With sour weather it seemed to be a good day to spend in the workshop making some progress on the laundry hamper.
With the stiles figured out last time we turned our attention to the eight cross beams to which the stiles will attach. Here are the four that will go around the bottom of the hamper. We chose the four nicer pieces to be the top cross beams.
Step one was to mark where we wanted to router out the holes for the dowel rods. We knew we wanted a stile in the middle (at the 7.5-inch mark) with an inch in between. That translated into a 2-inch gap between marks (1 inch plus 1/2 an inch for each stile). Like so.
Then we clamped the piece in tight against our brace and went slowly through the seven spots on each cross piece.
Lather, rinse, repeat three more times and we had the entire bottom done.
We sanded what will be the front of the top pieces a bit more to make them smoother and nicer and then repeated the steps above to dig out the 7 holes per board. Here are the eight pieces ready for the next steps--routering a channel on the lower beams to hold the bottom of the hamper and making dowel holes in the ends to attach everything to the legs. On the top photo you have to use your imagination and picture 16-inch stiles between the upper and lower halves.
We moved onto a thinking part of the hamper project this afternoon--figuring out how and where to make the holes for the dowel rod connectors.
Step one was to test drive the plunger function on the router. This was pretty simple once we managed to switch the router itself from the regular base to the plunger base. As you can imagine from the names, the latter allows you to punch holes into the middle of a piece of wood. With the regular base you start from the side and either go into the wood to carve a channel (as we did before) or to go around the outside of the wood to make a decorative edge.
The practice piece also told us that the center of the router bit is 2 3/4 from the end. Since we know that we want the hole to be in the center of the 1x1 stiles this meant we needed a 2 1/4-inch spacer (2 3/4 minus 1/2 an inch). With this as our calculation we set up a dummy piece of 1x1 to make sure that the spacing was right. We also had to experiment with different clamp positions to get one that held the stile perfectly vertical and still. As you can see in the picture, this is one reason why we made the piece that we brace the router against overhang the table's edge.
To get dead-center on the stile we drew diagonals and made the crossing point our target.
Then we routered.
And tested to see if our 1/4-inch dowel rod would fit.
To fully test the concept we dug holes in two pieces and linked them with a dowel rod, closely approximating the real project.
Well, we haven't forgotten about our new project but felt some urgency to tackle a different one. See, one of us has trouble walking their dirty laundry all the way into the baskets that are in an adjoining room, so we're going to build a hamper and put it closer to the source. In addition to doing our part for good housekeeping, this is an opportunity to work with kentucky coffee tree, the wood we might use for a forthcoming bookshelf project.
We had only a vague idea of the project before going to the neighborhood wood store but did think that it would be nice to have some 2x2 for legs. When we asked about this the woodseller, John, pointed us to some reclaimed redheart that looked intriguing.
The redheart needs some cleaning up, but so did the coffee tree, which had been rough-cut, as you can see.
No worries. That's what power sanders are for. Here's one side done.
With this necessary preparatory work done, it was time to really figure out what we wanted to turn all this wood into. We sketched out a design that was inspired by some we saw online. Here are back-and-white and (approximate) color versions.
With the basic plan and dimensions in hand we started cutting.
- the legs will be 24 inches...the redheart is currently 26 inches and the extra bits will be made into the handle on the lid
- the stiles will be 1x1 and 16 inches high...there will be seven on each side with an inch gap between them...making the sides each 15 inches total
- the 8 top and bottom cross pieces will be 15 inches wide (obviously, see previous point) and 2 inches high...we had initially thought about making them 1x1 as well but the bottom pieces need to be thick enough to attach to the legs and stiles and have a routered channel to hold a piece of 1/2-inch plywood that will be the bottom of the hamper
- the stiles-to-crosses and crosses-to-legs will be attached by pieces of dowel rods, so we have to drill/router holes for them (one at the end of each stile and cross piece, or 72 holes in all)
- the top may be solid or slatted as well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it
After a couple outings we've nearly got all the components needed for the box.
We still need 2 more stiles. These required a little extra work because the wood was about 1/8 wider than an inch. So after running the 16-inch piece through the table saw to make a 1-inch cut, we rotated the piece 90 degrees to shave off that 1/8 of an inch and make them a true 1x1.
And here are the 8 cross pieces. These we decided to leave 1 1/8 inches wide to inset the stiles a bit.
More to come.
We couldn't let idle hands stay that way, so we tackled a new project that we teased back in October. One thing that studio 2 needs is a little shelf to display curios. We had cut the wood a couple months ago but put it aside to focus on the kitchen. With that done and a little time to cleanse our reno palate we got back to work.
Step one was to lay out the two shelves on the rails. We figured out how high to put them on the rails and how much they should overhang. To keep the rails at the right distance we cut some plywood into spacers at the top and bottom.
As a reminder, here are the braces for the two shelves.
The next step was to glue the shelves in place. Here is where the plywood spacers really came in handy.
We prefer a clean look with as little metal showing as possible, so once the glue dried we put four small nails through the rails for some extra assurance. We've found the wood glue to be pretty strong but you never can tell.
Next up we glued the braces in place. Their length (hypotenuse) is such that the two sides of the isosceles triangles that they form are 5 inches. How to keep them from sliding down while the glue dried? We put little spacers under the top shelf...
and a heavy board under the lower shelf. When this dried we put four small nails through the rails into the braces, again for insurance.
And here's the final result. It needs some sealer to protect and brighten the oak and then we'll hang it because a shelf so close to the ground isn't very practical.
Well, it's been a long (long, long) time coming--begun in August in fact--but we've finally finished the kitchen. This week we put on our customary five coats of primer, paint, and sealer on the new shelves and installed them this morning. The more block-ish design really fits the rest of the kitchen better, not to mention they're actually the right color now.
A week before our second anniversary and we're really done with all the projects that we needed to do. Sure there are some fiddles around the margins (e.g. a new exhaust fan for the bathroom) and a few repeat projects looming (e.g. refinishing the deck with a better product), but mostly we're moving into the "projects of choice" phase (e.g. a wall of bookshelves for the library). It's a pretty good feeling.
Apologies. It's been a touch longer between posts than anticipated. We didn't mean to leave everyone hanging this long. So we'll start with what magicians refer to as the "big reveal". Ok, so this still needs some sanding and painting, but you get the idea.
The shelves are the easy part, it's just a 1x8 of poplar, but the four brackets were a little more involved.
We took the four new brackets that we made with nothing more than our saws and Elmer's wood glue.
And then things got fancy when we broke out the newest addition to the team--a router.
If you read anything online about using routers, a key ingredient is having a hard edge against which to brace the router rather than trying to use it free-hand. So when we built our work table we included such a brace.
If you're wondering about the bolts holding it on, we know there will be times when we want the use of the full table, so the router brace is removable with the help of two butterfly nuts.
The next step was to clamp the bracket firmly in place because with a router bit spinning several thousand times per minute you do not need the wood to shift around. The spacer is 2 inches, just the right length (with some practice) to center the router on the bracket.
The result was four of these. Why cut a channel?
Because we wanted to reuse the hardware that was on the previous brackets. After all it worked fine to hold those up.
And here's the pre-shelf version.
With the kitchen cabinets done, you may be asking, "What could they be up to now?" We wondered the same thing as we stared at this pile of scrap wood. Is there a project hiding in there?
That pile is a jumble of oak, solid pine, plywood pine, and poplar. We seemed to have the most poplar so went with it. We started by cutting 16 equal pieces on the table saw. Each one is 5x2 inches and 3/4 inches thick.
The size is a little easier to see when they're laid out.
We doubled them up with some Elmer's wood glue, making each piece 5x2x1.5. This is two pairs in the clamp. Trying to economize on the use of clamps.
Here are another two pairs (with an extra piece to absorb the brunt of the clamp) in a new corner clamp that will be useful in future projects to keep things at 90 degrees.
This is another new corner clamp. You can see that we've not only paired off four pieces but glued them together at one end.
Here's a finished version. We might put a small finishing nail through the end to keep the whole thing together, but what are we going to do with four L-shaped pieces? Don't you love a good mystery?
And now we are complete. Or at least our kitchen is with the last piece in place.
For anyone who wants to install their own sink tray, here's the story of what we did today. We started with a hole.
And the puzzle piece that fits into it.
As we have with converting everything else to the inset style, we had to add shims to which we could attach the hardware for the drawer.
What made this more tricky than usual is that we had to work around the sink and the countertop. In a normal kitchen we would have attached all this hardware before installing either, giving us maximum room to maneuver. Alas, we can't go back in time. So we improvised.
Here are the hinges for the drawer front and the shims. The depth was about 1/16 difference so we marked them to make sure we used the correct one on each side.
Then we drilled pilot holes to attach these two together. Unlike what the directions say, we could not attach the hardware to the frame first because we would never have had the space to drill and screw into the drawer front.
We set everything up, unattached, to make sure we weren't making any mistakes. Here's the top-down view of the drawer in progress and a close-up of one side.
Here's how everything looked from the back. The small metal plates in the bottom corners is where the hinges attach to the drawer front.
After drilling six holes into the back of the drawer (four to attach the hardware and two for the tray) we fixed the hinge in place.
Then we turned to making the tray. What you get from the manufacturer is 36-inches long, but we needed only about half that. So after measuring carefully and checking twice we cut this piece down and added the connectors.
Here's the whole drawer front ready to go into the cabinet.
We left the tray off to give us space to screw the hinges into the shims on each side.
Then we added the tray back.
And here's what it looks like closed.
If anyone's interested in trying this for themselves, we highly recommend this brand.
