Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Doors

We have been busy on a few fronts over the last few weeks. One of those fronts involved the doors downstairs - as untreated pine, they soaked up more than a few fingerprints over the last year or so since they were installed. They have been sanded fresh, re-primed, and painted. Also, door knobs have been installed on most of the doors. This door is looking into the downstairs bathroom, which has been repainted a reddish-brown. I forget the name of the color, but the name is the usual paint company hyperbole.
Karen sanded the french doors downstairs, and then primed and painted them with Mom. She found a good solution to the inevitable dust from sanding. Now there is a lot less mess to clean up afterwards. We like over-built and over-engineered, so a 3" shopvac hose on a 5" orbital sander? Sure, why not?!
This is one of the staging areas for the kitchen cabinet doors. These pieces are cut to length, width, and thickness, are sanded, and are stacked by size waiting for the router table.
This is the other end of the shop. Dad was cutting some quarter round trim, so the miter gauge on the tablesaw and the chopsaw are set up for that. The router table is set up to go, just pushed to the back of the bench for now.
Karen finished up the area under the stairs this week. We aren't quite sure what to do with this space yet. I'm sure something good will come to us.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Just a few pictures tonight. This one is old news, but was a little hard to see in the earlier picture. These are the stairs to the basement with most of the trim in place. The last piece is angled to fit flush with the ceiling - that was done with the jointer set at an angle.
This is the door for a cupboard in the mudroom half bath. I thought it would be good practice before I started on the cherry for the kitchen cupboards. This bathroom door is made from pine that was left over from the interior sheathing boards. In how many ways can one material be used? More than I ever thought! This entire door is made from 3/4" material - even the floating panel. The frame is 2" wide. The long sides are called stiles, and the short sides are the rails (rails being horizontal). The frame was cut using the router with a specialized rail and stile bit that allows the two pieces to mate properly at the corners. The interior panel is roughly 7" x 17", and is a full 3/4" thick, except for the edge, where it was trimmed down to 1/4" thick to fit into the groove in the rail and stile frame.
This is looking at the end of a stile, and is probably better at explaining how these work than any of my blathering. It's a fun process - cut the wood to length, rout the ends of the rails, switch bits, rout the side of the rails, rout the sides of the stiles, and assemble. It's good stuff.