The hardwood patch is pretty much complete. In retrospect, I don’t know what was worse — the sweat sessions that characterized the wood preparation and replacement stages or the non-stop cleaning sprees the wife and I have undertaken throughout the past week.
Preparing the new wood was labor intensive, but at least there was no chance I would change things for the worse in my house. Once I moved to the ‘removal and replacement’ step, that became a very real possibility. With any DIY project, you run the risk of screwing everything up even worse and paying someone else to fix the original problem and your additional mistakes. Knowing that, I was determined to get this one right. Before I could start working with my new wood slats, I had to remove every piece of wood that made up the old vent hole.
Like so many houses from the post-war era, our place has a huge hole in the hallway floor where an old oil furnace vent used to be. The furnace has long been drained and filled with sand, but the grate was never removed or replaced.
The old vent was depressed to the point that it seemed unsound, but we eventually learned to walk around it without even noticing it was there. It wasn’t until our first winter in the house when I realized how much cold air was seeping through the porous opening.
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:
This might look like an easy build, but the finish work and attention to detail made it quite difficult.
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:
When we lived on Capitol Hill, we kept our copies of the free community monthly, the Hill Rag. The cover art was usually pretty good, and we thought it would be fun to frame them someday. So for an anniversary gift to one another a couple of years ago, I made this piece to rest on the mantle of our new house:
I made it in such a hurry that I forgot to take pictures of it during construction.
