Flooring install time lapse

Time lapse video of the hallway on sunday.

Time lapse of the bedroom on saturday.  Took a while to get used to

Decking - Epic 2

Sarah and I decided to replace our carpet and put in hardwoods, while we were at it, we decided to replace the decking too.  What the hay, can't be that hard could it?  Wrong!

The old deck, only 6 years old but looks pretty bad.  We hated that there were so many different kinds of fasteners and holes that were haphazardly (irregular) made for the fasteners

 Lifting the deck was much harder than we expected, 2 different screws whose heads were clogged with debris.  We had to clear the debris before we could back them out with a drill with whatever we could find that was pointy.  Three different kinds of nails, including super long screw shank nails which were pure evil.

Bigger pile than it looks and only about 1/2 of the debris created from the removal of the railing and deck boards and "benches".  Some of those boards are 16' long. 

The 20 lbs of screws and nails that were removed with the decking and railing, seriously a bunch of hacks who built our deck.  (posts held down with toe-nailed brads.  5000 18ga brads are equivalent to a single lag bolt right?)

Constantly rejiggering furniture, deck boards, etc in order to have a place to walk and let the finish dry while being able to work on the next section of the deck.  Lots of planning around the weather too, we lucked out this Oct, although it was HOT! 

Stinky was perfectly comfy though and did a lot of watching and meowing through the window, when not sleeping. 

Completed deck with the railing saved for next year.  Still have some fascia to put up, but that should be easy (knock on wood).  Doesn't look like much, but our deck is over 40' long.  

The hidden faster system was worth it but took 2-3 times as long to install (cutting biscuit slots, getting the fastener inserted along the entire length, the correct gap).  The boards are all clean single board runs except in the middle where we ran a board perpendicular (hard to see).   Straightening the 18' long boards for the main part of the deck were a bear.  Sarah and I are both glad the hard work is done.  Ipe is always what we wanted, already much better and cleaner looking while providing the durability that cedar can't even come close to.  I've already dropped stuff on the deck and there isn't even a scratch this stuff is so hard.  I think we would do it again to, I don't think we could pay someone for the level of attention we paid while building this deck.

What an epic and HOT project.  I don't think I've ever sweat so much on a project.  Maybe the next project will be to finally build some furniture.

Pergola finished - epic 1

Started the project late June.  Milling the rough redwood from the previous post.  Finished the pergola over the weekends in what must have been the absolute hottest days we've had in Oregon, ever.

Sarah working on joinery 

Ledger and posts for one half of the pergola 

Ledger, post and beam for the other half of the pergola 

One of the completed pergola and hints towards Epic 2

This was an incredible amount of work.  It took a tremendous amount of work to mill the redwood from rough, green slabs into the wood used for the beams, rafters and lattice.  Probably emptied the dust collector over 10 times (35 gallon).

I have a lumber problem

This time it's for the pergola.  It was a good deal for redwood, what can I say?  I have projects for the black walnut...  13' long clear boards from the same tree, lots of possibilities.  Curly maple with lots of character?  I'm sure I can find something to do with that!

Needed some redwood, why not get some walnut and maple while I'm at it?  Redwood is pretty nice, a little short, but it's just so hard to find dimensional.  I'll make good use of it for the pergola's. 

Looks messy, but it was a lot worse.  French cleat wall just to hang up stuff and get it off the floor.  Used to store lumber here vertically, but it just didn't seem to store much and boards were hard to get to, especially if they were right at 8'.

Went to the plywood store to find some cheap plywood.  The cheapest they had was pre-finished birch plywood.  Guess what was on the other side?  The nicest cherry I've seen on plywood.  Felt a little guilty about making a french cleat wall and a router table with cherry plywood, but I'll get over it.

William Ng School and Dutch Tool Chest with Chris Schwarz

Was at the William Ng school of woodworking to build a dutch tool chest.  Fought a cough and cold the whole time there and for some time afterwards, but learned a lot and discovered neat little details everywhere.

My completed tool chest.  Used copper nails and hardware from Lee Valley.  Some of it was pretty crooked (the hinges and the hasp) but oh well.  I really like the copper nails.

Decided to french fit all the tools in the chest so they wouldn't bang into each other.  Making the wooden holsters for the block planes simply took forever.  Used all sorts of scraps which was kinda nice, some of those pieces I've been saving forever.

Decided to put a drawer in the chest for the bottom part.  The section without the drawer is plenty tall enough for planes and such, but a drawer allowed the use of the space left without having to stack things on top of one another.  It really does hold a lot of tools.

Aerangis time lapse - sort of

Shot this over something like 2 weeks and went though quite a few batteries.  Canon 70d kept turning off, still couldn't get to the bottom of that one...  Gave up on the movie because I simply bumped into the tripod too often and had to change the shot as the spike moved.

Macro shot of the shop

On a 10mm? sigma lens.  Can't see the lathe and some of the stuff by the table saw, but a picture of the garage when I used to be able to park in the car in there.