Woodworking

9
Sep 09

Labor Day Honey-Do Tasks

As apart of our Labor Day “staycation,” we cleaned the house. While my wife worked to organize her sewing supplies, I was cleaning the workshop in the garage and fixing a few things around the house. I’ve been looking for something to do with the wood that I have leftover from the kitchen remodel, so we came up with a short list of things to do:

  1. Cut out a shelf to hold my wife’s sewing supplies
  2. Rebuild the wheel mounts for the driveway gate
  3. Build a new magazine holder for the bathroom

It just doesn’t feel like a weekend unless I paint something white.

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3
Sep 09

Kitchen Remodel 11: Really Finished

I ended my last kitchen remodel update by saying, “we still have some little things to do in the room (build an island on wheels to rest beneath the matching pot rack, add shelves to the rear of the washer/dryer cabinet door to hold various sundries, and put a flat screen TV above the fridge), but that’s all cosmetic work.” Well, now the cosmetic work is done:

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I gave myself the arbitrary deadline of before football season to finish the work. It seems I barely beat the bell, considering that the college football season kicks off tonight.

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25
Aug 09

Kitchen Island

I wanted to make a rolling island to match the pot rack I hung on the kitchen wall last month. Last weekend, I finally got up the courage (and the cash) to give it another try. This was the design:
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This might look like an easy build, but the finish work and attention to detail made it quite difficult.

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8
Aug 09

Patio Drink Station

I’m such an idiot. After we remodeled our kitchen, we had no use for our old sink (pictured here). It was a white, porcelain coated, cast iron, double-well sink. I’m sure it was pretty expensive, but we had no use for it anymore. You could say I’m the opposite of a pack rat; I hate holding onto anything that has no use or hasn’t been used in a couple of years. So I put our sink on the sidewalk in front of our house and it was gone in a couple of hours. A few days ago, I ran across this article and it hit me that I could have made a drink station like this out of the old sink:

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Seriously, how cool would something like this look on your back porch?

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20
Jul 09

Chronicles of a DIY Kitchen Remodel

Our kitchen remodel is finally finished. Here are the before and after pictures:

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10
Jul 09

Kitchen Remodel 10: Finished

As you know from the last update, we encountered some unexpected grief from the kitchen sink. Once we got all of that sorted out, my wife and I were able to turn our focus back to finishing the room. We’ve been very busy with work and family lately, so we haven’t had more than a day or two where we could devote our attention to the house. I managed to get a little carpentry done after work, including building these 18″ deep shelves for the pantry:

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The pantry space is over three feet deep. We figured there was no reason to install such deep shelves, as we wouldn’t be able to reach anything in the back. And we couldn’t treat it like a walk-in pantry with shallow shelves, because the space is only two feet wide. My wife balked at the idea of putting in a false backing, since we’d essentially be throwing away good storage space in an otherwise small room. She recommended that we put shelves in the back for things we seldom use (specialty appliances and seasonal china), and build a movable pantry to maximize the volume of the space. This solution is actually closer to her original design, except that the pantry moves on wheels instead of on expensive, heavy-duty slide rails.

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7
Jul 09

Cat Food Station

Years ago, my wife asked me to make her one of those pet food stations that you see everywhere these days. The ones in the store are overpriced, and I had enough scrap wood laying around to make one for free. My wife bought a few bowls and I cut out some holes in a 1″ x 10″ piece of lumber to drop them in. The piece evolved over the years. After we moved from DC to to our temporary condo in SC, we added feet to the feeder and my wife painted it yellow. During our recent kitchen remodel, my wife repainted it again to match the room:

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6
Jul 09

Cat Door

Two cats got grandfathered into my marriage. We used to keep the cat food and litter box in the kitchen, but there’s no place for them in the newly remodeled room. I don’t mind the food bowls being out in the dining room, but I’m altogether tired of looking at cat litter. We had some space in the bottom of our bathroom closet, and we decided that was the best place to relocate the litter. The closet door is directly behind the bathroom door, which is a actually a good thing in this particular situation. The opposing door knobs keep the doors a few inches apart, and we decided the cats could squeeze through the gap and into the closet if we just cut a hole in the door. There was no way I was going to ruin one of our original solid wood doors, so I went to the local Habitat for Humanity Re-store and bought a used one for $10. It was in pretty shabby condition, but I figured it didn’t really matter since I was going to put the jigsaw to it anyway:

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The hole looks pretty big. But then again, our cats are pretty fat.

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30
Jun 09

Knife Magnet

My wife and I have managed to live in places over the years that have few, if any, drawers. We’ve had a knife magnet since we lived in DC, and it’s always been very useful. It keeps our cutlery uncluttered and out of the way. After we remodeled the kitchen, we couldn’t decide what to put above the range. Neither of us wanted to put up anything too decorative that would date the room, and we had to consider that whatever was there would receive a steam bath whenever we boiled noodles.

Knife Magnet 001

The space between the upper cabinets is about 30 inches. Since our knife magnet is only 18 inches long, we ordered another 12 inch magnet from Magnagrip and got to work.

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24
Jun 09

Pot Rack

As I’ve mentioned before, we decided to build a pot rack as part of our kitchen remodel. Our pots and pans take up way too much storage space in our new cabinets, and they look too nice to keep hidden. This was the design:

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