And it's done... well mostly... can't be ALL done, that's just silly

So, this is the fruit of the labor of several weekends.  The counter is 3/4" lodgepole pine that we purchased as 2 pieces of 96" x 12".  I used the biscuit joiner to join the two pieces lengthwise.  Then I went at it for a while with a belt sander to smooth the seam.  I completed the counter top with 1 3/4" trim in a different wood... which is slipping my mind right now.  I doweled the trim to the counter and finished it with oak dowel plugs.  

For the shelves- I used the leftover from the counter top to make the bottom shelf- same deal with the biscuits.  For the top shelf I biscuited 4 1x6's together.  I didn't get around to sanding and varnishing the top shelf... there's something about finishing the project that freaks me out.  Finally, I attached the counter to the cabinets with pocket hole screws.  It was pretty easy, except that I freaked Eric out because the screws were a touch too long so I didn't want to poke out the top of the counter and he was responsible for watching for screws coming out the top- none did.

All in all, I am very pleased with myself... and the result of the project.  The hickory in the pre-made cabinets is tied together nicely with the contrasting wood of the trim and shelf faces.  If I were to do it all over again and had a heated, larger work space, I might consider building it from the bottom up.  

This is a Post about Wood Working in February and March in Anchorage Without Proper Shelter

Eric and I decided our tiny kitchen needed some storage in the dining room and what better way than a classy "buffet" "hutch" or "server" (you pick up lingo like this with a little time on your hands and google).  By the way, we decided this approximately a year ago and have been waffling on how we want to accomplish this task without going bankrupt.

So- at first I was like "WE WILL MAKE ONE!" and Eric was like "yeah!" and then we didn't and then it became winter and then I was like, "We will BUY one!" and then we went to the Amish Furniture store in town with promises of a "great" sale and "plenty" of pieces that fit the description I gave the guy on the phone.  It turns out that Eric and I aren't willing to pay $2,000 for a piece of furniture that doesn't fit our exact idea of what we want, and that is VERY specific to this house.  

As I mentioned, this cycle went on for about 10 months.  Getting motivated to make one then getting lazy about planning it and deciding to buy one then looking at furniture in the store, getting sticker shock, and going back to deciding to make one.

One weekend, with some intense motivation (after a month of negative degrees as high temperatures, I believe it was a balmy 15), I dragged Eric to Lowe's and Home Depot to look at some Hickory in-stock cabinets.  I promised him that it would only be a reconnaissance mission and wrote up a list of things to look at... which we did a great job at doing.  Per usual, I was a lot happier to wander the aisles than Eric was, but hey, I like to shop.  So, Home Depot won because their cabinets were on sale.  The next day we went back and purchased 3 base cabinets in hickory (I really don't care how much of it is actual hickory... I think it looks pretty) and our countertop- which took two tries, but we finally settled on 2 pieces of glued together lodgepole pine that were each 8' long, 3/4" thick, and 24" wide.  Sort of butcher-block-ISH, but we won't use them as such.

Alright, we get them home IN OUR CAMRY (well, one was on top...) much to the disbelief of the group of people gawking at us as we struggled to geometrically fit a bunch of lumber and 3 cabinets into our practical sedan.  Then, we had to wait several weeks to start working because, well, weekends are busy and after work was still too dark for me to take on such a job.

The plan- one 12" wide cabinet attached to a 15" cabinet, one with 1 drawer and 1 cabinet, and one with 3 drawers (current kitchen drawer count = 1), then a 16" space that we would build shelves in so that our heat vent would be available to give us precious, precious warmth.  Finally, a 24" 1 drawer 1 cabinet unit.  Here's a drawing I made so that you won't stop reading my blog because it's so $*%&%* wordy.

When I finally had a little time to work on it, I decided it was time to dust off my biscuit joiner (literally dust it off...) and attach the two pieces of counter.  It took something like 6 hours for the following reasons: 1.  I'm kind of nervous when it comes to wood working 2. I practiced joining pieces of wood on several other pieces and I kept ruining them 3. it was 18 degrees outside, so it took a solid 5 minutes to suit up and suit down every time I had to pee, which is a lot 4. My wood working area is an unheated 12' x 8' shed... which is jam packed full of tools.  So, moving two 8' long pieces of wood around is tricky... let alone finding a place to set them up to drill biscuit holes... When all was said and done the pieces looked fine, but the biscuit joiner had slipped while I was drilling a hole and it drilled the hole diagonally out of the top part of the wood that was slated as the "nice" side.  So, I got to practice using wood filler! 

By the end of working as much as I wanted (which was a lot) for two days, the buffet looked like this:

It became apparent that my biscuit joining job was going to require more than my "little engine that could" orbital (palm) sander.  In the middle of the two boards that I attached there was about 1 mm of offset... a little like a normal fault... but since this is a piece that is going to be front-and-center in the dining room, structural geology needed to take a back seat to flush surfaces.  So, I went on a city-wide search for the "perfect" belt sander.  Frustratingly, I ended up purchasing one at the Home Depot about a mile from my house.  I like it though!  Although, after belt sanding for an hour yesterday my shoulders are very sore... I think I was fighting it too much... when you buy a belt sander the instructions should say "don't fight it, just let it wash over you... Also, and this is for Beth, mostly, please stop sanding in one small concentric circle because you're putting topography into your work and that's bad".

Yesterday I sanded, today I dabbled in attaching the trim with dowels!  Tomorrow will be more sanding.

I might post pictures when I'm done... if it turns out okay!

How we figured out what the "funk" was coming from the guest room...

Eric's sister is coming to visit us next weekend, so we thought that we could try to figure out what smelled in the guest room every time the heat came on.  You might be asking yourself, what about the visitors that have been visiting us over the two years we've owned the house?  I don't have an answer for you.  Sorry.

Since we have a slab-on-grade house with no crawl space and old old ductwork, we decided to start with an old fashioned duct cleaning.  This was recommended to us by the lovely fellow who came out to inspect our furnace to make sure it wasn't going to burst into flames (a tradition they recommend annually... the "making sure your furnace isn't going to burst into flames and destroy all of your possessions check-up").  I asked him about "the funk" and he agreed it certainly smelled in there, and told me that you can hire someone to vacuum your ducts AND spray an anti-bacteria cocktail into the ducts to kill the little nasties that live down there.

So, we had two wonderful people come out on Friday morning from Air Stream Duct Cleaning (it happened to be Veterans Day, so Eric was home with me!) to clean out our ducts.  Their giant vacuum that lives in their huge truck required that we have the front door open the whole time they were cleaning the ducts, so they also brought in a propane heater.  I have to say, the propane heater fire ball in our living room made us briefly nervous about melting everything in its vicinity until we realized it was TOTALLY unnecessary to put on 5 extra layers and we were the only ones who nearly melted.  But, I digress...

Eric and I sat on the couch reading while they worked their mysterious voodoo magic on our duct work.  I find it awkward when strangers are wandering around in your house working on something.  I want to hover, but I don't want to stare.  I am not the kind of person who cannot "act natural" under these circumstances.  Anyway, burying our faces in books prevented us from watching too closely and deciding we could do it next time.  This is a service I am happy to pay for... especially NOW!


One of the duct cleaners came SPRINTING out of our guest room and gleefully yelled "You guys have GOT to see this!!!!!"  We immediately obeyed because you sort of expect that a duct cleaner has seen it all so getting THIS excited must be worthy of immediate movement on our part.  As we were moving to the guest room, he goes "it scared the SHIT out of us!!!"  I guess while they were vacuuming the duct it came shooting out.  Here it is:

This is the iguana in the duct

This is the iguana after the duct cleaner sniffed it and confirmed that this is the source of the funk.

Yup, there was a desiccated, mummified iguana in our guest room duct.  I found the subsequent hours confusing.  I have so many questions.  Are you, in fact, an iguana that was the pet of the previous owners of the house?  Do you explain the funk in the guest room?  Could you be the iguana that escaped the two-doors-down neighbors house last spring?  If so, why wasn't there a bigger smell during the early stages of your demise?  If you are the neighbors missing iguana, how did you get into the duct?  If you are the previous owners iguana, how did you get into the duct?  It's perfectly reasonable to imagine why an iguana would find our duct work so inviting, but it does not explain how the little guy ended up expiring in there.  

Anyway, I guess my questions will remain unanswered.  Come to think of it, if that iguana was still alive, I still wouldn't get my questions answered because, well, iguanas can't talk.

In the Beginning: We found a House with a Distinct... Musk

So, I realize that keeping up a blog means actually posting things in a timely manner.  Well, we've been busy.  Alright, I'm going to embark you on an adventure I like to call: How we fell in love with this house.

Eric and I were getting pretty discouraged.  We wanted a house with a big kitchen, close to the trails, close to work, with a large yard, and that didn't have any major problems that we'd have to fix.  Also, being a geophysicist, I wanted to ensure that our house was on seismically stable substrate, ESPECIALLY since there was a giant earthquake that shook Anchorage back in '64 over Easter weekend and sunk entire neighborhoods into the inlet.  There was another big one in '86... anyway, I digress.  Seismically stable, to me, means that it needed to be built prior to 1964.  If it survived the big one, it must be pretty stable.  In response to this, our realtor took us to a house built in something like 2003... It was in a cookie-cutter neighborhood where they maximize the house size on the lot size so you have 10' between houses and tiny yards.  You could speak in a normal voice in the bathroom and people in the hallway could hear your words, and to top it off, it was in an area that i knew got flattened during the 1964 earthquake... I can't expect her to know that (although, she should...)  Anyway... it was NOT ideal... I think her angle was just trying to figure out WHY we were pushing so hard against new homes.  I'll give her ups on the big kitchen though... Oh, I should mention, she was our second realtor, so at this point we'd seen about 15 houses.

ANYWAY, it was sort of slow at work, so I was perusing the real estate website, and found our future home show up one morning as a "new listing."  We made an appointment to see it after work the next day with a hand full of other houses in the area... but after mulling it over, I decided it was more dire than that.  So, I forced everyone to drop what they were doing so we could go check it out.  This was June, so Eric was still working out of the basement on his PhD with no job yet.  The real estate agent was headed to the valley (Wasilla, Palmer) and diverted to meet me at the house.

It wasn't love at first sight.  It smelled.  They had left a fan going, but it was a smelly, smelly house.  The realtor thought it might be an incontinent dog.  It was tiny.  No walk in closet?  The kitchen is the size my ideal closet would be... it was SMELLY!  The carpet in the bedrooms made me gag, one of the rooms was painted purple and fuschia.  But, the light fixtures were nice, and it sure had a huge back yard.  Two sheds in the back yard seemingly dropped there randomly... Anyway, we left.  I went back to work... Eric went back to writing or making an excel spreadsheet, and our realtor went to the valley.  I sat at work, mulling it over...

After work that day we talked it over and the next day decided to keep it on our list of houses to see in the neighborhood.  We went across Tikishla park to see two houses in "Airport Heights" (we find out later, this is the side of the park everyone gets stabbed and robbed)... anyway, first house is nice, large garage- plenty of room to work on constructing things... the problem was, there was no construction to do, the house was built in the 80s, it was a split level, and it had a "fair" yard- balanced out by the sweet deck.  We hated how the neighbors houses looked... Anyway, this is boring.  The next house we looked at was a dump.

So, we came back to our house... looked it over again...  it still smelled.  bad.  no fans this time.  the carpet was still disgusting, and the guest bedroom was still painted fuschia.  We said good-bye to our realtor, and on our way to dinner, we were very quiet for the first... oh... 1/8 mile.  In retrospect, I shouldn't have been driving, but I think this is still when I was afraid of Eric driving my car.  Finally, after what felt like forever, I said "Um... how do YOU feel about the house?."  Eric started with "It's like an ugly dog..."... well, that didn't sound good to me!  But he continued with "You get an ugly dog, say, you adopt it and feel good about adopting the ugly dog... well... that dog can learn some sweet tricks, REALLY sweet tricks because it's a smart dog... but it's still ugly... but it's owners love it SO much."  there was a pause on my end... and then I was like- Well.I-want-to-put-an-offer-in-do-you?... he said okay... i had him call the realtor... we put an offer in.

The we went to dinner and I told this same boring story to the waiter... in about 15 seconds... when he asked how we were doing this evening...

It took from June to September 28 to close on the house... but that's another story.

Sorry this isn't more about a wonderful lack of right angles in my life... I felt like starting at the beginning... and it's my blog.

First Post- had trouble figuring out how to blog... but now here are some disjointed thoughts about rough construction

Alright, first of all, you probably all know me.  If you don't, you probably hit "next blog" and ran into my blog willy nilly.  I hope it did not hurt.  Either way, enjoy my ramblings.  This is probably the part of the blog that I'm supposed to talk about myself and have a bunch of well put together stories for you so it makes a hint of sense.  Instead, here's what you should expect:

Eric and I just finished putting starter strip for vinyl siding on the North side of the house.  Starter strip, although invisible, needs to be really level so the rest of the siding doesn't look stupid.  Also, the starter strip has to start kind of level with the other pieces around the corner from it... again so the siding doesn't ultimately look stupid.  Anyway, anyone with a bit of brain, not currently being used as a warm comfortable house for a family of rodents, with minimal experience with vinyl siding or competitive sports, should know that doing either activity with someone you are currently involved with or live with is a TERRIBLE idea.

That said, I am now inside out of the cold, late September rain with a glass of wine while Eric puts together dinner.   We aren't fighting, but a bit of separation is good after such a strenuous activity as drilling about 15 painstakingly level screws into the side of my house that took, collectively, approximately 20 minutes because our neighbors stopped by to chat for a bit.  Ha, try it!!  It's really hard to calmly explain the thoughts in your head while you're playing construction twister- he's balancing the level at "level" position while you're sneaking in with a drill that has a 2" screw perched on it, hoping it doesn't fall off before/during your best efforts to drill it through the right slot in the starter strip, some metal flashing, and a few other layers, all the while you're crouched impossibly low to the ground and a dog is probably licking you in the mouth.  The moment you look out the corner of your eye to see if it's YOUR dog french kissing you, the level goes unlevel and you drop the screw.

So, now that you know where we ARE, let me start with where we started with this project.  We bought a house... I guess technically (and literally), I bought the house... me, a woman, with some general ideas about how to make a house better.  When I am out of ideas, I call my dad (HI DAD!) I usually get my mom on the phone, though (HI MOM!).  Anyway, after purchasing a house, I started collecting all of the power tools I've ever wanted... and not wanted.  I put them in "the blue shed" which is one of two sheds that were deposited seemingly randomly in our back yard... It's my wood working shed!  However, it's too small by about 500 square feet, so I do what I can.  We didn't really plan to do any large projects when we moved in to this house.  Okay, so maybe we planned to replace "a few" windows.  Right, time for a photo.  Here we are after our first bike commute from this homestead.  I'm blocking out the address so the "next blog"gers don't try to steal all of my cool tools.

Anyway, enjoy my first blog post, and if you don't then probably don't read the next one.

Cheers,

B