A Final Coat on the Dressers

I was well enough to work on the dressers this weekend…but this time it was the weather that was not cooperating. I got the final coat of white paint on and added a little bit of grey to the routered areas to give them depth.

All that is left is a spray of clear coat to really seal them, but that will have to wait for a day without rain.

And now we know: the finish line is in sight!

Planting the Garden

This long weekend got a little derailed by a bad reaction to some medicine and a stay in the hospital. I did not achieve my goal of finishing my dressers and in truth I was just happy to be able to get off the couch by Tuesday.

Instead, with a lot of help from my lovely husband and mother, we got the vegetable garden planted and fixed up the front flower bed a little.

Here is the veggie garden before we started; the rhubarb was out of control and the rest was empty except for some flowers at the far end.

Here is the veggie garden now, after planting herbs, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, hot peppers and red peppers. Last year animals ate all my tomatoes but the cucumbers grew like crazy and there were too many to eat. I’m hoping for a little more balance this year.

The front of the house was a mess where the foundation was fixed last year. There was a mound of clay instead of a flower bed and large patches without grass.

We created a flower bed with new top soil and added some new plants. The hydrangea is a new purchase but the other large plant was moved over from the right side of the steps. I am trying to square off the front on the beds a little more in the hopes of one day putting in a little rock wall along the fronts.

After the bed was done, we sprinkled grass seed over the bare patches. Even though we’ve have rain every day since, the seed does not seem to be growing.

And now we know: tomatoes should be planted 2 feet apart

Fallen Trees

A couple of weeks ago this happened in our back yard:

Although this weekend was crap weather with lots of rain, we went ahead with our plans to clean the mess up. A friend came over to help and to take the wood home for summer campfires.

He brought a chain saw and we also borrowed one from family. Turns out chain saws are not the magical tool they are portrayed in the movies. We were not slicing through wood like it was butter, each cut took minutes and involved adjusting angles, applying pressure and just a lot of effort. And that was when they were actually working; if one didn't need more gas the other needed sharpening or had seized for no reason. After 4 hours in the rain, we realized that the chain saws were not going to make it through the largest section of the trunk, about 18” diameter. These pieces were levered into the woods behind our property and there they will remain…probably forever. Unfortunately the fence was a victim of the tree.

On Sunday I spent yet more time sanding the 2 dressers I built. This project is really dragging on. I realize it is because I have been so sick, but I feel like they will never be done. The sanding is finally complete and all they need is a few coats of paint. Hopefully they will be done by the end of the long weekend…

And now we know: the movies make chain saws look much more efficient than they are, or maybe we need chainsaws that are less that 20 years old?

I Master the Router (mostly)

My grandfather-in-law generously gave me his router in the fall. This tool has been kindof intimidating to me. First it was unclear what purpose it serves, then people were suggesting it would be impossible to use without mounting it in a table. I decided to try it out for the most unique thing it does (to my thinking) which is create grooves and edge details. I wanted the drawer fronts to have some interest so decided to do 2 vertical and 2 horizontal grooves on each one. I spend a lot of time experimenting with depth of the bit and how to set the guide the correct distance from the bit. The result once I finally got going was exactly as I picture it and pretty fast to do.

Then I decided to add some detail to the top edges so they wouldn’t be so sharp. Using a bit I got for Christmas that makes a double scallop type design, I did 3 sides of each top piece. This was harder to control and you had to be careful on the corner to get them to line up. There were a couple of errors but nothing major that a little wood filler won’t fix.

I managed to finish all this detail work in under an hour. The cleaning up after was when it all started to go bad. The guide piece is a plastic block, attached to the router by screwing in 2 metal rods which are then screwed from above into the guide. While removing it, I broke the top of one of the screws and am now unable to remove the guide. We are still trying to come up with a way to get the screw out because the router is unusable if we can’t. So I mastered the router and then broke it all in one day.

And now we know: be careful with pliers of metal bits of old tools, metal fatigue is real