The Making of a Frieze Board

I got carried away on trim in the purple room as usual, and part of that was making frieze boards for above the doors. I started with a 5" recycled pine board (recycled from the external trim of the windows). Strangely enough, the Lowes didn't have MDF, which had been my planned base, but I improvised.
Next, I ripped some colonial base down to 3", returned it on both ends for the top cap (I didn't want to use crown moulding at the top to make a dust collector). Then I used a piece of be moulding on the top against the colonial cap to make it look like nice.

I used a piece of simple beaded mullion along the bottom the base, to provide a highlight there. Lastly, I put a piece of dentil trim on top of the mullion to spice it up a bit.

There wasn't enough room to get a full board over either door in the room, so the were both one-sided returns. Basically, I warpped the trim around one end (the right above), and flush cut the other to snug up against the wall. The fluted door trim was recycled from the room, it was in rough shape, but was able to plane and sand it down, repaint it and it came out great (IMHO). We were actually able to save a lot of the old trim in this room, so we bought relatively little new trim. We did a paneled kind of thing in this room, with vertical styles and a plate rail.

The baseboards got the same treatment as the fluted door trim, these were the baseboards that were in the room originally, just planed, primed and painted. You probably can't tell in the picture, but we used a semi-gloss for the walls and flat for the trim, which actually came out nice, despite being what you're supposed to do. The plate rail is about 3 1/2" wide, and there's a piece of cove underneath to smooth the transition to the top rail of the paneling. That cove was formerly the crown moulding in this room. Lastly, about 1/3 of the vertical styles are recycled 3" colonial base from the guest bathroom. I ripped off the top and re-used them here.

I'm really please how the trim worked out in here, things really tied together well. The vertical styles are pretty much lined up with the studs, so some of the outlets and switches ended up overlaping. So I ended up putting in box extendors (which are outrageously expensive considering it's a useless little piece of blue plastic), on, and building out the trim around it. Here's one around the outlet, worked out nice.

Oh, and in my bit of bragging, here's an end table I made! It's sycamore and finished with a couple coats of Danish oil (or as it's called around here, fancy pants oil).
Lastly, here's a cool secretary we found at an antique store near here. Julies grandmother appears to have the highboy version of the exact same piece of furniture which is pretty neat. The makers mark is missing from ours, so we'll never know for sure, but it's a dead ringer for some pictures of secretary's made by a place called Maddox Furniture. They were located in western NY (Jamestown), so that gits as well, it's nothing special of course, but neat nonetheless.
So long!

Floors

In todays webisode, I'll be going through the floor we installed in this room. We got hardwood from Seneca Hardwoods, which is a cool local company. It's a nice place with good people, they are very tolerant of people wandering in and incessantly changing their mind about things. The store is actually an outlet store, they ship most of their stuff elsewhere for sale, but they're really good to people showing up at their place. Their place is a big empty warehouse with a tiny room in it that acts as the office. When I showed up to pick up the hardwood, I got there at about 10am, which as it turns out, is coffee break time. The guys found me a coffee cup and I hung around in the office for 15 minutes until the office lady came back. We discussed how to unfreeze the truck stalled in the parking lot (it was ~5 that morning) and how clear the birch was they had milled for me the day before. Suffice it to say, I'll be back! So I barely managed to jam 3 bundles and cherry and 7 bundles of yellow birch in the back of the Audi. Barely. For those who don't know, yellow birch is very hard and dense. It's about as dense as beech or white oak, and so lugging 7 bundles (~20 sqft/bundle) of this upstairs almost killed me. We let the wood acclimate for about two weeks up stairs and put it down in a long weekend. I spent about a day removing squeaks by rescrewing the subfloor down, patching holes, vacuuming incessantly, and finally putting down red rosing paper.
I taped up the seams of the rosin paper, primarily to make sure that it would be easy to keep the floor clean as I worked. The plan was to put a cherry border around the room 3 strips (9") wide around the room in a picture frame setup (woven corners) and doing he bulk of the floor with the birch. I started off the next day putting the first piece of cherry along the side of the room I was working from and started around the sides of the room. After a trip to the rental store, I brought back the flooring nailer. I was able to use the nailer on the second piece of flooring, which was far better than hand nailing things. I picked up the nailer around 9am and worked straight for about 12 or 13 hours. You get loopy after 8 or so hours of racking, cutting and nailing flooring.
Here I am just about finishing up. You'll notice it's plenty dark outside. I worked alone until about 2 in the afternoon, and then Julie bailed me out and started racking and cutting boards for me. The picture framed cherry I had oriented so that the tongues were facing the birch, but the flooring we got wasn't end-matched (no groove on the ends). So Julie took over the job of racking the pieces and adding the groove to pieces that abutted the cherry border. I had setup the tenoning jig on the tablesaw to cut the groove, and she ran the table saw all afternoon.
I wouldn't have finished in one day without her helping me with it. It was a ridiculously long day, but I was glad to just get it done. The next morning, I drove back to the rental store, returned the nailer and promptly picked up the floor sander. I was laughed at.
The floor sanded out really nice. I used one of the jitterbug type sanders instead of a drum sander. I think next time I will go for the drum sander. I know it's harder to control and much more aggressive, but the jitterbug takes for ever and all of your money goes into sand paper. The sheets of sandpaper are about 8x for the jitterbug, and so being a cheapskate, I end up using fewer pieces of sandpaper then I should. Either way, I did a fine job of producing massive amounts of dust and the floor sanded up nicely. We swept, vacuumed, swept some more, vacuumed a couple more times, and finally dust mopped with denatured alcohol on rags.
Once this dried, we followed up with a coat of sanding sealer (zinser sealcoat), and then the poly. I wanted to try to match the character of the original hardwood flooring downstairs, and I wanted to make sure the cherry darkened up nicely, so I used oil-based Varathane. I had a really tough time with the mop head applicator for the urethane and quickly abandoned it. I ended up on my hands and knees applying three coats of poly with a 4 inch brush. Thank goodness it was only 160 sqft!
Above is the floor with one coat of poly and below is with three coats on. The first coat was a little crappy, but I got better as went along and the third coat was pretty good. Hopefully it'll hold up well and I won't be repeating the process in 2 years.
Next, I'll show you the trim and the frieze boards I made for over the doors.

I've been lazy here for the last couple of months, so I'm going to try and play catch up over the next couple of weeks. We've finished up the room (though we don't actually have any furniture for it) shown in these pictures, but I'll just pretend it's not done yet here! This is the purple room, which is the room we replaced the windows in, an upstairs bedroom, we ended up taking it down to the studs, as we the wiring was pretty shady in there. Part of the walls were plastered, you can see the hallway walls in the picture below, which is drywall over plaster.
All the power in this room is on a new circuit, so the other bedrooms are less stressed as well. Of course, I also managed to run cable and cat5 up to this room, because I can't help myself.

Julie and I drywalled and taped the room over a long weekend. She was an animal hanging drywall, so in the next room, I'll be leaving all that to her. I'll just come in when there's painting to be done. I figured people would appreciate the complete mess of drywall dust that we had partway through the sanding, mudding cycle. You can also see the beginning of the "bay" window seat builtin. The window seat will have three small bookshelves in the front and hidden storage underneath, which will be accesible from the top via a trap door. You can see the three bookshelf boxes in the picture above, I'd just leveled them on a base and attached them to the floor and each other (hence the clamps hanging off of them). When I did this I was planning on building and staining pine face frames.
We painted the room kind of a sky-blue color. We're planning on doing white trim in here, so we wanted a rich color to set off the white trim. We want to do paneled walls with a plate rail in here, so lots of white against the blue. The walls actually came out quite good, which is probably a minor miracle and only took 3 mud/sand cycles. I was prepared for more, but we did a pretty good job, I think.
We found a hardwood supplier in the next county over that harvests and mills locally (Schuyler county), which was pretty cool. It took two trips by me and one trip by Julie, but we finally decided on birch with a cherry border. We had intially thought Oak, then I wanted cherry with a maple border, on and on. Finally, Julie really liked the look of Birch, and so we went with that. We used 3 1/4 strips, but I think I actually like the 2 1/4 better. The mill has also recently started making quarter-sawn oak and they're doing up to 10" wide stuff. If only I could get my hands on some unfinished walnut 2 1/4 flooring I'd be a happy man! Either way, I managed to just barely jam 160 square feet of birch and cherry hardwood flooring in the Audi, and I figured you'd appreciate the picture. Around every corner, the pile of wood tried to squish me, but I made it home! Snow and all!

Christmas time is here

Well its Christmas eve eve - time flies when your having fun! Or renovating an old house. We've had an eventful fall Nate was able to install new low-e anderson windows in the upstairs before it got too cold.















We started renovating the inside of that room as well. I came home from work one day and all of the dry wall was in the driveway. It was painted a terrible dark blue, and there was an equally terrible purple shag carpet in there. But that was all removed down to the studs...Nate was able
install new additional outlets around the room (he even passed the electrical inspection -what a stud!). And then we hung new drywall. Yes, even me. Nate showed me how to cut and hang drywall sheets. I even got pretty good at "dimpling" the drywall screws, if I do say so myself!














I was also able to finally take care of something that had been bothering me since we moved in - the kitchen stove. Its an older Jenn Air convection/electric range, which is supposedly a nice unit - but it only had two burners on one side, and this stupid and useless grill feature on the other. You cannot heat that much cast iron with electricity. Its just not possible, unless you have all day. So all this time I was cooking with two burners, and it sucked. But, I found that the stove allows you to remove and replace the burner units and Jenn Air hasn't changed to connections in quite some time so I was able to find a replacement two burner unit for the stove and finally get rid of the disgusting grill!














Before: Useless grill! Only two burners! After: Behold the glory of four burners!

In between all of this we found time to go to see the Pats at Buffalo with our friends Sarah and Brandon. Turns out Buffalo's not that far away! Unfortunately, it was not friendly territory for us Pats Fans and on top of that it was a blow out at 56-10! But that's okay we had a lot of fun anyway and I'm sure we'll back again next year!














I would be remiss if I didn't mention the snow...we got a good bit of snow - maybe 10-12 inches or so followed by a few more inches. It's an early snow which is good maybe we'll get to x-country ski this year. At least Max is having fun in it!