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Practice, dry runs, and models

Nov 18th, 2012
by htwollin.
1 comment

I don’t know how some bloggers do it – seriously; everyone can’t be an expert in everything. I admit most of the time to not even being an expert in the stuff that I do, but sometimes it seems as if people just pick up whatever and are giving lessons over the internet.

When I want to do something I have never done before, I tend to ruminate. A lot. And if it involves machinery, pointy things, and the possibility of losing body parts, I take a long time to get into action. It’s just how I roll here, which is generally why if I can do it, I take a workshop to get started.

Unfortunately, woodworking is not one of those things that I can take a workshop in locally. As a matter of fact, the closest woodworking classes are over 3 hours away. Whatever happened to all the wood shop classes in junior and senior high schools? I guess they all got taken over with computer technology classes. So, I end up fiddling around a lot before I get started, to think through stuff.

In the case of the ‘left over oak flooring table’, since I’m literally going into this blind, with little experience, no written up plan and just an idea, I decided to lay things out with popsicle sticks, to see if it even looked ok as a concept. So far, so good. At this point, I have determined a couple of things:

1) I don’t have enough wood to make the whole table. That is ok – once I figure out measurements (so far, the oak flooring part of the table top is going to be 16″x30″ and I know from other side tables in the house that it will be 24″ off the floor), I’ll figure out how much other wood I need. At the end, when I finish it, the table top will not match anything else and that is ok. I follow the ‘go big or go home’ philosophy – no way to make them match so I may as well make the difference into a design element.

2) I don’t think my original plan, to just attach all the pieces of flooring to one another with pocket screws, is going to work the way I thought it would. This flooring has a tongue on one side and a groove on the other and after a couple of tests, it looks as if I could definitely split the flooring. Now, the way you actually install wood flooring is that you put down a piece, tongue facing out, and using a pneumatic hammer, you put a special flooring nail through the tongue into a flat surface (these days, that is usually something like plywood). Then, you put the next piece of flooring in front of that, groove facing the tongue of the last piece, and using a mallet, you snug that right up with the tongue inside the groove and you nail that piece through it’s tongue, which is facing out. You are never nailing through the mail piece of flooring itself – just through the tongue, which is probably only about 15-20% as thick as the rest of the piece of flooring is. I’m playing around with the idea of using 1/2″ plywood as an under-surface for the flooring, but that is going to make the table top very…very heavy.

3) I have a couple of choices in terms of what sort of wood to use for the legs and the trim around the table top. One of them is NOT pine, which is a very very soft wood. I’m leaning toward maple at the moment, but I could be convinced otherwise.

Like I said, this is not a project that I can, with the best of intentions, knock out. When I read other people’s blogs where they show some amazing coffee table complete with drawers and say, “My husband and I knocked this out in a couple of hours,” I have no idea how they are doing this, seriously. At this rate, this little table will take me until Christmas.

Left-overs

Nov 11th, 2012
by htwollin.
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Hah – I’ll bet you thought I was talking about left-overs in the fridge, right? Well, we’re talking about left-overs from when someone does a new hard wood floor.

In this case, the DH and your Aunt Toby, a long (long!) time ago, when we put an addition on the house here at Chez Sibera, put in oak floors in the dining room and in the new upstairs bedroom. Now, looking back, I’m not sure I would have put this in the dining room because at the time, due to the layout of the house, we were doing such things as carrying five gallon buckets of hot water out of the house to take up to the barn for the sheep and goats. And the route took us… right through the dining room, which meant that sooner than later, water got spilled, flooring got stained and eventually we ended up having to have the floors refinished (but we had also ripped up all the rugs in the house so this made sense).

But, as usual, I digress and this is not a post entitled, “Ten Reasons Not To Put In Hard Wood Floors”. This is about the left-overs, which we have kept in a big plastic garbage can in the back basement of Chez Siberia. And a good thing it was, too, because when we ripped up the rugs, we found that the flooring at the bottom of the stairs had a couple of pieces that needed to be replaced. And they were the same wood and there we were with random bits that the contractor could go through and choose pieces that he could sand down and stain to match the original flooring. Frankly at this point, no one would be able to tell which pieces of flooring were original and which ones were the replacements. So, if you ever plan to put in hard wood floors in a room in your home (especially if you have an older home which probably already has hard wood floors elsewhere in the house), remember this: You will definitely end up with odd lengths of flooring left over at the after end. Put them someplace like the attic or up in the joists in the basement and keep them safe because when you need them, you will have them and you won’t have to go to the lumbar yard or the ‘extremely large national chain home center which competes with your local lumber yard’ and have to buy an entire BOX of flooring (because my dear little wombats, this is how flooring comes – you cannot go in and say to the lumber man, “I’d like one piece of flooring, please.”), just so you have a couple of pieces of flooring to do repairs. By the same token, if you ever see an ad on Craigslist (or your local version thereof) offering free odd bits of hard wood flooring, or you know someone who is talking about doing hard wood flooring at their home, offer to take it off their hands, even if it costs a bit. Because buying a whole box of hard wood flooring, even at one of the liquidator centers is going to cost you a lot of money, especially when all you might need are a couple of pieces to do a repair. So, keep your eyes and ears out.

But again, this is not exactly the point of this post. This is actually an introductory post to another project. Our son, The Boy, has moved out of the house and has taken with him a lot of the odd bits of furniture that over the years we have accumulated here at Chez Siberia. This has left us in the front porch with no side table. No place to set down a book or a glass of iced tea, which is annoying. Now, considering that it is November and not exactly ‘sitting out in the front porch of an evening’ sort of weather, your Aunt Toby is not exactly in a sweat to remedy this situation immediately, but it does give me an opportunity to do something I have never done before: Build a table.

(Ah, the light dawns: the whole point of the post)

Now, we have a lot of odd lengths of flooring – the photo above is showing most of the largest we had in that plastic garbage can. And I lined them up and measured them; the shortest is 23.5 inches long, so no matter what, my table top is going to have a certain length limit. I’m also thinking about putting some 1×3 around the edges, ‘breadboard’ style, which would bring the length into the 25-26″ range. I’m also thinking seriously that because this is ‘front porch furniture’ (and I think readers will understand that this phrase describes a class of furniture which is usually characterized by being casual, rather beaten up, handed down, and many times has a finish which leaves a good deal to be desired), that this table will have ‘cross-buck’ legs (that is, legs in an ‘x’ configuration). For the moment, this is as far as I have gotten in the planning for this project. Any ideas or suggestions from more experienced folks would be much appreciated.

Anatomy of a Broken Zipper

Nov 4th, 2012
by htwollin.
1 comment

Once upon a time, your Aunt Toby did a little thing on replacing zippers in blue jeans. This is an entirely different kettle of halupkis (as we say here at Chez Siberia): A separating zipper in a jacket. (cue the scary music)

What makes this zipper different than a jeans zipper? (more…)

Wherein Aunt Toby Gets Annoyed.

Sep 4th, 2012
by htwollin.
2 comments

You know, your dear Aunty has moments when putting a fork in my eye seems entirely appropriate. After posting about the ottoman project (see the last three posts), I was in one of those massive home center/lumber yard/hardware store/garden supply places (you know who you are) and I picked up a magazine (one which is based on a national home rehab show, I might add) and lo! And behold!

The first project in the magazine was on building a storage ottoman. Just one of those moments where the cosmos comes together and finds that the locus of all points is in upholstered ottomans. It happens. And then your dear Aunty read the article and it was ‘fork in the eye’ time.

Not only did the writer (and I assume this came out of the editor’s files or got thrown at a junior staff member like some sort of piece of old meat — “Hey, Mergatroid – you want some clips? Here: write this up!” – Don’t laugh; it happens; my first real publishing was just such an article on electric and composting toilets for a no longer extant home magazine published by Rodale Press) do up a nice neat tidy article with a graphic, a cut list, and an estimated cost; the article also included other offerings from various retail sites with the final estimation that it was not worth even trying to do it. Literally, it came down to: “Don’t bother; this is beyond you; just buy one of these.”

Cue the violins from “Psycho”.

The estimate in the article was $200-$300 for the ottoman.

Hello? What were they upholstering this in – the skins of extinct Mongolian wombats? Holy Hannah.

Now, I have to admit – I didn’t save every single little receipt for this ottoman but I can tell you that it did not cost $300. It did not cost even $200. I don’t even think I put $100 in materials into this.
The feet cost me $3.79 each (plus tax). The plates for the feet cost me $.50 each because Lowes was putting in a new style. The half a batt of padding was about $7 and the upholstery fabric was about $15.00. The cover-your-own buttons were two packages at $5.00 each, so that is $10. The piping was approximately $5.00. And I have to admit that the DH made the box out of scrap lumber that we had around, but if we’d had to have bought a piece of pine 1″x12″, we’d have spent less than $20 for that. All told: $53.20. And I’ll throw in some extra just in case I’ve forgotten something and am not taking stuff into effect because we have a staple gun and staples and thread and needles in the house already – I’ll just say $75.00.

$200-$300. And they are also saying that in terms of difficulty, it’s ‘moderate’. I have to admit something here: My experience in terms of upholstery is minimal at best. I moved from the kitchen chair to the ottoman because it’s flat surfaces and I figured if I could do this, anyone can do it. Seriously. If someone asked me what a ‘moderately difficult’ upholstery project would be, I’d have to say that it would be something like a small upholstered chair that needed small repairs and a slipcover. ‘Difficult’ or ‘challenging’ would be something like having to tear down a chair or a couch to the frame and doing the whole web/re-springing/creating entirely new cushions, etc. sort of project. So, I think calling an ottoman a ‘moderate’ difficulty project and estimating the cost to do it at $200-#300 is vastly over the top. Even with putting in a hunk of ‘piano hinge’ and one of those children’s toybox supports, it’s over the top (plus there are other methods of doing this and I’ll be damned if I don’t do it sooner than later just to show you it can be done). OK – and if you want to see the article and the cut list and so on, see here: How to build a storage ottoman

And it is frankly that sort of thing that a) drives me crazy (cue the violins) and b) makes me a bit angry because I feel it discourages people from doing things for themselves. I can see readers looking at that article and saying to themselves, “Oh, I can’t afford that and it looks too difficult and hard – I’ll just go down to Target or Home Goods or something and buy one there.”

And they do. And it’s from China and was probably made by a 13 year old kid with a pneumatic nailer who’s sleeping on a floor in a dormitory and being fed a half a cup of rice a day and is making $10 a week, if that.

Trust me: If I can do this, YOU can do this. Seriously. If you don’t have a saw at home, you can get the guys at the home center to cut the pieces of wood to size (Use the wood cut list from the article, or I’ll get you mine – btw, you don’t have to use birch-faced plywood: you’re upholstering it. Regular plywood will work fine, as will 1″x12″ pine boards. Birch-faced plywood is used for making furniture which you want to stain, so that you want an outside surface that looks really nice. Birch-faced plywood is what custom kitchen cabinet guys use). After that, just follow my tool list and instructions.

Don’t be discouraged by stuff like this though. Just infuriates me…

Ottoman Finish Part 2

Sep 1st, 2012
by htwollin.
Comments are off for this post

Welcome back Ottoman Peoples!!! We are literally at the 11th hour on this project, so fasten your seat belts, put your tray tables in their upright positions, and prepare yourselves for the rather accelerated zoom to the finish line on this project. This part is took literally about an hour and part of that was just finding the wire cutters.

Seriously.

Tools you will need at this point:
Wire cutters
4 ‘Cover your own’ button forms – the ones I’m using here are the biggest I could find, which were about 1.75″ across. I think there may be sources over the internet which have larger ones
Fabric to cover the button forms.
Wire – I’m using, frankly, wire for electrical fences, but you are looking for something that is rather stiff. A thin wire coat hanger from the cleaners might work, or something a little bit smaller in diameter but you want something stiff. Not picture hanging wire.
Staple gun (more…)

I Otta(man) Finish This. Part 1

Aug 31st, 2012
by htwollin.
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So, in our last episode, we had a padded box and we had stained feet and we had the triangular metal plates screwed into the bottom four corners for the feet. Now for the upholstery, where, as the saying goes, ‘the rubber meets the road’. I really do think this is what scares people away from doing this. I’m breaking this up into two parts because it is so photo heavy. (more…)

Ottoman Feet

Aug 26th, 2012
by htwollin.
1 comment

When I bought the wood feet for the ottoman, they were hanging by plastic labels which had been stapled into the tops of the feet by the screw ends. My way of handling the finishing process of these was to haul out my trusty old (very very old) wood laundry rack and hang the feet by string through the hole in the labels. I could then swab the finish on them without their falling over, getting dirty and so on. I thought I was being very clever. (more…)

The Rise of the Ottoman (not the empire)

Aug 25th, 2012
by htwollin.
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After I saw how popular the chair refinishing posts were, I figured that y’all are hungering after more upholstery yumminess. This is basically the next step up – an ottoman.

Yes, I realize the photo at the top looks like an empty box, but bear with me on this because that box is actually the foundation not only of an ottoman, but of a lot of other basic furniture. We are not going to go into how to build a box today – that is for the future, but trust me on this one: If you can embrace the box, you’ve got a houseful of furniture just waiting for you. (more…)

Pull up a chair: Done

Aug 11th, 2012
by htwollin.
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Now, just as a reminder – it’s always good to look at where we start to see the difference from where we ended up – I started with four of these: Old bent-wood kitchen chairs that I had inherited many years ago. A lot of the finish had been rubbed off the backs; there was a certain amount of small repairs that had to be done on the spindles (thank you, wood putty), the seats needed to be completely redone with new foam and fabric and so on. To review what I did, see these:
Pull up a chair
Pull up a chair – part 2

Once I got the seats all done (and frankly, once you have all the foam and fabric pieces cut out, doing all the seats at one time is less than an hour), then it was back to the frames. The DH had really done all the heavy lifting on the repairs. The spindles in the backs had all popped out of their holes at the underside of the top of the back and he repaired that by frankly shoveling into the holes a whole lot of wood glue and wood putty, jamming the spindles back into the holes and then using rope wound around the seat and over the top of the back as a primitive sort of clamp to hold the spindles into the holes while everything dried and set. Then I took a craft knife and chipped off anything that squeezed out of the holes. (more…)

A sense of occasion

Jul 29th, 2012
by htwollin.
Comments are off for this post

Ahem. One thing that Aunt Toby really hates is going out to what is considered ‘fine dining’ (which I realize is stretching things where your dear Aunty lives but the point is made), and some of the details are off.

The food is exquisite. The wine list divine. The wait staff attentive. The bathrooms artistic.

And paper napkins.

Ayyyyyyyy! It makes me want to stick a fork in my eye. Attention to detail after detail after detail – and paper napkins. They might even have white linen on the tables (usually under a piece of glass, which I also hate – what do they think I’m going to do – write my name on it?), but no cloth napkins. The wait staff might even have one over their arms or use one to help open the bottle of wine.

But no napkins for you!!!
(more…)

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