Showing posts with label carpentry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carpentry. Show all posts

More nookie

Here is the breakfast nook bench, screwed to the wall but without its false paneling rails and stiles on the back or molding on the base.

I wonder about the height of the window. It has always seemed high for a nook window. Aren't they usually just above the table-top?


I ordered the floor- Armstrong Excelon tiles from Lowe's, where they are $30 a box with free shipping to the store. Online, some stores wanted $1.69 per tile, and then $200 for shipping (granted, I didn't call to ask if they could just UPS four boxes to me)














I thought I'd get artsy with the shavings from the seat edge.

Breakfast Nook Bench 1


I am totally proud of myself! I built something that's like real furniture! Like, it's made of more than just soft pine 2x4s!
 
This is the first (experimental) of the two planned kitchen nook benches. I made a couple of bone-headed measurement errors, though they were cheaply and easily fixed. My real hangup was the hinges for the bench lid. I have a bad record keeping hinges straight and even. After an evening spent plugging and re-drilling screw holes, the joint is even enough and I just hope the problem hinge will warp into place after it is sat upon awhile.

I didn't find furniture-grade wood for the curvy bench ends as thickly as I wanted it, and ended up buying 3/4" birch plywood instead. I'll see how it goes- if they feel cheap and flimsy when attached.
My goal as a novice carpenter is to have these benches feel as if they are original to the house, and as the original nook pantry woodwork has a rough, nearly primitive feel inside its guts, it doesn't concern me that I didn't use fancy joints, and that the bench lid is two pieces of wood (carefully) joined with braces. The bench's weight alone makes it very sturdy. Fat Cat is kindly demonstrating this.

Now With 98% Less Cockroaches!

With all the holes now patched up, including the rat entrance around the old gas pipe and valve that are still sticking out of the wall, we have installed the base cabinets. Here are the cabinets we chose, from Ikea. The fronts, at least, are solid wood, and they fit our measly educator/non-profit employee budget at $1100. The full overlay is an acceptable substitute for the face-frame, for me.














The idea is to paint them, with appropriate bronze hardware, to match these in the breakfast nook. Not to make them blotchy like these partially stripped guys, but to paint the entire set in the same cream color. I should mention, I've tried every stripper method I know on this pantry; chemicals, heat etc., but the thing that worked the best, and cleanest, was just peeling off the layers with a razor blade. The layers are 1/8 thick in some areas, and they peel with diligent coercion.















Here is where we are now, about 36 work-hours into the project. The fronts had to be ordered and we are picking them up in a few weeks from an Ikea warehouse. The wood-colored post in the cabinet center is my own replacement of a part Ikea got wrong. I didn't feel like fighting with them over the phone about how they had given me an older cabinet and a 2009-model rotating tray. In the past their telephone customer service wasn't great.



















The countertop and floor haven't been ordered yet because I thought I'd be pink-slipped this week in surprise cuts. It has been depressing to walk into the unfinished kitchen everyday thinking it might look like this for months. I don't know how I became lucky, because I'm usually not, and am sad to be losing so many friends and good people from my workplace.

I'm doing the plumbing myself. My mom asked me how that was different from the mess the flipper left us in, and wondered if I should call a plumber. But I've done code research, and if it really gets screwed up then I will call someone. Working in my favor is that every bit of the plumbing is exposed under the house, the drain already at the proper incline, and easy to install. In the crawlspace, however, the glue smells awful!

The Kitchen that Was

Dear Ralph's lonely blog,
I am sorry I abandoned you. Really, there was nothing to write about. Now there is. On impulse, the Sunday before New Year's we bashed the kitchen cabinets into nasty, dirty pieces, making them into the appropriate 4' x 4' sections for the trash truck guys. This is what was underneath, yuck. These pictures were before breaking off remaining rot, decay and plaster. Since we moved in, the only thing between us and the crawlspace and the exterior walls was 3' of clear packing tape that I used to bridge this hole around the pvc drainpipe. I'm amazed we didn't see rats more often.

Rat Poop Before Sweeping:














Hole in the Wall Where Sink Used to Be:














The golden-color floor material appeared to be vinyl, and came right up. It was lain over linoleum tiles that may have been early to the house. Neither of them extended into the business portion of the kitchen floor. There, under the current beige sheet vinyl, are glossy fake parquet vinyl tiles, which peel right up with the sheet, exposing beautiful but very sticky wood floors underneath.

My guess is that someone redoing the kitchen in the 70's had the the really old stuff stripped off and refinished the wood floors. The old stuff remained under the inaccesible cabinet bases. But then, some recent fool put down the fake wood parquet tiles, maybe a renter. Why, when there is real, finished wood underneath?? Anyhoo, the real wood floor was made so sticky by those parquet tiles that I decided the layers should just stay. They will be a good underlayer for new linoleum tiles.

This is the new shimmed wallboard and 3/4" plywood under-cabinet floor patch.














Here is Jason wetting and scraping the popcorn ceiling. Yay!


More to come!
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