Chair Rail & Stencils

It's the thing to do when the grandparents arrive: work on some house project. This week it's the chair rail and the stencils in the formal dining room. Cheryl's been looking forward to this 'upgrade' for a long time. Really adds some character to the room. She already spent a week or so getting the room painted, now she's up on a ladder stenciling the ceiling while her dad measures, cuts and installs the chair railing.
It really makes the room like nice. Ready for another formal dinner. Which we haven't had in a long time, probably since Seder. It's been used as a craft room ever since then, which means it's been jammed up with scrapbooking stuff and painting odds and ends. Now it's looking nice.
I like the stencils. Adds some nice flavor to the room.
Even looks nice with those red curtains.
How she managed to do it while standing on a relatively short ladder, is beyond me.

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Mary's Birthday!
Mary had a nice birthday, although she would rather have opened the presents earlier this morning instead of waiting until after dinner. But we didn't have all of them wrapped this morning, and we wanted her to focus on her schoolwork during the day rather than the gifts. Not sure if it worked. But she enjoyed the cards, the cash, and the gifts.

How is it possible for her to be so old now?

Basement Door

Inspired by all the fun I was having building platforms at the church, and wondering if perhaps one of the boys might want to migrate to the basement during the grandparents' visit this week, I decided to have a little more fun and devise a method for putting a door in the basement room which will one day be James's primary residence.

Not having a real bedroom door lying about unused, I opted to 'borrow' one of the closet doors which has been leaning up against the basement wall for the past year or so, unused because the girls didn't like it. The only difficulty with using this type of bi-fold door is, of course, it requires a track to run on, and the existing metal track from the girls' closet framework is the width of two doors; so instead, I opted to make my own.

Besides, it's more fun to learn a new woodworking technique (or, in my case, make one up).

First, of course, it was necessary to build the header for the doorway since there wasn't one yet. That was rather simple, just putting together a rectangle from 2x4 material and screwing it in place above the doorway.

Sizing the doorway width-wise, it was found that an extra 2x4 was required along one side. Easy. Cut to size and screw in place.

Creating a baseplate for the pivot point on the bottom of the door was supposed to be easy as well, but instead of using a cross-grained (horizontally speaking) piece, I just grabbed a scrap piece from the bucket and used it. Unfortunately, it was vertically-grained, which meant that screwing it down to the floor cracked it. Oh, well, two of the corners held, and it was just a test anyway, so I left it in place.

The top plate was a bit more involved since it would go the length of the top of the door; it needed one pivot point and a slot for the slider. The pivot point was easy: just a 1/4-inch-deep, 1-4-inch-wide hole. The slot was more difficult since it had to start 1-1/2 inches from the pivot point and continue on to the other end. But I eventually figured out to drill another 1/4-inch hole at the starting point and then use the table saw to cut the slot from that point forward. For a prototype, it's not too bad.

At least it will allow James to go into his room and close the door and get the sense of what it will be like to live down there. I'll probably put one of the air mattresses in there tonight to get a better idea of how much room is left with a bed in place. And see if one of the boys wants to try it out for a night.

There's still lots of work to do. The drywall isn't up yet, the ceiling isn't done, the ventilation needs a new plan, we haven't decided on the type of flooring to use (wood laminate versus carpet). And I still need to put up the closet door framing.

But it's progress.

What Do You Do with an Old Baptistry?

There are many things a congregation can do when their old auditorium is no longer used for corporate worship because they have built a new one. Seven or eight years ago, the congregation to which we belong completed phase 1 of a 3-phase expansion which included a very nice multi-purpose auditorium. Due to various reasons, most of them related to the downturn in the general economy in Michigan, the money for phases 2 and 3 never materialized. The old auditorium, out-dated and in woeful need of repair to various infrastructural items (heating, electric, plumbing) has been in the process of transformation into a Youth Ministry Center for several years now.
We've spent much of the summer attempting to move further along the path of that vision, and my portion of that vision was to try to turn the old baptistry into a working closet. Since the completion of the new auditorium, the old baptistry had become superfluous; and, in fact, it had been used more as a waste receptacle for building materials and assorted odds and ends due to its superficial resemblance to a large, deep bowl. This offends my sensibilities, so I came up with the idea to build a platform which could be placed inside the baptistry to support a plywood floor, turning the "empty space" into a functional storage space.

It concerned me that some of the items being "tossed" into the baptistry might damage it to the point where it could no longer be used as it was originally intended, and it was in my mind that one day the congregation might want to use it once again for baptisms, especially if (for example) they wanted to have them performed in the Youth Center, or rent out the old auditorium to other churches if the economic situation demanded it; thus the intent was to create something that could be removed relatively easily if desired.

It might also be useful for staging puppet shows or other evangelistic presentations, in which case a solid floor would be a nice thing to have underfoot.

The baptistry is itself a fiberglass shell approximately eight feet wide by four feet deep (lip edge to lip edge), and forty-two inches deep. It lends itself easily to being covered by a standard 4x8 floor panel. The supports I constructed to support the panel consist of two 4x4 cubes formed by standard 2x4 boards, leaving (but not encouraging) some amount of storage underneath.

The stairs leading down into the baptistry will require a similiar support structure, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

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Cheryl Continues Beautifying the House

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She's on a Mission, she is, and she won't stop til the house is as pretty as a picture.She spent the weekend painting the dining room, turning the dull, drab tans into very nice shades of green. How she did it while dealing with a cold at the same time, I don't know. She's an amazing woman! She got the girls to help her unload the hutch of its treasures, and we moved it into the center of the room; then, when all that was done, we moved it back so she could do some trim work on the ceiling.While she was at it, she also painted the little alcove known as the 'butler'. She's got some plans going on for the living room while her folks are out visiting this week, something about some chair rail or decorative trim or something. I have no idea where she gets all that energy!

PowerDown

We lost power Tuesday night around 9 o'clock, right after watching a few episodes of Firefly. There was a storm coming through outside, but it whipped through so quickly that it barely registered on our eyeballs before it was gone. Like lightning.

Unfortunately, the wind or the lightning did enough damage to the power lines somewhere around the area that our power was out for much longer than we anticipated. We've had power go out before, but it usually returns within four to six hours. This time, it took twenty.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. I rather enjoyed the experience, outside of the anxiety of worrying if the food in the fridge was going to go bad and the anxiety of worrying if the sump was going to flood the basement. (Had it been a Katrina-sized event, I'd have a lot more to worry about.)

It was an excellent opportunity to find out just what kind of emergency supplies we had at the house, and how much energy we could get by on. In the first hour, we managed to locate all the flashlights in the house, along with a dozen or so candles. The house was lit like an old-style Christmas card, just beautiful from within. And we all got to bed on time, for a change, since there was no point in staying up just to stare at the flickering lights.

And after all the showers, the hot water was gone, too.

It was a bit more worrisome in the morning when we discovered that the power was still out, and we couldn't find out if the high school was open or not, and James needed to be there early for band practice. The phone directory, which had the telephone number for the school district, was stored in the wireless phone, but it wasn't working anymore. The number we had in the yellow pages wasn't working either, but we weren't sure why. So we took James to school, and as we drove around the neighborhood, we discovered that the power outage was highly sporadic. Some of our neighbors around the corner still had power. Entire neighborhoods nearby had none; yet immediately after those, as we drove along the road to school, we found others fully lit.

James got to school - I couldn't tell if he was excited to be there or not! - and the rest of the kids went off to their respective buses when the time arrived. Cheryl had a dental appointment, so off she went. Eventually, no one was left but me. Before going off to work, I bailed out the sump drain, just in case the groundwater decided to rise.

Around lunch time, I headed home to see if (1) the sump was filling up; and if (2) the food in the refrigerator was getting warm. Stopped by the store to pick up a couple bags of ice for the cooler, just in case. At home, the situation hadn't changed. No power. So we put the perishables in the cooler and then I whipped together a backup power system from a couple batteries I had lying around so we could get the DSL router going and check the internet. And try charging up the wireless phone.

Also pulled out my solar array panel so I could charge up one of the old lead-acid batteries for additional backup. Nifty panel. In full sunlight, it got 13.5 volts, which was enough to quick-charge the battery in about four hours.

The kids were disappointed to find the power still out when they got home in the afternoon, but we made the best of it, finding interesting chores for them to do. After all the chores were done, James went on a bike ride and Mary drew chalk art on the driveway and Adam read a book and Deb did something else.

Then the power returned, and life returned to normal.

Just in time for dinner.

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Mary did a curious thing tonight. After the power came back on, I was out in the garage preparing some boards for cutting, and she walked up to me and said she needed me to show her how to use the saws.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I want to build a table for my doll house," she replied. And she looked down on the workbench and saw a thin block of wood which was just about the perfect size for the table top.

"Can I have that?" she asked. "Sure," I said. Then I showed her several different ways to cut some table legs out of some other scraps, including the hobby saw, the mitre saw, the band saw, and the compound mitre saw. She preferred the band saw, because it cut fast.

When it came time to put it all together, she was thinking of using nails, but I persuaded her to use glue instead, for the sake of an unblemished table top. "It just wouldn't do to have the nail head sticking up through the table top." She accepted my point, but still thinks it would be sturdier with a nail in there somewhere. I told her I'd ship her out to Grandpa's for the summer and he could teach her all about making furniture. She thought that would be great fun!

After we got the table put together, she helped me carry some particle board scraps up into the attic so I could use them for walking on, and then it was time for dinner.

What a fun day!

The Mystery Deepens

OK. I Lied. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Yet.

Instead, I'm going to show you a bit of an update to it. This was in the original plan, but I hadn't gotten that far the other night, and thought I was out of 2x4 stock, but it turned out there was another board hiding in the basement (afraid of my blade, no doubt!) so here is the actual "thing", the way it is supposed to look.

Does that help? Can you see what it is going to be?

What is It?

Today we're going to play a little guessing game. You get to guess what on earth that thing is that I built in my garage this evening!
It only took me six 2x4s and about half an hour of work, and there it is. Whatever that may be.
Looks sorta like a table. Or a workbench. Except it ain't got a top yet. But it isn't either of those.
And no, it isn't a giant Rubik's cube, neither.
I'll give you a hint: I'll need two of them before I'm done.
Now gimme a guess!
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In my next post, I'll show you what it's for. Hopefully.

Pre-Labor Day Labor Day

The chair has been sitting on the floor without legs for a few months now, probably the entire summer. It's difficult to remember exactly how long; the house and all the things inside of it continue to fall apart at random paces, and it is impossible to keep up with them. The critical ones get immediate attention. The merely annoying are placed on the To Do list. And the To Do tasks are completed in a relatively random sequence.

After spending most of the morning emptying out the basement bedroom - which has served as an auxiliary workshop for lo, these many years now - so that it might be possible to figure out the ventilation system which must be set up down there (and that's a long story for another day) - it occurred to me that the chair had been sitting on the floor without legs for long enough; it was time to do something about it.

I had tried to do something about it a month or two ago, by the simple task of purchasing replacement legs at one of the local hardware stores. But they were not the correct type. In fact, the "correct type" didn't seem to exist. This particular chair has the screw threads for the legs embedded deep within the bottom plate, but the replacement legs have very short bolts. Apparently they assume that the base threads begin level with the surface of the mounting plate, but that is not the case.

So it was time for a little improvisation.

The skirt is about four inches high, so my first thought was that a couple of scrap 2x4 blocks in each corner would be about the right size. There are plenty of scrap 2x4s lying about the basement. Not surprising, considering all those walls that've been built down there. But how to attach them to the base plate? Screws would probably work, but there was a suspicion in my brain that they would be wobbly that way. It would be nice to take advantage of the threads that are already built-in to the base plate. Are there any bolts lying around that could be used? It wouldn't surprise me, considering how much of a pack-rat I am. Absolutely refuse to throw away anything that could possibly come to good use at some time.

Scrounging around, I was able to find a set of bolts that had been purchased for some long-forgotten project (which evidently never was completed), and, miracle of miracles, they were exactly the right size! So then it was time to take a set of 2x4 blocks and drill a hole through the middle of each and bolt them to the base plate.
The first task was to (1) find the center of the 2x4 blocks; then, (2) mark it; then, (3) drill a countersink hole and then the hole for the bolt to go through; then, (4) take the bolts and cut a slot in the top so that they could be screwed down tight into the base plate.Finally, I put the leg onto the base plate to see how it looked.

Not bad.

Now, it was time to put the second part of the stack so as to have the proper height. There weren't any more 2x4 scraps, but there were still plenty of 2x3 blocks, so I took four of those and drilled holes along the outer edges and put screws into those holes and screwed them down on top of the 2x4 blocks.

Well, it isn't quite as tall as I'd wanted, but it'll do for awhile. Now it's time to clean up all the sawdust in the garage, put way the tools, and get ready for dinner.

Glasses

We knew it was going to happen one of these days; in fact, we've been expecting it since the first time she started squinting when looking off in the distance. It only makes sense, after all, since she is the offspring of parent who both have one astigmatism or another.

We didn't want to make her wait until after college to get glasses like I did (and that was only because they were necessary to pass the eye exam for the flight physical). It was amazing how suddenly the number and severity of my headaches dropped. And I realized how badly I'd been straining to see the road while driving late at night.

Attitudes about glasses have apparently changed a lot since the days when kids were called "four-eyes". Lots of kids are wearing glasses. Many kids are wearing contacts. Most important, they all realize how important it is to be able to see the white board from their seats.

And some of them look so cute!

While Cheryl and Mary were picking up the glasses, they also got some "Aunt Mary" straps for me to use with my bifocals; that way, I can take off my glasses without the risk of forgetting where I put them. Plus when I'm lecturing to the kids about how hard life was back in "the good old days", I can take them off and wave them around to make my points, then put them back on so I can see who I'm talking to.