It’s … alive! It’s alive!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling, well… constrained by the state of my workshop. A few weekends ago, I kicked off a project to restore a wooden storm door, only to realize how much faster it (and every other project) would go if my workshop were at least partially functional. Since I was waiting for a part for my random orbit sander anyway, I decided to shift gears from the storm door and make some progress toward getting my workshop set up.

My basement workshop is a fairly open 28′ x 28′ square, with chimney, furnace, water heater, and boiler in the center. (Even with these, it’s twice the square footage of my last workshop.) The chimney in the center divides the space, with a garage cut in to the east side, several inches lower than the rest of the basement. I decided that I would use that garage bay as my machine room, since that’s when I’m most likely to be working with long stock. I’m planning a bench room in the large open space on the west side (once I tear out an ill-conceived full bathroom). The northeast corner is a tool crib of sorts, with mechanic’s tools and hardware, and a few knocked-together handyman benches left by a previous occupant. I haven’t decided where to place the lathe yet, but it’s coming. Given my project list, I decided to prioritize the machine room. After a few evenings of work, I had my tablesaw reassembled and oriented to provide a good balance of infeed and outfeed space, and shimmed to compensate for the way the floor pitches to the drain.

Stopping at the home center after work on Wednesday, I bought the supplies I needed to wire my workshop outlets. With a little puttering after dinner, I had a working 220v outlet (and a working tablesaw), and everything seemed just a little better. I still need to get a 110v circuit laid out for dust collection, and another for jointer, thickness planer, and smaller power tools, but it feels like progress.

The replacement pad for my random orbit sander arrived on Thursday as expected, but I had to work late and didn’t have the energy to do anything with it. I left it on the kitchen table overnight, not thinking much of it. When I got up Friday morning, the envelope was in shreds and there were a few puppy teeth marks on it.

 

None the worse for wear.

 
 Getting back to work Saturday on my screen door, I ended up back at the home center a few times. (I seem to live at the home center these days, but I’m still trying to figure out what must be the most complicated parking lot-to-side-street-to-highway transition in the Greater Kansas City area.) Looking for more sanding disks, what do I find but the same replacement pad I just ordered from Porter-Cable, but for $20 less than I paid to have it shipped to my door. 

I never would have expected it, but apparently the pads must fail pretty often. And yes, I concede, Bonny was right.

Correcting DIY Done Wrong

A few days after moving into our house, my daughter posted a video to social media*, showing the ceiling fan in her new bedroom, ready to spin right off the ceiling. All the other ceiling fans were high-end fans that were competently installed, so the home inspector and I took it for granted that this one would be, too. 

Not so, apparently.

After watching the fan in action, I made sure she knew not to use it until I could get up there to fix it, and last weekend, I finally got that opportunity.  I could tell by the wobble that it wasn’t braced properly, so I bought a retrofit ceiling fan brace on one of my many visits to the home center this month. 

Yesterday I took the fan down to take a look. Sure enough, the fan was mounted to a standard old work ceiling box, which was mounted to … lath.  

That’s right, just lath. And when it first started wobbling, it looks like Handy Andy grabbed some spare stranded wire and looped it around the fan mount to keep it hanging. And what did he attach that tether to? Lath. The same lath that was supporting the ceiling box.

Along the top of the picture, you can barely make out the two fender washers held up by blue concrete screws, which were holding either side of the tether around the fan mount. What, no bailing wire? No duct tape?

I disassembled this safety hazard and installed the ceiling fan brace. Reaching up into the ceiling, I was relieved to find reasonably-spaced rafter ties. positioning the ceiling fan brace was by far the most time-consuming portion of this job. 

Since the drywall ceiling covered the original lath and plaster ceiling, the box that came with the ceiling fan brace didn’t descend low enough to hold the mounting hardware at the right height, so I returned to the home center for a solution. I found an octagonal extension ring that mounted securely to the ceiling box at just the right depth. It held the fan mount securely too, so I was back in business. The fan now spins without the threatening wobble. 

While I was at the home center, I picked up a 60 watt-equivalent LED bulb that was on sale. Since this room is in a converted attic, I figured a cool-running light source might be good. The ancient incandescent bulb burned out shortly after we moved in, anyway.  So far I’m a fan of the Cree LED bulbs. I’ve installed some of the daylight bulbs in my basement workshop, and they’re nice and bright. We’ll just have to see how they perform over the long term.

* While I doubt that any sort of parent-shaming was intended, it was a surprisingly effective attention-getter, regardless. I just hope my wife doesn’t catch on to this strategy.

Bench room, meet throne room.

A few weekends ago, I rented a small U-Haul truck and packed up my workshop. The 15′ truck was big enough to hold all of my machinery and benches, but if I ever do this again, I’ll find a truck with a lift gate instead of U-Haul’s long ramp. I got about half-way into the move and realized I needed a helper (a spotter?) to get the Unisaw and 18″ bandsaw loaded. I called my dad, who always has good ideas in these situations.

Loading went fairly smoothly after that, with just one hitch. As we were pushing my Anarchist’s Tool Chest toward the ramp, the wheels caught on the ramp, pulling the leading batten cleanly off. Maybe I should have glued them on after all, or maybe that would have led to more damage. I don’t know. One more thing to add to the to-do list.

More than a week later, everything was pretty much as it came off the truck. The main issue?

What is it about 100 year-old basements that make people want to build full bathrooms in them?

I didn’t quite get this makeshift throne room torn out of my soon-to-be bench room, like I’d planned. My last house, a 1917 foursquare, also had a shower in the basement. I’m personally not a fan of subterranean showers.

I’m finally breaking radio silence.

It’s been a while since I last posted anything here, but like the duck on the pond, all the action is going on below the surface. So I’ll end my long silence by noting that Bonny and I recently closed on a fantastic 95 year-old house.

This was not the plan I had for the year, but nothing this year has gone according to plan. In fact, the story seems straight out of a Laura Numeroff children’s book.

Last December, I set out with a plan to get my woodworking house in order. I’d started reading about 5S workplace organization, and aimed to make my workshop more functional. I built a lumber rack that got my sheet goods up off the concrete, but then the sheet goods didn’t clear the western-most rafter tie.

The bowing sheet goods (and January’s Polar Vortex) motivated me to reframe for a vaulted ceiling and insulation, but then a new job opportunity came up in April before I finished the framing, and I haven’t really made it back out to finish up.

With May came my kids’ end of school rituals: concerts, awards ceremonies, and enrollment for fall. Enrollment was a difficult topic this year, as our school district wasn’t making important programming available for David. Bonny and I found ourselves discussing policy and curriculum with the assistant superintendent for middle school and high school, but our best negotiated agreement was that we’d monitor how David’s school year went.

Negotiators will tell you to evaluate your BATNA – your best alternative to a negotiated agreement – to understand your bargaining position. Looking around at other districts, our BATNA was much better than we realized; all we had to do was move. Sure enough, one night in May, Bonny suggested moving to a neighboring school district. Eight days later, we had a contract on a house we loved in a school district we admired, and I was rethinking all of my woodworking plans.

The new house, a foursquare with lap siding and a wrap-around porch, offers some interesting alternatives to my previous woodworking arrangement. The one-car garage is built in to the nearly 1,000 sq. ft. basement. On the plus side, anything I build in this basement can go out the garage door and up the stairs to the front door. I won’t have to worry about extreme heat and cold like I did with the freestanding garage, and I won’t have to deal with my tools being divided between the garage and the basement.

It’s by no means an ideal workspace, though. I’ll need to buy a dehumidifier soon. The ceilings are somewhat low (I can reach up and touch the bottoms of the floor joists in some places), and the central location of the furnace and hot water heater (not to mention the boiler) means I’ll need to be careful with my space, setting up workstations to accommodate all of my tools.

Rather than waiting to sell our old house, we decided to keep it as a rental, so most of my tools and materials are still in the old workshop, waiting for a weekend when my time is my own.

For a wood nerd, the house itself offers much to be excited about, including oak pocket doors to the parlor and the dining room. The floors and trim on the first floor are all oak, the trim stained a rich brown color.

Most of the trim is in great shape, but as in our last house, the remodeler made no attempt to tie the kitchen trim in with the rest of the house. The kitchen cabinets were installed fairly recently, but they are cheap, home center units that will need to be replaced someday.

Our first official act was to take up the pet-stain-saturated wall-to-wall carpet in the parlor and the dining room. We’ll need to refinish the floors, but once we do, I think they will be beautiful.

My woodworking focus for the rest of 2015 (and maybe 2016 as well) will likely be to restore the original double-hung windows and wooden storm sash. While the house has two high-efficiency furnaces and air conditioners, plus a boiler and (presumably working) radiators, it’s obvious which rooms need storm windows.

I’m already excited by what my initial research has uncovered on window restoration. There is a lot of material on the internet about the restoration process, but I’ll share what I learn along the way.

I’d love to try my hand at making window sash. With all of the storm sash we need, it might be easier to make than to find in architectural salvage.

I sense some tool purchases in my future. After all, if you give a woodworker a project, he’ll want to buy the right tools….

I’m good to go now.

For years, I treated portable power tools as an afterthought. Sure, I owned them, but I didn’t put much thought into them. And it was beginning to show.

What a mess.

And then this fall, I got a long-overdue replacement for my cordless drill driver – an 18v Bosch. It’s quite a step up from the Black and Decker model I’ve been using for the past decade. Hold on a sec. I need to go fix something…

…Got it. Thanks for hanging in there. Like I was about to say, I’ve gone from looking for alternatives to my cordless drill to looking for reasons to use my cordless drill. What really flipped the light switch for me, though, was the Sortimo case it came in. These cases are a nice balance of durability and light weight, and best of all, they stack in a uniform form factor.

My wife picked up on my enthusiasm for this system, and with my mother and my mother-in-law, colluded to encourage my organization kick. With two of the drawer systems and plenty of drawers, I managed to reduce the mess above down to this tidy stack.

Getting there…

I added a few of the No. 3-sized boxes, one for my plunge router and another for my circular saw, reducing the stack down even further and making room for a leaning tower of fasteners.

A neatly organized space.

So far, these boxes seem to be very thoughtfully designed. Unlike the typical molded cases, the consistent form factor means they take up less space. The latches have a more positive action to them, which is good, since the latches seemed to be the first thing to fail on the original cases for these tools. I do have one drawer that likes to stick on me, but my guess is that this is a result of the way I’ve loaded it.

With the old, bulky boxes in the recycling bin and the white painted bookcase broken down in my stash of reclaimed pine, I’ve saved a fair amount of space in my shop and made these tools much more portable.

I could use a few more of the No. 2 boxes – one for my 15 gauge nailer and another for my sanders – but for the most part, I have this corner squared away. I even hung a cabinet in place of the rickety metal shelving I had hanging upside down to store stains and finishes. The cobbler’s kids are getting shoes.