The first time Dad visited us in our new house, we were walking around together talking about the various things we had plans for.  One of the these was a desire to remove the carpet and the vinyl flooring underneath it in the living room/TV room and replace it with matching hardwood to what we found under the carpet in the family room/fireplace room.  At this point, Dad did a very smart thing.  He pulled out one of the AC vents and inspected the edge of the existing hardwood flooring we hoped to match. 

 

 

“Well that’s not going to work.  Your floor is too thin”.  Indeed it is.  I had just assumed that a house build in the mid-30’s would have a 3/4” thick floor, but for some reason, this is not.  From one perspective, this is a relief.  I don’t have to feel bad about tearing it out, since it is too thin to refinish.  And I don’t have to try to match it, now, either.  On the other hand, though.. it just feels awful to tear out an old floor. 

 

I found an odd lot of some 3/4” thick Brazilian Koa (it’s not really.. they just call it that) at Lumber Liquidators.  It’s full of some damaged pieces and lots and lots of short pieces.  I’m a tad nervous about it.  That is an understatement.  The truth is, though, that we can’t really afford to do what we really want to do.

 

 

I really like the look of wide plank mixed-width flooring.  This is white pine.  It’s grown, harvested, and milled right here on the East Coast.  But at $6-9  sq ft, it’s not in our near (or not-so-near) future.   At $2.45 a sq ft, though, we could swing the cost for the nearly 1200 sq ft of the stuff we bought from Lumber Liquidators. 

 

I decided to rip up a chunk of the flooring in an out-of-the-way corner so that I could transfer all the new flooring into the house. 

 

 

Ugh.  This process is not fun.  I did find this on the bottom of a few of the flooring remnants. 

 

 

 

So now I at least know a little bit more of the history of my current flooring.  After a few hours of work, I had a section cleared, de-nailed, and cleaned up.  The next morning, a friend helped me unload the trailer and get it in the house.

 

 

 

 

A few days later, I attacked another section of the floor.  These nails suck.  I have spent enough time crouching and shuffling about the room to qualify as an Old Bay Crab. 

 

 

When I was done, I cleaned it up with my venerable shop vac.  Which may have been pointed into the fireplace when I turned it on.  And may have then sprayed fireplace ash all over the whole room.  And consequently the cleanup may have taken about an hour.  sigh.

 

 

 

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I’m aware of my growing absence from the site.  I have content for you; I promise.  I just don’t have time to present it in an interesting way.  The reasons for this are four-fold:

1. The car that is supposed to be my project car is currently my daily driver because Dani’s Jeep is on jackstands in the shop where I am gradually losing the will to live trying to fix it.
2. The project car has needed a lot of attention to become drivable.
3. The office where I blog from hasn’t had Air Conditioning until a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been HOT.
4. I came across a ridiculously good book and it’s sequel, who’s length runs nearly 2000 pages.  It’s a newer author.  I have feasted upon his prose and it has left my appetite for words diminished; like a good meal. 

 

But I could hardly allow Father’s Day to pass by and fail to acknowledge my father on a blog he practically ghost-writes.  His tireless devotion to better himself, his family, and his home is the inspiration for this site and the projects documented on it.  So…thanks for everything, Dad.  Love ya.

 

Recent phone call topics:

• How to get a coil off the Jeep
• How to drop a transmission
• How to get some rusted bolts out of a cross-member
• How to remove a strut when the top bolt is rusted on and turning it just turns the whole strut

 

 

 

My father-in-law deserves some acknowledgement, too.  His frequent stops to the house are a god-send.

 

 

Oh, and he drives a camo van.  So he’s got that going for him, too.  I’ve borrowed it.  I get lots of looks.  Mainly from the ladies.

 

 

More coming.  Pinky swear.

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A while ago, I blogged about my design for the corner storage bench I’m building for the Sun Room.  This weekend was a three-day weekend, and I started building it.  The unit is made up of three sections; 2 benches and the end piece.  I’m starting by making the plywood boxes that are the primary component of the benches.



This is how I decided Dad told me to rip the plywood.  I considered using my table saw, but ripping a 4x8 sheet by myself just didn’t seem doable.  I called my Dad and asked him how he would rip it, and he told me to do it this way.  His tone of voice made me think that this was the only way to do it, and I probably should have figured that out.  Which, come to think of it, is probably true.  Basically, lay the sheet on something to prop it up, clamp down a guide piece, and run the circular saw down the length (after making sure the blade depth won’t hit the floor, of course).  Speaking of circular saw….



Look what I got! 

This thing is awesome.  It’s the Makita 5007MG Magnesium 7-1/4-Inch Circular Saw.  I bought it at Home Depot because I needed it quickly; it’s a few bucks cheaper on Amazon.  It’s light-weight, has a work light, and it rips like the wood is butter.  Oh man, did this make a difference.  My old mid-80’s hand-me-down Craftsman saw was great for the price (free), but it doesn’t hold a candle to this one.  I called Dad about this, too, and asked him which saw to get.  “Get mine.  Nothing better.  I love it.”.  Ok, that was an easy one. 

After I ripped all the sides and bottoms for the two benches, I wheeled out some of my cabinets as saw horses and started sanding.  And sanding.  And sanding.


 

Dani took these shots, so I was actually in a picture for a change.

Once everything was cut and sanded, it was time for assembling the first box. 
 

Above, you can see how I used a straight piece of 1x4 and some painters tape to make a nice 3/4” strip where I’ll be attaching one of the sides.  The tape will protect the wood underneath from the wood glue oozing out of the joint.  Nobody likes oozing joints.



After a lot of gluing, clamping, and screw-gunning, all four sides are now attached.  But wow, what a sag!  This isn’t supposed to happen with plywood!  I need to be more careful when I buy the wood next time.  I called Dad and asked him what to do.  He said “plywood isn’t supposed to sag; be more careful when you buy the wood next time”.   Thanks, Dad, I’ve already reached that conclusion; now what?  He advised me to weigh it down overnight.  I flipped the whole thing the other way around and put some big heavy bags of concrete mix on each side to hopefully counter the bow.  The next morning, I took the bags off and there wasn’t much of a difference.  I put the bags back on and glued/screwed on the base anyway, and it seems to be holding the bow in check. 
 

After the bottom was attached, I used my planer to even out any inconsistencies, and then attached the back lip piece, which is just a 8ft 2x4 that I sanded down.  I started the second box, too, but I ran out of screws, so it’s back to the store for me tomorrow.

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I spent Christmas and New Years in Chicago with the parents this year.  Various surgeries, sicknesses, and car issues contributed to making it less of the joyous holiday season we had hoped for, but as Perry Como croons, there’s just no place like home for the holidays. 

 

As is my fashion, I go from shop to shop to see what various members of the family are up to.  Most of my family does blue collar work of the type that screeches to a halt when winter arrives.  A quick aside: this fact has lead to the phrases “I’m not even thinking about that until the snow flies” and “I’ll do it this winter” being commonly heard throughout the branches of the family tree.

 

Anyway, I present two of the shops I visited on this trip: Dad’s and Uncle Terry/Cousin Bret.

 

My Dad’s Shop

It’s odd to look at pictures of this place.  It’s been part of me my entire life.  Some of my earliest attempts at writing my name are on a few of the shelves in here. 

 

 

Although it may be a little bit of a visual overload, Dad’s shop is highly organized.  I think we’re on revision 5 of the layout.  Any surface capable of having pegboard adhered to it has been plastered with it.  Everything is labeled.  Hidden in those rafters are large quantities of valuable commodities that Dad doesn’t want anyone know he has.  Like a lot of work gloves.   Apparently, they don’t make them like this anymore.  Which, for Dad, means that Menards doesn’t sell them anymore.

 

 

Dad had a new knee put in the week before Christmas. Moved by pity, Uncle Mike bought him a big bag of Mike and Ike’s, which Dad took a fancy to.  The confusion of Mike giving him candy called ‘Mike and Ikes’ combined with the Vicodin he’s on post-surgery had him calling these things “Mikey Likeys” for a few days.  That just never got old.

 

 

Note the labeled drawers in the back, there.  English, metric, steel, stainless, machine, wood, etc.  Everything sorted.  Insane.  I wouldn’t have the patience for that.

Incidentally, I have no idea why he has a dryer vent on the bench.  He really has a thing for that style dryer vent.  When he helped me put in the range hood vent, we went through a couple different ones until we found one just like that.  So I suspect he just bought this one when he saw it in case he needed it. 

 

 

Dad used to fix vacuums on the side until they all became so infested with plastic that they were barely serviceable.  Charting the death of the small-time vacuum repair industry would make an interesting commentary on the shifting economic climes of America.  When I got engaged, Dad gave me a commercial vacuum that is so heavy it may have been forged whole.  But I’m pretty sure that it will probably work until I’m dead.

 

 

Tape is very important.  We should have a lot of it.

My Dad’s mantra is “If some is good, more is better”.  I should have said that in the first sentence, and then I could have just stopped typing, because it explains most of the rest of the pictures. 

 

 

Organized; yes.  Spelling Bee champion; not so much.  When I asked him about it, he responded with something along the lines of “I can find the antenna parts, can’t I?”

 

This clock has been there for at least 15 years.  At one point the battery died, so he put that digital one under it.  I can only surmise that the digital one died, so he put a battery back in the analog one.  The bulletin board has, to my knowledge, always been empty.  When Dad saw me looking at it, he said “That’s where people are supposed to leave their name and what tool they borrowed”.  I think he’s the only one that knew that.

 

I’ll wrap up the tour of Dad’s shop with a list of some of the things I made in here during my younger days.

• Pinewood Cars
• Bottle Rocket revolvers (shot 8 bottle rockets in 10 seconds)
• Robots (out of old RC cars.  They didn’t work.)
• Overpowered Super Soakers.
• Slot-car tracks
• Crossbows (Mom confiscated them)

 

Uncle Terry/Cousin Bret

Terry and his son Bret haul loads of mostly aggregate around locally using their dump trucks.  That’s the part of what they do that is easy to explain.  When they are not doing that, they are busy buying, fixing, and selling things.  As is typical of the family, everything they own is for sale.  For the right price. 

Seriously, if you see something in these pictures you want, you can probably buy it.  They love eBay.  They like to buy Quads and Snow Mobiles and Jeeps, have some fun with them, put some money into them, and turn it around for a bit of profit.  Here’s the current winter projects.

 

 

Terry found a 1940s(?) Chevy with a restored interior that needs some TLC on the exterior.  He’s decided he’s going to replace the rotted out wooden bed, tune or rebuild the original engine, and put some new wheels on it, but that’s it.  He’s going to leave the paint as is.  I like it.

 

 

 

Bret’s project is a Jeep Wrangler TJ.  He’s put the LS1 engine and computer out of a corvette into it, long arm suspension, acme transfer case, transmission cooler, and a lot of other stuff.  It’s on the rack because he’s regearing it. 

 

 

 

Bret has offered on numerous occasions to do my dream car, pictured below,  for me.  We’ll see.  We’ll see.

 

 

 

This concludes our shop tours.  I hope you had fun.  Share some stories or links to pictures of your shops; I’d love to see them.

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A couple of my trees look like they have butts.

 

 

 

This is fitting, as animals appear to use them as toilets.

 

 

Those are pictures of the inside of each hole.  That is disgusting.

 

I had a guy out to the house this summer to give me an estimate on trimming up the trees on our property.  The price was $3800.00, and I threw up a little in my mouth when I heard that.  The gentleman was extremely knowledgeable on trees.  I actually watched his face light up with excitement at the prospect of climbing the oldest tree on our lot, which has a 5ft diameter.  Every boy loves climbing trees.. I suppose it’s not surprising that some men don’t let that go. 

 

Anyway, I took the opportunity to pick his brain on some tree-related questions I had.  One of these was what to do about holes in trees.  He said I could just fill them in with Great Stuff, so I picked up a few cans the other day.  When I went outside this afternoon to work on leaves, I decided that shooting large quantities of expanding foam into massive butt-like voids sounded much more fun.  So I did.

 

 

Each void took 1.5 cans.  I called Dad about this shortly after finishing it, and he had bought some cans of Great Stuff the previous weekend for the exact same purpose, but had hesitated, thinking it might be bad for the trees.  He’s since done the same thing.

 

  

 

As it expands, it will fill up whatever space is available in there. 

 

I had a little extra foam left, so I shot it into the void through the brick left from when we removed a derelict vent pipe during the kitchen renovation.

 

 

 

I left some room to cap it with mortar in the spring.

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One day, when I was about 12 or so, and my Dad was still a garbageman, he came home from work really excited.  Dad would often find things of great value out on his route.  Hey, one mans trash is another mans treasure.  My brother and I had 3 functional Nintendos because of that.*  Anyway; this particular day he came home with a very large torque wrench.  It was broken.  He was excited because it was a Craftsman tool.  He told me that Craftsman tools have a lifetime warranty.  That weekend, my Dad, my brother and I went to Sears and the clerk gave my Dad a 130 dollar in-store credit from that broken torque wrench.  His excitement was contagious, and we walked around throwing wrenches and screwdrivers and other tools of all sorts into the cart until we used up the credit.  I learned that day that a Craftsman tool means something. 

 

I’m a Craftsman Club member, and most of my tools are Craftsman tools.

I present to the court Exhibit A: My Craftsman C3 Collection

 

 

From left to right we have:

Planer, Work Light, Fluorescent Light, Right Angle Drill, Reciprocating Saw, 1/2 Driver Drill, 1/2 Hammer Drill.

 

There’s also Craftsman wrenches and a hammer in that shot. 

 

Deep inside, I know that a lot of these things are sub-par, now.  Sears has decided to capitalize on the name and lower the quality of the tool, knowing that sentimental fools like me will buy them anyway.  That reciprocating saw has let me down on a few projects.  The batteries are definitely not as robust as I would like.  But, on average, for most home-improvement jobs, these things are great, and they are reasonably cost effective.  If my budget allowed it, I'd get some DeWalt tools on that wall, too, but for the most part, I’m content.

 

Today I bought this.

 

It was on sale, and I got an extra 20 bucks off as a Craftsman Club member.  I have a large number of huge trees, and the leaves are overwhelming.  My Dad and my Father-in-law both have Stihl Backpack Leaf Blowers, and sing their praises, but I can’t afford to drop 500 bones on a single yard tool.  Hopefully I won’t regret this purchase.  I used it to blow off my rather sizable driveway this afternoon, and while underpowered compared to the Stihl, it did a fine job.  I’ll review it after the fall season.

 

Between visiting the wife at work and running around shopping for a blower, I didn’t get too much done under the sun today.  I did 10 feet of fencing.  Once the sun went down, a friend and I did a little project I’ve been wanting to knock out to prepare for the cold evenings at home, but I’ll post about that tomorrow. 

 

* Another related story: do you remember Pepsi Stuff?  Oh man, did we get a lot of stuff from that catalog; and all thanks to people not recycling.**

 

** Please recycle.

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When I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, I had a bedroom in the basement of my parent's house.  My Dad has a workshop in the basement, as well as a large closet for his workclothes, gloves, boots, shoes, etc.  He worked as a garbageman, and would often come home with wet boots.  In the winter, he'd place these on top of the furnace with large Christmas lights stuffed into them to safely(?) dry them from the inside while the furnace dried them from the outside.  It made the basement smell funny.  On the ground he had 3 or 4 pair of New Balance tennis shoes; each in a slightly different state of deterioration.  The worst ones were for cutting the grass, the next for working in the shop, and the nicest for wearing out in public.  My Mom often extolled upon me the great waste of wearing white socks into dirty places.  If I did this, she'd warn me, I'd have to buy my own socks.  And so, when I wanted to go into my Dad's shop, I would slip on a pair of his shoes, much too big for me, and venture onto the cigarette-littered concrete floor of the coolest room in the house.  I'd go to make a pinewood derby car, or a bottle-rocket gun, or to steal a can of pop from Dad's stash; but usually, it was because Dad was working on something.  Dad built most of our house by himself; to walk around in it now is akin to standing in his trophy room.  His rookie years are documented in places like the buried electric box above the shower.  His MVP years are hidden in the kitchen walls and the garage ceiling.

Now, when I go home to visit, I still sometimes slip on a pair of his shoes and go into his shop to see what new projects are brewing on the ample counter space.  We wear the same size shoes, now, but I still don't seem to fill them.  I hope I never do.

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First cabinets go in! First up is the corner upper cabinets.  You have to do these first for pretty obvious reasons...

1. You can't start at the end of the row because the corner likely won't fit correctly
2. You can't start with the lowers first because it would make putting the uppers in far too difficult.

Here, we are carefully measuring the back of the cabinet for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, we need to know where to mount it to the studs.  What we did was to find the studs in the wall, measure from the corner to the middle of the stud, and then use the measurement to find that same place on the back of the cabinet.  Once we had it, we drilled some pilot holes.  Secondly, we measured for the hole to pass the romex through.  You can see it hanging out of the wall in the picture.  There are two strands; one goes into the corner cabinet for in-cabinet lighting.  Eventually, we'll be putting glass in those doors.  The second strand will go into the next cabinet over to feed a supply for under-cabinet lighting.  It's worth pointing out that I've put switches in place that feed each of these lines. 
Lessoned Learned: I should have put the strand for the in-cabinet lighting on top of the cabinet instead of inside.  Now I have to try to hide the hole.

Once all of the uppers had their pilot holes drilled, we installed the ledger bar. 
I read about this on the web.  Dad had never put in cabinets without a soffit before, and I had never put in cabinets at all before.  This ledger bar made the whole thing possible. Basically, put some 2x4's up on the wall at the correct height, and make it level.
Lessons Learned: Two on this one.  I should have focused more on making the ledger bar an equal distance from the ceiling instead of perfectly level.  Why?  Because it's an old house, and nothing else is perfectly level, no matter how hard we tried to make it so.  Second, I should not have gone so tight to the wall w/ the ledger bar.  It caused drywall screw heads to pop, and I have to fix them at some point in the future.

The ever-reliable Jessie and Jamie

We jumped a few days ahead here.  The ever-reliable Jessie and Jamie came over to help get some more upper cabinets in.  And now I get to share a little secret design idea of mine visible in this last picture.  We built a 2x4 base under the all of the base cabinets.  Since 2x4s are really 1.5" thick, and we stacked two of them, this gives all of our cabinets a 3" lift.  This is awesome!  Since all the men in my family are over 6', this was a no-brainer for me.  My wife, at 5'4", took a little convincing, but she was totally sold the first time she used the sink.   It was also great because we were able to run some PEX for the pot-filler over the stove and also the venting tube for the range hood.

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