master bedroom

The saga continues on the stained glass design for the master bedroom bureau. I created two more designs (below) that look nice but seem inappropriate for this piece.

I'm beginning to think that stained glass in general is too heavy for this cabinet. I considered using cane instead except my cat would make short work of that. Trixie hops up on the window sill, opens the sock drawer and sleeps in there. Giving her a climbing wall would be a mistake.

Then I remembered something I've seen in old movies: wire glass. You see it a lot in Hollywood set depictions of judge's offices. It's like chicken wire safety glass except the wire is more decorative and usually made of brass. I've never actually seen this stuff in real life so I don't know if it's an actual product or something you sandwich between two panes of glass. All I know is that I spent a fruitless afternoon Googling for it. If you ever need to know about glass coat hangers or glass-impregnated wire, ask me.

Does anyone know what this stuff is called and, better, where I can find it?

I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place.

While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects.

The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art.

I can't freakin' believe it. All my tools are back in the shop where they belong, the paint's up, the room is clean, the nine-month saga of the master bedroom renovation.... so OVER!

Okay, there are still a few things left to do: the cabinet drawers and doors, the hallway stained glass windows, the doorknobs. I'll get around to it.

Over the last few weeks I've been finishing up the hallway, the two closets and my outside plantings. There's always a sense of closure when I lay that second coat of paint, especially after a nine month project. I used a wedgewood blue matte finish. It was down to that, salmon or a pale yellow. I couldn't decide so I just closed my eyes and picked one. I like it. It's sorta weird in these shots because the camera makes it look lighter than it really is.



If you haven't followed the saga of the bedroom renovation, this is all new work, not woodwork refinishing. I tried to keep it period though and with the possible exception of the floor, I think it works. No sheetrock and clamshell moulding here!



It's time to reflect back on the lessons I learned. At the top of the list is, don't use engineered floors if you have big, energetic dogs. The floors already look like they're five years old (I'll post some shots later). The engineered floors held up well in my office but I have a plastic chair mat and there's not enough room in there for the dogs to get nuts. I really should have gone with solid hardwood flooring, which would have been cheaper anyway.

Secondly, I'm not sorry that I built that curved plaster corner on the closet. I'd never done one before and I think it's a nice detail. But, man, between the plaster, the baseboard complexities and the cedar paneling inside the closet, I probably spent two weeks just dealing with the annoying geometry.

This room was orginally two bedrooms. The smaller one on the left was probably intended as the baby's room. I converted its doorway into a window opening so the hallway will get light from the south-facing window in that room. It will get a pair of stained glass windows.

Yeah, I know I need door knobs. I actually ordered a whole bunch of amber knobs, locksets and brass plates five years ago but I dropped one on a tile floor, shattering it. No spares either. And now I can't find the company I got them from.

The cedar closet turned out pretty well, even if I can't hold a camera level. What you can't discern from the shot is that there's a six foot wide cedar shoe rack at the bottom/back of the closet.

What you also can't tell from the shot is that closet is actually quite a bit wider than it looks. It extends three feet beyond that intersecting wall, where the old closet used to be, and it's 'L' shaped. My neighbor, Betsy, calls that 'L' my "panic room" but it managed to fit all my retired musical gear, including two huge speaker cabinets.

I've been referring to this project as my master bedroom renovation but it also included the hallway and an existing walk-through closet (also cedar). The hallway walls only have primer on them because my next project is to rebuild the funky and crumbling skylight over the stairs. I'll be breaking out the stained glass tools for that. It's also a bit involved because the only way I can work on the skylight is to build a temporary scaffold.

I've been pushing off this little project for a couple of months. The bedroom renovation began with construction of the closet and the curved plaster corner I absolutely had to have (if for no other reason than I'd never done one before). I knew that was going to create problems with the trim later but, hey, later is later. Six months later, later became today.



There are basically four ways to build a curve using solid lumber. One is to steam it and bend it in a jig. Bending 1" nominal hardwood stock to as shallow a radius as I need is probably impossible, at least with my skills, and since I don't have a wood steamer anyway, it's moot. So let's move on.

The second method also involves a jig but instead of bending solid lumber you build up thin veneer layers like plywood. You can construct a very small radius this way and lots of glue ensures a stable curve. The third way is to saw lots of narrow vertical kerfs in the back of the stock, leaving a thin facing layer to make it bendable. It's tricky but this method wouldn't work for me anyway because the board has a half-lap detail.

I chose Option #4: build up the curve using several narrow pieces of lumber edge-laminated together. It's not really a smooth curve however but a polygon... kinda like the difference between a raster and a vector curve. However, since that's how all the convex curved woodwork was originally built in this house, it's Authentic. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So how do you calculate the miter and width of each piece? Fortunately, dumb luck made this almost a textbook exercise. The corner's circumference is eleven inches. If I were to use one-inch wide pieces how many pieces would I need? You, the kid in the back corner. That's right, eleven pieces. But how do you calculate the miter angle for each piece? If you glue together eleven pieces of lumber you have ten joints. A 90 degree angle divided by 10 equal joints would mean that each joint would have to be 9 degree corner. Since a corner is two equal miters, then the miter is 4.5 degrees.

Am I smarter than a fifth grader or what?

Alright, there's a bit more to it, like the fact that the face of the baseboard will have a larger circumference than the back, but a little guesstimating set the width of each piece to 1-1/8" at the face. Close enough.

Construction was pretty routine except that clamping was a bit of chore once the curve extended past 30 degrees. So I constructed the baseboard as three sets. Then I assembled them around the jig I'd used to make the knife to construct that plaster corner: a plastic bucket. A strap clamp held the pieces snug while the glue dried.

It still needs cap and shoe mouldings and, of course, it would look better actually attached to the wall. More to come.