A View from Elsewhere : Construction

Enter the Porch

johnmont — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:51:29 GMT

As part of our remodel, considerable work was done on the front porch. Unfortunately, that work didn't include putting up the railings. This weekend has been the weekend for me to replace them. This has involved purchasing 4x6s and 2x4s to create the classic Craftsman heavy look, then assembling them, which has involved tracing the contour of the house's siding so the 4x6s are notched to fit, and mortising the 4x6s so the 2x4s will sit in them. Yesterday it took me about 8 hours to build 4 feet of railing. I'm hoping today goes faster.

Introduction to Plumbing

johnmont — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:45:56 GMT

Plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task. Today I tried to repair the drain in my mom's front bathroom. The pop-up wouldn't go up and down. Based on this and all my previous plumbing experience, I have come up with John's Rule of Plumbing: All plumbing work takes three trips:

Trip 1: Get the parts.
Trip 2: Get the right parts.
Trip 3: Get the parts you forgot in trip 2.

Oh, and at the end of this I should add the optional trip 4 to replace the parts from trips 2 and 3 that are defective out of the package.

Have I mentioned that plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task?

Running Toilet

johnmont — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:02:40 GMT

The toilet in the bathroom I was using in my mom's house was running. Not a "jiggle-the-handle" kind of running -- more like an "unstoppable-gallon-an-hour" kind of run. I lived with it for a couple of days, thinking, "If I were back in Seattle I'd go to the hardware store, buy replacement innards, and install them." But my mom's tool collection is a bit sparser than mine (no pneumatic tools, no table saw. Imagine! And her an 80-something year old woman!).

Then the light went on: hardware stores also sell tools. Two pairs of pump pliers and a couple of hours later, no running toilet.

Oh, and the review on Amazon of the Fluidmaster 400AK doesn't reflect my experience. I've used them several times on different toilets and they've always worked.

Getting Square, Part 2

johnmont — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:15:25 GMT

I just spent two quality hours with my table saw. I'd known for a while that the saw needed tuning, but I'd been putting it off. Yesterday's frustrating session, however, was the last straw. I'd been checking the saw for true for three years using the blade and a square, but it doesn't really work well -- the blade is too small and has the carbide teeth that throw things off. It always looked "close enough" but of course, in fine woodworking there's no such thing. So I hauled out the MasterGage MasterPlate and SuperBar that had been sitting in a drawer for three years (!) and set to work.

There were three problems: The table was slightly askew, and the stops for the blade and for the miter (or mitre) gauge were all slightly off. Basically the only part of the saw that was right was the rip fence. So I replaced the blade with the MasterPlate, loosened the top of the saw (~80-100lb piece of cast iron) and set to work getting the SuperBar to read less than 1/100th of an inch difference across the length of the plate.

Once that was done, I set the miter gauge to 90 degrees and checked it against the plate and then adjusted the screws until there were no gaps. Repeat for 45 degrees. Next, tilt the blade to 90 degrees and dork with the set screws until it was really 90. Repeat for 45 degrees.

Run some test lumber through and verify all the angles coming off the saw are correct -- that two 45s make a 90 or a 180, and that all rips are parallel to each other and square to the miter gauge.

If you own a table saw and don't have a MasterPlate and SuperBar, borrow one. You'll need them every year at least, and they make a nearly impossible job simple.

Technorati Tags: table saw maintenance, mastergage, masterplate, superbar

Right Angles

johnmont — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:14:38 GMT

One of the projects I've taken on for our home remodel was building the downstairs linen cabinet -- a built-in set of shelves, drawers, and doors that fit into the space next to the first-floor bathroom. To get this project going last summer, my wife and I purchased several sheets of mahogany plywood -- 3/4", 1/2" and 1/4" -- that will be used to create the basic box, the shelves, and the forms for the drawers. It will all be trimmed out in fir and stained to match the rest of the exposed woodwork, but mahogany had the advantage of being considerably less expensive and, of the available options, looked more like fir than anything else.

Last summer, I rough-cut the sheet materials I would need, then stored them for when I had the table saw back running. (I'd removed the 240v circuit for it when I wired the second floor. At the time, there was a great reason, but I can't remember any more.) Earlier this evening I re-ran the wire and reinstalled the breaker to get the table saw up and running. A quick test and the table saw was ready to go.

So this evening I dusted off the plans for the linen cabinet, retrieved the rough-cut sheet goods, and began to final-cut them. But something was off. Just a little bit off, but off. I'd done a quick check to make sure the saw still held true right angles, and it looked fine. I didn't notice until I'd run an 80" piece of lumber that it was about 1/8" off at the bottom. So now I have a bunch of lumber that's all slightly off -- about 1/32" per yard. I probably just need to make a slight tweak to the rip fence.

Fortunately, none of the pieces I cut will show the problem -- they're all part of the basic box and all the ends are rabbeted together and can easily absorb even 1/4" of error. But it just goes to show that I should have broken out the Master Plate, which is sitting idly in a drawer.

Spar Varnish...

johnmont — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 20:10:07 GMT

...is like painting with mucus.

On the recommendation of a professional painter, my wife and I spent two days this week applying spar varnish to the ceiling of our front porch and the soffit around it. While the end result looks lovely, the actual overhead application of the varnish (using a pair of Shur Line 9" pads and a couple of extension poles) was horrible. Imagine having snot dribbled all over you and everything around you. Clean-up (using paint thinner) is more time-consuming than cleaning up oil-based paint because the varnish is so thick. It could have been worse, I suppose: we could have tried to do it with paintbrushes.

Updated: two tips. The first is about thinning the spar varnish: yes, you can thin it, despite what the label says -- about a teaspoon of paint thinner in a quart of varnish turned it from the consistency of cold honey to something more like heavy cream. The second is to roll it on with a 1/4" roller then back-brush it to get the right finish. For our project, which already had two coats of spar varnish, these two tricks combined to enable us to quickly get a mirror-smooth finish with no visible imperfections.

Technorati Tags: spar varnish, home improvement, varnish tips

What "Vacation" Means During a Remodel

johnmont — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 20:38:04 GMT

I took this week off from work. Or I should say, I took this week off from going to the office. So far, in addition to doing quite a bit of email (that's the right verb, isn't it -- one "does" email?) and attending one teleconference (during which I invoked Bruce Willis and The Fifth Element), I have:

Weeded, trimmed, and cleaned up the front yard
Patched, primed, and painted the living room (two colors)
Stained the soffits around the front porch and the front porch ceiling (with my wife)
Patched the wall into the dining room where our idiotic drywaller messed up
Selected 11 sheets of plywood and various other bits of lumber to create a linen closet
Made pancakes twice (from scratch)
Gotten slaughtered at trivia
Gotten my car repaired (thanking my wife for convincing me to get the extended warranty)

There is still more to be done, including stripping the front door and actually using all that lumber to make something. But I'm still having fun.

Technorati Tags: construction, vacation, fun

Removing the Vestiges of Winter

johnmont — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:17:38 GMT

As my team gets nearer to shipping (fingers crossed) life at home turns back to normal, which means more time spent working on the house and less time spent on email. This weekend saw two milestones: the restored (stripped, sanded, stained, sealed) trim installed in the TV room and the removal of the Christmas lights from the tree on the parking strip in front of our house.

Installing the trim was easy, but I was working on the tree for about three hours -- pulling down lights and trimming the tree for spring growth. I'd left the lights on the tree for two or three winters and they were starting to cut into the tree's growth, so it was time.

The Knees Have It

johnmont — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:51:00 GMT

My favorite tool today is… Knee pads. Not just any knee pads, though: CLC’s Gel Kneepads with grooved caps (you can get them at Ace Hardware). I spent about six hours this evening on my knees pulling wire in cramped spaces so that we can restore the original lighting in our living and dining rooms. I was working with my knees positioned on the floor joists of the second floor for six hours. Had it not been for these incredible devices, I would have given up after an hour. Most knee pads pinch really badly at the back of my knees (especially bad when I’m working in shorts as I was this evening.

I also highly recommend CLC’s Pro Framer gloves. They leave your thumb and index and middle fingers open to do things like grab nails from a bag.

De planer! De planer!

johnmont — Fri, 26 May 2006 16:35:00 GMT

Earlier this week I ordered a 13-inch Grizzly planer-molder. Our initial job for it is to plan several thousand lineal feet of painted molding from our house through it to strip it back to its original finish. After that, some custom molding for the dining room. I can’t wait until it arrives – all 217 pounds (98 kilos) of it. It’s kind of like “Tool Fantasy Island.”

Concrete Post Caps OK But Not Usable

johnmont — Wed, 03 May 2006 01:26:00 GMT

Following up from my previous post about creating a cap for our front porch pillars out of concrete: it worked. I unformed them last night and the concrete seems to have emerged relatively as I wanted it. But we're likely not to use what I created. Why?

First, the darn things weigh over 200 pounds. Lifting them will take three people, and actually setting them in place (above chest height) will take four.

Second, our contractor pointed out that he didn't know exactly where the support post would emerge. While we'd been smart and left a 10" hole in the center to run a post through, his point was that he didn't know if he'd need the post dead center or off center enough that the 4x6 wouldn't fit through the center hole.

Third, see the first.

At least now I know we can do it. I'll probably form the next ones in place later in the construction.

Forming Concrete

johnmont — Mon, 01 May 2006 23:22:00 GMT

Yesterday, in preparation for the start of a big remodeling project, my wife and I began to create the new tops for the posts on our front porch. During construction, the existing tops, which measure 30 x 30 x 4 and are concrete, will be destroyed so we can reinforce the brick pillars that hold up the front porch roof. Consequently we need new caps for the posts. Yesterday I built three molds (one for each post). Because they were large and would hold a lot of concrete, I built them from 3/4-inch plywood that was glued and nailed together. I also routed out some cove molding and cut it into the corners at the bottom of each box (so that the concrete would have a nice rounded edge when it came out of the mold). Today, we mixed fiber concrete for the first cap as a test. Two hundred forty pounds of concrete. It's curing downstairs now. Tomorrow we'll probably pull the test cap out of the form. More notes on that later.

Drywall Screws Work on Drywall: Who Knew?

johnmont — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 19:52:00 GMT

Last weekend, I spent two days helping out a local charity, L'Arche Seattle. My version of helping is to go over and do some of the various light construction projects they need. A couple of months ago, for instance, I cut through a load-bearing wall to frame in and install a door between two basement rooms. The lesson from that weekend was that you're better off going to Second Use to find a door that's only 60 inches tall than you are going to Home Depot and cutting a standard 80-inch door down.

This time, they'd asked me to paint a bathroom in one of their houses and to erect a wall to separate off one part of the basement in another. The lesson from this trip: some work is much easier with a framing nailer. Like framing. A wall that would have taken about 30 minutes to nail off with a framing nailer took a couple of hours by hand.

And as a side note, I'd like to remind people who work with electrical to turn off the breakers before they do the work. I couldn't find the breaker that cut power to the new outlets I was putting in (there were about forty breakers and I couldn't kill power to the house without pissing off the residents and, of course, they were all incorrectly labeled). So I livewired it. This isn't a practice that anyone with any common sense will do. I was super-safe for the first 80% of the work. But there was one outlet that was giving me problems (a four-way junction) and I wound up both accidentally grounding the wires to themselves (I love the smell of ozone in the morning) and through me (as if eight cups of coffee weren't enough to wake me up). In the end, everything worked out.

Oh, and the reason for the headline. I realized that I go through pounds of drywall screws each year and rarely actually install drywall with them. They're incredibly useful for just about everything. Turns out they're really good for drywall, too.

Maytag Neptune Washer Lawsuit?

johnmont — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 03:02:00 GMT

Well, well. After doing all the research, we learned yesterday that there's a class-action lawsuit against Maytag for problems with the Neptune washers -- evidently they develop mold in the door gasket, the motors break, and other things go wrong. So we went to Home Depot where we bought those devices and asked. Nobody there knew anything about the class action suit. So I called the regional Maytag sales director. I'll see where that winds up.

I was pretty irritated at Home Depot and the fact that they sold us a washer that could have such problems. I even asked explicitly about known issues with the washer because some of the Web searches I did (e.g. on epinions.com) indicated that the Neptunes could be very hit-or-miss, and he said they got no returns. Maybe they don't. Then again, if mold starts showing up in a month or so, I'll be returning mine.

Grrr.

Updated April 9, 2006: I've received hundreds of thousands of views of this blog entry and, while the comments are closed, I get a regular stream of emails seeking advice or help. I'm afraid that I've had to stop answering each email. I'm rather appalled at what I'm hearing about Maytag's service and its reported lack of response to calls and unwillingness to repair the units for anything less than several hundred dollars as well as the reticence of large chain stores that sell lots of these units to talk about the lawsuit. I will say that so far I haven't seen any mold growing in our washer, but I do keep the washer door open except when we're runing laundry. I posted subsequently here and here.

I'll also point people to the Maytag Front Loading Settlement site (US -- Canada is here) as well as a search for other sites that talk about the suit. Based on all the emails I've gotten, I can't say I would ever buy another Maytag anything -- the company seems deeply in denial about what appears to be a widespread problem with its products.