finish carpentry

My dogs are killing my floors! They're large and energetic pups who like to use the floor as a skating rink. I decided to look in my photo archives to see what they look like now as opposed to five years ago.

Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as I thought but I'll probably get the floors lightly sanded and refinished when I'm done with the construction here and the dogs are a little older and more sedate. One of the reasons I don't stain floors is so I have the option to screen them if they need refinishing rather than having to do a thorough sanding.

While looking for those old photos I got sidetracked by a few pix of the nearly completed media cabinet I had built for the living room. This project started as an afterthought. Because the living room isn't huge, I had originally planned to stash most of my media hardware in a basement locker. It was a poorly conceived idea.

The location of the cabinet was dictated by the layout of the room. It was going to have to be a corner cabinet. But I piled on a few more requirements. It had to hide all my audio and video gear as well as my favorite 300 or so CDs. Even though I didn't own one yet, it had to support a 38" wide HD monitor. There would be no visible wiring and there would be a hardwired Ethernet connection. It had to blend into the finish trim style of the room, which meant that it had to be a built-in.

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.

Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession. I've been so busy that I haven't found the time to sit down and write about what I was up to.

I should break this update into a few posts. Lemme talk about the bedroom reno first.

I completed all the woodwork on the bay window unit today. I won't play conquering hero either. With the weird angles and different depths of the windows, the embedded convection steam radiator, and more than a couple of measure-once goofs, I was very lucky to get through this without a major screwup.

This weekend, I completed and installed that removable grill in the center of the windows. This was also a bit of work. There are seven boards and two store-bought but modified red oak grills in that face panel, all of them biscuited together with waterproof glue. I wanted no chance that heat and steam from a leaky air valve would cause problems with that lamination, as it did in the dining room cabinet. I was going to do some router scroll work between the grills. I caught myself just in time. It would have exposed those embedded biscuits.

I finished cutting 208 feet of bolection moulding for the wainscotting in the bedroom reno and guess what? I needed 216 feet to complete the job, dammit! I knew I was cutting it close (literally) but I only had a couple of (expensive) red oak 1x8s left which I need for the wainscotting shelf. I'll dig into my red oak scrap pile and cut the remainder this afternoon.

Anyway, I was right. A bolection moulding is just an inverted base cap profile with a rabbet. After my router bit quest, I settled on a $28 base cap bit from Woodside.

So it was back to the shop to rip a bunch of red oak to the 1-1/4" width I needed for 26 eight-foot blanks, which I thought would do the job if I planned my cuts carefully.

Man, this shop needs cleaning and reorganizing after six months of this renovation!