Living Room Bookshelves

This story starts with Stefani hijacking the bookshelves from my basement office to use in the front room so that we would all have better access to our books; so to get them back, I needed to come up with a solution that would make the living room look nice without breaking the bank.
So, we decided to take this chance to just turn the front room into a bit of a library. There was an incredible deal at Walmart for some really cheap bookshelves: 6' ones for $25 each and 3' ones for $15 each.  Stefani had a fun idea to stack them; and with our nine-foot ceilings it seemed like it could potentially be a good fit for the room.  So, we did some measuring and were coming up about 18" short.  So, we hit IKEA and struck a good bargain on a shelving unit that was the width we needed to complete the wall.  It even came with optional glass doors on the front.  So, I decided to make that a 'look-don't-touch' book section for all of the old and/or valuable stuff.  The shelves were finished only on one side (hey, they were really cheap!), so I had to put the 3' shelves that were to be stacked on top of the 6' ones upside down in order to keep people from seeing the unfinished part.

I used some good, low-profile metal bracketing straps to attach the 3' ones to the 6' ones, since they could be bearing a lot of weight. I also had to get some beefy screws that were not longer than the width of the boards, so that they wouldn't be poking through to the books. I also had to be careful to drill good leader holes, since I was dealing with particle board.

The middle shelf was shorter than the others.  IKEA sells extensions, but they were really designed to hae only one extension.  So, I had to drill a few holes to the top of the lower extension in order to accommodate the upper extension.  I have anchored them to the wall on top with some serious L-brackets, and when we get the money, I'll add some of the nice overhang-style accent lights to the shelves.  We came in just under $300.

Who-Ville Party

Garden Boxes

Materials needed (per garden box):

1 4"x4"x10' post
3 2"x12"x8' boards
(if sloped) 2 2"x6"x8' boards
~4 dozen long outdoor wood screws (3.5")
landscape fabric
3-way mix of Ulite, Peat Moss, and Topsoil)

Stefani wanted garden boxes for years, and we finally got some for our backyard in our old house the season just before we moved.  So all we grew in the first ones was bindweed.

So, she was motivated to get me on a new set of boxes for this house.  The trouble was that the old ones cost around $250 for 3 4'x4' vinyl boxes, the same stuff that these fences in the area are made from.  We didn't want to shell out that much for just 32 square feet of gardening space.  So, we decided to go on the cheap and make our own boxes.

I saw how some of the other garden boxes in the neighborhood were constructed, and some were holding up better than others.  I chose a design that was cheap but hopefully durable to last 10-15 years.  we purchased one 4x4x10' for each box, cut into 4 pieces.  This made it so that each corner post would be in the ground at least 1.5' (with 12" of garden box showing), and 2' in some parts (with 6" of garden box showing because of the slope of the yard).  To the tops of these we screwed 2x12's, overlapping across the 4x4 post (see diagram for rough details), and alternating screw placement for strength.

Since we put these onto a slope, we also added one more level of 2x6's where the slope of the land would cause the bottoms of the 2x12's to rise above the ground level (see diagram).

After putting the boxes together, I leveled them (just using a level and shovel.  I ended up not only digging the post holes but also trenching between them to keep the sides off the ground while leveling between corners.  Once level, I just filled in the holes with dirt (no sense cementing these in, as they're 10-15yr boxes, right?)

After grading the yard around them, we laid down landscape fabric as a weed barrier, fitted and stapled to the sides of the box so that it will not tear when we filled them.   Then we filled the boxes with the 3-part mix recommended by the folks at our local IFA: Ulite, peat moss, and topsoil.  I think this time around we went a little heavy on the Ulite, and we were a little skimpy on the peat moss.  But, we had a bumper crop of tomatoes, got out of it some zucchini (which made some decent bread, below), and got some Komote Tops (sort of a leaf-only plant for soups from the Philippines) to grow well.  Our pumpkins and squash failed because of some bugs and because we were a little late getting the drip system hooked up to the box.  All in all, it was a project well worth doing, and we'll probably put a few more of these in next year.

Two pinewood derby cars

This year was the first year Michael was able to participate in the pinewood derby.  I got a little excited.  We had a car all designed, cut out, and sanded and ready for painting.  Then Michael and I got some tickets and saw How to Train Your Dragon in the movie theater.  The kid absolutely fell in love with Toothless, one of the dragons in the show, and as we were walking toward the car after the show he said "Dad, we need to change my pinewood derby car to be Toothless."  I said "well Michael, we're almost done with the car, and I'm not sure we can get it to look like Toothless."  That didn't deter him, though, so we gave it a shot.  We drew up the design when we got home, and after Michael went to bed I broke out the Dremel and started carving into the night.  It turned out better than I had expected, and Michael was thrilled.

This year the dads were also able to participate in a "no rules" pinewood derby race, where (as long as you didn't burn down the track or damage the church building) you could do anything you wanted with the car.  So I headed down to Radio Shack and bought two motors to mount the wheels onto, wired them to a switch that was pressure-sensitive to a small plunger that served as a bumper, and hooked everything to a 9-volt battery to power the thing.  (The bumper was designed to rest on the starting pin, so when the pin dropped to start the race, the switch would open and engage the motors.  I then glued some rubber bands onto the back wheels because otherwise the motors were just causing the car to spin out on the linoleum during test runs.

The car absolutely dominated the open competition, beating its next closest competitor by 1/4 of the length of the track.  On its first race, nobody knew it was equipped with motors because from the top of the car it looks like any other derby car.  People were so surprised when they saw it go that many involuntarily stood up and exclaimed "whoa".  That was a high point for me.  The only real downside to this experience was that it turned out that most of the dads didn't bother with this race, so most of the competition was 6-year-old girls who had built cars so that they could race after their big cub-scout brothers...  Have you ever seen the episode where Kramer beats up on the little kids at the dojo?

Refinishing the Kitchen Table

We have had the same kitchen table since shortly after Stefani and I were married (coming up on 10 years this summer). We bought it out of some garage-based wholesaler in north Seattle as a scratch-and-dent, and the finish was all but gone. We also weren't fans of the honey-oak color. It matched our first house, but moving into our current one meant that it had to go.

So, I took on this weekend project to refinish it, right?... Three weeks later we are satisfied with the results, and here's what I did:

1. I took the thing apart and headed out to the garage.  I spent some hours stripping it, first with the furniture refinisher I got at Home Depot and some steel wool.  It came off pretty well, but I went through a lot of wool because it kept getting gummed up with old sealant.

2. I tried putting a test coat of the stain we chose (from Kwal Howell, which I recommend for the most part), but it wasn't taking the stain very well.  So, I decided the best way to take out the rest of the finish was to just sand it down...


3. When it comes to sanding, I'm really liking the power tools.  It would have taken me forever to get all of the sanding done by hand.  I used this really old Makita vibrating sander for all the flat and convex surfaces I could.  I moved the project down to the basement, where I could put a tv show on while I sanded, and I spent an especially long time on the table top because I was trying to get out some scratches that had been there since we originally purchased the table.  It almost worked.

4. For the concave surfaces, all of the little nooks and crannies, this Dremmel tool came in handy.  The bit I used was a little carving ball of some sort, and it allowed me to pull all of the residual sealant out of the detailed table legs and etc.

You can see the difference between the wood after it was stripped using the refinisher (right) versus after sanding down to the bare wood (left).  Before sanding, the wood was just not equipped to take on new stain.

5. With everything sanded, I began putting coats of stain on.  The guys at Kwal Howell said to only apply one coat.  I did, and it just wasn't as dark as I wanted it.  So, I disobeyed them and put on three coats.  I smothered it and let it just sit there for a while, so that the pores would soak in the darker color.

6. Once the table was the color we thought we wanted, we took the next step of sealing it.  At Kwal Howell (and this is where their advice didn't turn out so well), they recommended their water-based sealant.  I was to put on 5 coats of this stuff onto the table top and 3 coats everywhere else.  I was also instructed to make the coats just as thin as I possibly could, and to do each coat in one sitting so my layers would be consistent.  Well, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this, so I really did exactly what they said.  No good.  After I put the coats on (several days worth of work and wait), it looked as though a sandblaster had hit the table.  The more I put on, the worse it got.  I was livid.  I eyed the axe in the garage as the solution to this table...

7. So then I resanded
the...
whole...
freakin...
thing.

8. After marching back to Kwal Howell and demanding a refund for that stuff, I headed over to Walmart to get some oil-based sealant.  The instructions on the can were similar to those on the can of the water-based stuff, and my methods of application were identical; but the result was oh-so-different!  4 coats of that stuff on the table top and 3 everywhere else has yielded an impenetrable barrier that is a nice wipe-able surface that will hopefully ward off Ali's fork-attacks for years to come.

projects projects!

So, I have this thing for projects. I love them. I would rather complete a project than do just about anything else. Lately I've had lots of them at home, at work, and as side jobs; and I crank through them and never look back. Well, now that I'm starting to get old, I'm losing the ability to look back. So, I'm going to start trying to document some of my projects so that I can remember the steps I took and can start to ballpark costs in order to benchmark future projects. Then when I'm really old I can have something to reminisce. Anyway, we'll see how I do...

Welcome!