We haven't been too active around the old homestead, in part because we've done most of the projects we wanted to do. But...there's always something.
We took advantage of the last mild days of the year to do an outside job that we've been thinking about for probably a year. As the name of this blog suggests, our house is from 1957, which means the bricks around the foundation are from that year. And frankly, they were looking a little tired. Here are a variety of angles on the left side of the house to show you what we mean:
The last one shows a mystery splotch of white that we've never been able to figure out or been able to clean off. So we've wanted to paint the brick to match the yellow of the siding. We had some paint from when we redid the garage door and some masonry primer from the front steps, but needed a bit more for this job. Here are the same areas with the primer. It's already looking much better.
And here's the final result with two coats of paint. It's about 1000% better in our opinion. Gives the whole house a fresh and clean look.
To ensure that our hard-won woodworking skills hadn't atrophied, we delighted when a friend asked for a small favor.
He had some cabinet doors that he wanted to convert to rounded edges. Perfect job for a router. The only uncertainty was whether the door material--MDF--would hold together under the cutting/shaping. It's harder than some other manufactured woods but has a feel like really sturdy cardboard, so we bought a test panel from HD to see how it would hold up and to practice.
The first step was to measure the distance between the center of the bit and the outer rim of the router so that we'd know where to place the guide clamp. This way we can slide the router along the clamp knowing that we're making a smooth, even cut.
Then we had to pick out the bit to give us the right angle/design. This was pretty easy because our friend wanted a curved edge.
Next we had to know how deep to set the router bit. Set low and you get a lip, kinda decorative but not what was requested:
Set too high and it doesn't round down the whole edge:
Like Goldilocks, the third time was just right:
With all this prelim work done, we could turn to the actual cabinet doors. Our friend helpfully identified which edges he wanted to be rounded. It's the tops, bottoms, and outer edges, leaving the squared off edges to meet in the middle (the little holes toward the bottom are for the knobs).
As with the practice piece we set the guide clamp on the door at the right distance:
Six edges later and here's how it turned out. Not a bad afternoon's work.
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