirring blade and puffed. It was at this point that a little alarm bell went off in my head. "Hey," I thought. "This is really dangerous. I shouldn't put my face so close to the router. I might, y'know, get hurt."

Apparently that feeling lasted for all of 1.5 seconds because I then brushed away the sawdust with my finger. I was careful. Honest. I moved slowly and kept my finger (singular) away from the blade. Trouble was, the other four fingers weren't paying attention. And one apparently strayed into the router's killzone.

Router blades are sharp. And they spin really fast. So sharp and fast, in fact, that you don't even feel it as it chips away at your soft fleshy parts. Like a surgeon's scalpel, but with more sawdust.

The good news is, routers don't have a lot of torque, so when they're chipping away at wood (or whatever) they slow down. And you can hear the difference in pitch as it contacts the "work surface." So I heard, rather than felt, the router dig into my finger. And 6 million years of evolution trained me to yank my hand back. Lucky thing, that.

Oh, there was blood. Way too much considering how shallow the damage was. The only uncomfortable part was cutting away the loose pieces the router hadn't finished. Yuck. And the gouge was remarkably straight and well-defined. Hey, nice router.

So now I've got a new Band-Aid and a new appreciation for all the brightly colored safety stickers they print on power tools. Too bad they weren't bigger.

1928-2012