Projects in progress or in planning...

The current woodworking project consists of building a paneled wall, a built-in bookcase and a new Fireplace Mantle and surround.

The floor plan for the new place is really nice. It is generally very open and very bright. But, the living room and family room run together with no seperation of function. This picture shows the problem. The living room and family room are joined by a 6-foot framed opening. I'm going to close up the opening and panel the wall on the family room side. I'll do a built-in on the Living Room side. We don't much like the fireplace and the slate surround so we plan on replacing that also. Notice in the picture there is a column standing there by itself. We don't like that very much either, so that will be made part of the foyer wall.

February 2007
I started by framing in the wall from the errant post. When the dry wall work was finished, I framed in the opening between the two rooms. I have quite a bit of wood stashed in the shed (If you are interested in the "wood story", look under Woodworking Prjoects, then Cradles). I have a lot of Black Walnut, but it is generally poor quality, lots of knots, nothing very clear for any length or width. This is the design I came up with to make maximum utilization of the wood at hand. The paneled wall will provide a darkish background for the TV and stereo equipment planned for the room.

I thought I would be able to re-saw the boards I have and glue up book-matched pieces to make the panels. But, the wood just is not quite thick enough for that to work. I tried out my new MiniMax shaper, a stile and rail set, and a raised panel cutter. They seem to work well. I made the test-cut stiles and rails 4-inches wide. I do not know if that bodes well for the project as my sketch calls for 3-inch stiles. I tried making a simple flat panel but that design was pretty unexciting. I found I can get a pretty good looking panel as long as I edge glue two pieces from the same board. The color and grain match well enough to be acceptable. I glued up 55 blanks. That is 5 more than I need, but I expect some mistakes and test cuts along the way. The glued up panels are 0.90 thick. I expect them to move a little as the wood decides where it wants to go after the first rough planning. The finished thickness for the panels will be 0.70 thick.

March 2007
I still wasn't certain how to approach building and installing the paneling. Should I do just one row at a time? Should I just go ahead and make all the pieces? I settled on just making the first row. The first row gets 12 x 24 inch panels whereas the panels in the rows above are 12 x 12. I made the 10 panels , the horizontal rails, and the vertical stiles. I kept these clamped and watched the humidity until I was able to spray on the pre-cat lacquer.

April 2007
Along the way I rigged up a spray booth of sorts out in the shed. A couple of attic fans mounted in a sheet of plywood and wedged under the roll-up door work for ventilation. A piece of peg board screwed to some 2 x 4's and my strip tank work as a drying rack Some plastic, a roll-around box with a lazy suzan on top complete the spray area.

I was concerned about how difficult it would be to keep the stiles aligned perfectly vertical while tapping the panels into place. As it turned out the stiles grabbed and held pretty well with no appreciable movement, though I did check them after each panel was installed. I installed all the panels and their stiles for the first row, and then put on the top rail. The top rail was the most exciting part! But, I got it hammered in place without moving any of the stiles. As one would expect, only the stiles and rails are glued. The panels are tight but free to move around. The biscuit slots in the top rail will let me mount a chair rail without visible nails or screws. The top rail is screwed to the studs in both the old and new framing

May 2007
I decided it would take way too long to get this job done if I only finished on one row at a time. I made up all the rest of the panels, stiles , and rails. It was a tiresome two days to spray all these pieces. IIRC, it was about two hours to spray and three hours to sand them between coats. So, something over 15 hours.

I laid all the pieces out. I made sure the panels. were random in color, no groups of light or dark panels. I made up a story board with the panel locations marked on it. Installation of the panels and stiles was as straightforward as before. I used wedges to lock each top rail down untill the glue set up a little. Getting the very top rail in place was a bit of a challenge. I couldn't swing the hammer to tap the rail in place becasue I was too close to the ceiling. I panicked a little before I grabbed a stack of shim shingles and used them as wedges between the ceiling and the rail. Whew, all's well that ends well! Here's a test-look without the trim pieces. Glue blocks connect most of the stiles to the framing.

June 2007
The remaining trim pieces were mostly pretty straight forward. I needed to make multiple passes on the shaper for the chair rail. It got away from me at one point and I thought I'd need to trash it and start over. But, a few hours with some old hollows and rounds and I was able to recover enough to make it useable. The profile is a little different than planned, but who's to know?

I glued the chair rail in place using an improvised clamp system. The wall wasn't quite as straight as I would have liked but the joints get covered by the television. The top trim is just a couple boards with round-over edges, but it looks OK and was a lot easier, less risky than crown molding. . There's a one-screw screw-up there but I plugged it. The baseboard finishes the installation. And here's the overall shot. So, the family room side is done!

September 2007
The fireplace mantle and surround in the Living Room is, well...let's just say it leaves something to be desired! There is really no other way to put it. It is mostly particle board with the few pieces of wood looking like they were cut by hand with a kitchen knife. The slate is dull and stained, too. I found a design for a fireplace surround in the December 1997 issue of Wood Magazine. I used the basic idea to design a built-in and a new fireplace surround. The built-in goes in the living room on the back side of the paneled wall.

The built-in starts off as a basic MDF box with a face frame. Notice the knots! It's tough to find good long boards in my stash. Fortunately only about an inch of the bottom board is exposed. In this picture I have temporarily set the box in place in the living room. I need to tailor the wrap-around corners and the two outside vertical shelf supports to the depth and contour of the wall. Then I can finish building it in the shop. Once the locations are all marked and everything is back downstairs, I need to secure the bookshelf columns to the cabinet top. The unit is a little too big for my set-up table. Notice the one column setting setting on a drawer on the cabinet behind. The columns are secured to the cabinet top with screws and dowels. I have made the doors for the bottom cabinet. I don't have a lot of room for assembly much less for taking pictures but I did stand all the piece together to get a test-look.

October 2007
The plan calls for quite a bit of large cove molding on both the built-in and the fireplace surround. The molding will be made by pushing the pieces across an angled tablesaw blade. A cumbersome and nasty effort, but necessary since I can't afford a shaper cutter that large. These are the glue-ups for the cove moldings. Here are some of the molding pieces as they come off the tablesaw. They require lots of sanding!

November 2007
There are a lot of molding pieces on this thing! The little pieces that bridge the step around the columns are particularly difficult. They are too small to hang onto to fit by hand with a chute board. Once I figured out the exact dimension I used the tablesaw. I had to tape up the board to prevent tear out. Then I had to hook more tape to the cut off piece so it wouldn't fall back into the saw and go sailing across the shop. Hey, it is supposed to be a challenge! Here is the top section with all the molding installed.

Molding for the bottom part of the cabinet was a little easier to install. Plus I could get the cabinet back in the shop closer to the tools. These flash pictures make the wood look a little strange, plus the cabinet is laying on its back. Re-orienting the pictures doesn't always help. Here are details of the base cabinet moldings: pic1, pic2, and pic3. Here is the whole thing put back together for another test-look. I still need to make the shelves and buy something veneered for the back and top. I'm going to take a little break from all this woodworking and do something fun. I'm going to put up Crown Molding in the Living Room and Dining Room!

December 2007
The crown molding is installed; caulking is your friend! Anyway, time to start on the fireplace mantle and surround. Here is what it looked like at the beginning. The first thing was to pull the old surround off the wall. It was only held in place with four nails and a lot of caulking. I made some cuts into the drywall to get access to the framing so I could install a couple of wall sconce light fixtures. I taped up the drywall cuts to ensure no drafts and installed the new granite. The granite is simply glued up there. The cross pieces will hold it until the glue dries. The pieces are essentially stacked, with all the weight being transferred straight down to the hearth. Not much force pulling away from the wall. Having said that I think I'll leave the cross pieces in place until the surround is fully installed. I found a really nice piece of wood for the mantle top, and a nice piece for the front horizontal piece. I found two pieces for the fronts of the columns but one had some nasty rotten knots on one side and I couldn't tell how far they went into the board. I glued up the pair of 3-piece columns and cut the flutes in them. Here is the router table lash-up to cut the flutes. All the clamps simply make stops to control the length of the flutes. Here's the nasty knot I mentioned. The front side of the knot doesn't look too bad, and the routed flutes didn't cut into anything bad. With the hoizontal board keeping the column square, the columns had to be fitted to the wall. A hand plane was the only way to fit the wood to the wavy wall. Once the columns were fitted to the wall, they were screwed and glued to the hoizontal board. This will be somewhat of an exercise in wood movement. That is an 8-inch horizontal board cross-grain glued to a 6-inch vertical column board. There could be some splits, or moldings popping off, somewhere down the road.

January 2008
Happy New Year! Here is the first picture of the new year. I was getting nervous installing the molding without test fitting it so I carried the whole assembly back up to the living room. While it was there I figured I might as well install the top mantle board since it had to be fitted to the wall.

I finished the moldings for the bottom of the mantle. I'm pretty pleased with the way this coming out so far. It should be pretty sharp if I can get it finished properly. I just love all this molding on these things. I made the rest of the odds and ends. I made the shelves for the top and bottom sections of the built-in. I'm going to do walnut baseboards on two walls, the walls with the mantle and the built-in. I made these little doobers to go in the corners. They will make the transition from the walnut baseboard to the existing white baseboard on the other two wall. It is difficult to add nicely finished natural wood trim to this place that uses all white fiberboard trim and white plastic windows. I hope my idea for the walnut to white transition looks OK.

February 2008
You didn't think we would keep the really red walls, did you? I added crown molding to the two rooms, the living room and the dining room. There are some funny steps in the walls in the dining room. They probably hide some sort of duct work. The trim looks a little strange going around these corners. The chair rail had to be routed back where it butts the window trim, and then it had to be coped where it ends on the wall. The freshly painted room is quite a change. We have been looking at those red walls long enough!

March 2008
Well, it is March and too early to set up the spray equipment. It will be April or May before it is warm enough in the shed to start spraying the mantle and built-in. We have, or had, one of those two story foyers that seem to be so popular these days. Some of those are very nice, with stairs entering, nice railings, fancy upstairs windows, etc. Ours was not that way. Ours was simply a two story white box with a big hanging light. We decided to add a cailing/floor and make a second floor sewing room. I made some measurements, did some checking with the stud finder and cut some exploratory holes. These holes mostly confirmed what I thought was there, so I set out to remove the necessary dry wall. There was nearly a 100 kinear feet of cuts to make to remove the dry wall. I wasn't about to do that with a knife! I knew it would make some mess but I decided to use my circular saw. I marked the area to be removed with pencil lines. I put up plastic sheeting to try to contain the dust. Then, with repirator and safety goggles I started cutting. It went pretty quickly; saw a little, shake off the dust, saw a little.... When it was all done I stepped outside of my tented area, removed the respirator and googles, and looked upstairs. The dust hanging upstairs made it look like the house was on fire! I hadn't planned on so much of the dust rising up. Anyway, there was a really stiff breeze blowing outside so opening a couple windows on either side of the house cleared the air pretty quickly. After the drywall was removed, everything was pretty much as I expected. I could see the header above the door but it looked like a board laying flat so I couldn't really tell how it was made. If I didn't know exactly what was there, it would worry me the rest of my life, so I took down the dry wall over the door. That is a really nice 12 x 6 inch beam! That will certainly hold the floor joists. Anyway, after the initial mess, the rest of the work went quickly and predictably. The I-joist were hung on hangers at one end, and set on the built-up header at the other end. I added tight bloacking over the door to make certain the I-joists could not twist. Drywall installation was uneventful. All of the trim, painting and lighting is now done for the living room, dining room and foyer. Now to just wait for the weather to warm up enough to start spraying finish.