elbow tendinitis and a sore shoulder are the result of our sanding down the 5 bedroom windows for refinishing, and whaling out all the old trim and baseboard in those two rooms, as well as ripping out bad stinky carpet, pad, and the tack strips.

either the little doggie the previous owners had was incontinent, or.... no, I don't want to think about that ;)

only had to replace a three foot piece of subfloor, though.

had some friends lay the carpet, and there isn't much paint to redo for scratching. my, that is some wonderful dense carpet to walk on ;)

got to put on baseboard and fix the paint before we can put the second bedroom back together, move in the computer colossus and the sewing maze, and clear the rest of the deck and house back to liveable again.

now, when I have an arm back in a few days, I have to level up about 10 of the 38 cupboard doors, and then we clean the garage until there's no dust left. then it's staining and sanding 38 cupboard doors for the kitchen, seven interior prehung door sets in 6-panel oak, and 6 bifold 6-panel oak closet doors for the three closet spaces. then door installation.

then a shipload of trim and door molding stain and varnishing, and we're done with this phase of remodelling. only things left will be paint in the hallway and living room, repairing the glass and redoing the wood in the living room, and eventually new living room carpet. it's a full half-day project to strip down the media center, so that even more than wanting to hang onto some savings, is delaying that project.

oh, what, hon? ah, forgot about the shed levelling and foundation, and it's garden time. how'd that slip my mind???

you know how it is when you fix something... all the other Stuff lying around gets jealous, and it breaks down by the numbers to get attention, right?

well, when you remodel something, everything else looks tacky. so it's off to the home centers once again.

I don't have assigned parking yet, but we're getting there. the bedrooms frankly had odors, so we decided it makes no sense to put in the trim before replacing the hallway's hollow doors... and then we really shouldn't retrim without carrying the golden oak throughout... and it's dumb to do that without replacing all that original 1979 carpet which holds some nascent odors...

and pretty soon, you're wondering if you should save the light bulbs when the dump trucks and bulldozers come the next day.

we haven't gone that far, but have repainted both bedrooms in preparation for putting in the carpet we ordered in February. the closet bifold doors were two atom thick veneer over scuzwood and the hollow doors were supported by cardboard inside, so they will also be replaced with solid 6-panel oak doors. my, did those hollow doors burn fast in the firepit last night! see, it's a SAFETY upgrade! -- and now I need more, sharper tools, to avoid MORE accidents ;)

anyway, second bedroom got stripped to the bones, one or another critter in the house's past requires replacing a couple running feet of floorboard, and we're going to sand off the evil dark brown stain from Hell on the window frames tonight. the frames have been de-trimmed, and it took a bunch of backer rod and caulk to stop the drafts around the crummy trimming of the sheetrock around the frames. we gut the first bedroom starting friday night and through saturday.

then we put the previously finished trim in those rooms, fill a truck with more, finish it, finish the kitchen doors, finish the hall and closet doors and install them, do all trim, do the kitchen doors...

and try to avoid noticing the living room seems dark, dank, odorous, and menacing.....

actually, 38-dooring the joint. only three cabinet doors left to glue up tonight, and that includes the 6 that had, uhhh, various defects and had to have some components remade.

got the ceilings repainted in the main bedroom and hallway, new lights in the hallway and front entry, and the entire main bedroom is faux finished. we're going to put off the (hellish) second bedroom... the wife's sewing stuff is as nasty to disassemble and stash someplace as is my computer desk and cable menagerie. so we're only going to do that room once. carpet goes in weekend after Easter, so sometime in a week or so, we're going to gut that room, pull the moldings, rip the carpet and tack strip, patch and repaint... and leave it for the carpetlayers.

got to play tonight with several alternatives in planing the surface of the 38 doors. I have a little power planer, an old but trusty 16-inch block plane in maple, sanders galore, and a rotten old piece of tempered steel someplace that would make a great scraping knife. somewhere in there, using some wood scraps glued up to mimic a door edge, I hope to find a process to clean up some 10 doors with high rails (or high stiles if you flip the door over) made of hard red oak.

this sort of stuff occurs when you mill a pickup load of oak boards with a roman ogee rail and stile bit set... everything looks good in the model making stage... and then Son #2 comes over, gets the bug, and routes all the wood with the stile bit in one long afternoon without using the micrometer to make sure all the wood is milling the same.

I knew I was in for it when I changed bits to cut the rail coves, and noticed the top cutter in the stile bit had rotated 90 degrees, chewing up the copper spacer disk. didn't know how bad the damage was. fortunately for the forests of north america, I had enough wood butchered so I didn't have to mill a bunch other stuff. and I can cut that stile milling off flush in the table saw, and make the doors in the bathroom and laundry room cabinets at a more normal width of 2-1/8 actual.

but in the meantime, not knowing anybody with an open-side planer (fussy big cast iron bastards that take half a day to set up if they are moved,) I have to clean up 10 or 12 of my 38 doors to the tune of between 1/32 and 1/16 inch (in a couple cases.)

this is why replacement doors for refacing cost $100-250, I guess.

woodworkers' glue, that is. got 12 of the cupboard doors glued up, and when I get three more in-frame tonight, will start routing the edge ogees on the done ones. we should be sanding this weekend and staining next week.

well, knuckled down the past few days, and all but six cabinet doors are cut, routed, and ready to glue. glueing will take most of a week because of the number of clamps I have. then route the ogee on the edges, sand, stain, and varnish.

I earned it, and I've taken it ;) seriously, have to wait for another router base. seems excess wood dust gets between the plunge base and the router head, and it slips out of alignment. had a casting fault in it anyway, so ordered up a fixed base from parts and when it comes in a day or so, will send the plunge base back under warranty.

had a lot of back-shred cutting the coves in the kitchen door rails, and laid in more lumber to mill to cover that shrinkage.

meanwhile, we have been planning painting in the upstairs bedrooms and the hallway, and will seek colors saturday. carpet goes in the week after easter in the bedrooms, we already ripped it out in the hall and put in wood, ran the same floor we used in the kitchen.

will put in the tip-out drawers under the sink tonight. www.rockler.com has lots of neat stuff.

we're also planning the finishing of the 7 new 6-panel interior oak doors... either in the basement or in the garage, which would require cleaning up all the wood dust first. we'd like to get the doors in before spring and gardening season, so it's another tight schedule.

we're back to normal, sort of. there is no trim up yet, because we sorta need to refinish a patio door, and it's cold and intermittently snowy yet. so it's cutting and making 41 cabinet doors, rail and stile routings, plain inserts.

appears one of the sons, helping rout the stiles, pushed against the cutter, and it went out of line a little bit, chewing up a copper spacer and spinning the top cutter 80 degrees. so we'll have to do more sanding than was expected. cutting the matching ends on the rails caused some more splintering that we didn't see on the test cuts in softer wood. this is why they make wood filler, I guess.

we also brought home a dozen boxes of floor tile the other day, to get the laundry, first bath, and breezeway floors de-slicked of deathly slimy vinyl tile. probably be getting to that in two or three months.

overall, comments have been good. we hope to have family over in april sometime towards the end of the month for a second homewarming.

but I digress. making doors is the subject. quarter-inch plywood for inserts does NOT cut well on the table saw unless you have all sort, manner, and kind of feed-in and feed-out rollers. slicing stacks of milled boards to make multiple door parts does NOT work well on the miter saw if the guides aren't higher than the stack of milled boards. you can NOT mill the amount of lumber that is needed to the inch and make all the doors you wanted. so far my wastage is about 10%, I expect a little more. good thing I planned for 15%.

oh, yes. wastage is damaging a hard rule I made, about making all four sides of the door frame from the same piece of wood, to insure it all takes stain the same way. I expect some zebra doors, which will be put in dark corners and under a counter overhang, so it isn't all that noticeable. if you have a series of doors right next to each other, also cut the panels from the same sheet of plywood, and make sure they are oriented the same. use a little blue painters tape on the back side. that way they look like they were at least made in the same year.

the extra crap is out of the kitchen, just in time for a two-foot snowfall event, and I'm planning phase III. which is final painting, installation of the wood floor, and installation of moldings, etc.

then I get banished to the garage to finish milling the boards for stiles and rails for cabinet doors, and starting to fit them together.

Hooooooo-kay. we're having some fun now!

cabinets are all sanded down, stained, and varnished. countertops with oak reveal bevel on the edges are built and installed. got the sink cut in and the water and sewer redone. dishwasher drain leak is fixed and it goes in tonight. the drawer fronts, all 21 of them, are cut from red oak and fitted, the staining and varnishing is done, and the interiors are to be painted this week. augmented wiring is fully done, and the tile backsplash is installed... still needs grout. first coat of paint is done. vent hood is back up. new light up in the kitchen, an artsy-fartsy halogen thingie.

still to do are grouting (next several days,) dishwasher reinstall (tonight,) stove slid back in (after grouting.) we have a quarter of beef coming end of the week, so have to clean up and power up the old freezer left behind when the previous homeowners sold and moved out. the final painting is needed. need to rip out the carpet and vinyl, and put down the engineered oak flooring, then put all the baseboards and chair rail up. the cabinets and crud have to go back on the wall.

and there is the small matter of building those 41 cabinet doors yet. almost all the oak is routed for stile, and then we need to cut rail ends on some of it after cutting to size, make the door inserts, and glue 'em up.

the week off was quite a success, in spite of having to spend half of both sunday and saturday blowing the 14 inches of drifting snow.

not bad work for me, the wife, and two sons periodically dropping in to eat, drink, and pitch in.

I have a full cask in the basement ;)

as for the kitchen, a little seam sealing and surface prep for painting, and I move on to countertop build testing.

pay no attention to the voices from under the floor.....

and tonight the last wall gets covered in tile backer board, then taped with mesh tape. carpet has been ordered for the two main floor bedrooms, one color of which will be manufactured friday and shipped next monday. we found the dealer online, in the shadow of the mills in atlanta.

brought a taurus full of oak lumber home after church monday, and if I have time tonight, will case forward several idiotically-sunken cabinets to the same depth as all the others. first brad nailer I bought threw three brads halfway in and then the coil burned up in white smoke. the replacement seems to be all there.

sorta figuring that friday I will do "proof of concept" countertop to test how I'm going to inlay the oak and bevel it back out again on the edge, including the rounded corners, and then this weekend actually build out the finished countertops. costs $20 a day to burn the diesel in the shop heater to allow working in below-zero weather, but it's better to do that in the garage than bring all the glue fumes into the basement.

next week, we're off from work, and the sons will be on hand to make the big push in completing the kitchen.

took a night off, back at it in the kitchen, carpet-bombing away. all the old formica backsplash is gone, along with countertops, and the walls backsplashed are also gone. only one outlet box left to convert to a double and space out far enough so the plugs and plates are even with the tile going on, not pushed forward with a half-inch of 10/32 nuts as spacers.

added two dual-duplex outlets where needed, and had to wire up a dishwasher circuit, which entailed knocking out a fair sized strip of ceiling in the basement for a wire run. not wired into the "arcwelder" yet, as electricians call FPE entrance panels, that's coming Real Soon Now as well. see http://www.inspect-ny.com/fpe/fpepanel.htm if you need that one explained. // edit -- oops, disposal circuit //

the base sanding is done, and we're doing the 150-grit final stuff next several nights.

I have to do the "proof of concept" countertop, with oak inlay on the edges to be bevelled 45 degrees and revealed through the new formica pattern. this includes the 2-inch radius curved corners. then while the wife paints the insides of the old cabinets white, I can build the countertops.

hope to have running water and a sink again by next monday sometime. have to get a non-leaking solenoid valve for the drain on the dishwasher before it goes back in.

we have a minor amount of second-pass sanding left, and then fine grit sanding for smoothness, and then I get to knock holes in the wall while the wife starts painting shelves. new wiring for several appliances and doubling-up the number of outlets. this project is working out! paint and countertop stuff next week, along with staining and varnishing.

the binary logic is quite simple here. (if hole) then fill. (if nohole) then cut. repeat until out of materials, then paint.

we have the worst of the nasty old dark walnut-plus stain and varnish off the kitchen cabinets, and are now silting up the air with finer dust from the palm sander. the ugliness of having to pull the stove and dishwasher must be faced in the next several days for access to the last ugly stiles. should be priming/painting the insides of the cupboards this weekend, and setting up the walls for their paint. undecided when we pull the backsplash and rip up the walls to double-up all outlets.

remodelling is kind of like "spaghetti life" with ten GOTOs between you and the logical next step. sux.

two words... kitchen remodelling. with the temp 18 below outside. this better work out ...