It’s not that I’ve forgotten that I have a blog with a readership of…maybe, in a good week, 1 (plus about a thousand bots)…but I may have realized that my last post to this thing is almost 18 months old.
A lot has changed since then.
This post isn’t meant to cover the contents of the last 15-18 months, it’s just a reminder to myself to post a few things a little more often.
Anyways.
Thanks to Facebook Memories, I was reminded that it was about 5 years ago this weekend that I was in Berkeley visiting a friend. It was an awesome trip, a perfect chance to unplug and get away from life for a week or so and recharge, but looking back on it I’m struck by how much things have changed in that time. In that time, I moved (twice), bought a house, moved over to a new position at work, lost Jetta (and gained Cortana), retired (for now) from soccer, lost a few friends, and picked up a few new ones. Oh, and Game of Thrones finally figured out how to let good things happen to good people.
Despite the fact that it’s the weekend after Valentines’ Day, the weather this weekend was positively spring-like. Mid-April, spring-like. Sunny enough that my furnace hasn’t run since this morning, and I actually turned off the heat (again!) today and opened a few windows to air the place out.
It was also sunny enough that I opted to rout 660 board-feet of lumber in my garage, rather than in the basement as I had originally planned.
First: some background.
One of the things I’ve done since I painted a room and hung up new curtains is redo the bedroom that I turned into an office. It was very much a test case for both a design style and our methods for finishing things. I’ll cover the methods and process in a separate post, but the short version is we stripped the wallpaper (and about ten gallons of wallpaper paste), ripped down the trim, and then replaced the trim and painted the ceiling and walls. We had borrowed tools in the process of routing and cutting trim, but realized that if I’m going to re-trim an entire house, we should probably in-source that stuff.
So, recently, I got my hands on a few new toys.
In addition to the kick-ass miter saw and stand, I got a Porter Cable 690 router (fixed-base) for Christmas. I ran some rough numbers for trimming out the rest of the main floor, and got a couple of quotes for lumber from a few local lumber yards, which brings me to this:
A NOTE ABOUT YOUR LOCAL LUMBER YARD: if you have a local lumber yard, please go visit it. Odds are they’re cheaper than Lowe’s/Home Depot/Menards (hey, Midwest readers!), and not only will they not store lumber vertically so it can warp into all kinds of fun shapes, it’ll probably be a better grade than what your big box has. I got my lumber for this project from DeLeeuw in Holland, and they came in about $250 cheaper than what it would have cost to source from Lowe’s. Yes, some pieces were still a little funky, and quite curiously, several boards seemed several inches short of their alleged length, but on the whole it’s a huge step up from my original experience going to Lowe’s for the lumber I used to do the office.
Behold: this is what 52 pieces of 1×4-inch Poplar looks like:
I’m still probably a few boards short, but that’s 45x8ft lengths, 5x10ft lengths, and 2x12ft lengths. Not everything needed to be routed on both sides, but in total, we were looking at 660 board-feet of lumber to rout.
Since it was a sunny weekend, we set ourselves up in the garage. The original plan had been to close off a section of the basement with plastic dropcloths and hope that would contain the sawdust, but I cannot emphasize this enough: do. not. ever. rout. boards. in. your. basement. The sheer amount of sawdust generated by this was mind-boggling, and it got everywhere. My garage looks like a fine layer of dust was sprinkled everywhere, and that’s AFTER we swept everything three times. There’s a couple of cubic feet of sawdust in the flower bed in front of the house, which under different circumstances might look like snow. Plastic dropcloths might have stopped the dust from leaving the area, but a week of vacuuming wouldn’t have caught it all.
The MDF I had on hand as a surface wasn’t as long as I wanted, but there we are:
Another nugget of unsolicited advice: when shopping for saw horses, get the kind that have extendable legs. I got mine from Lowe’s, and the fact that I was able to raise the work surface up to a level approximating “standing desk” is about the only reason my back hasn’t completely betrayed me at this point.
After playing a bit with the router base depth adjustment, and running out to a local hardware store for a different type of clamp that was far faster to clamp/remove, we were able to get the process down to a well-choreographed routine. On Saturday afternoon, we were able to get about 15 boards routed, including the two 12ft pieces, which were probably the hardest ones to manage. Today, though, we ripped through the rest, and now I have 52 pieces of poplar sitting on my old desk in the basement waiting to be sanded, primed, and painted.
The other major accomplishment for the weekend was getting my new desk set up in my office. For a while now, I’ve been wishing for more storage, and my old desk was okay, but it wasn’t really cutting it:
As a work surface, it was perfectly adequate and sufficiently large, but I have found myself wishing for more storage pretty much, well, everywhere. Over the course of a few weeks (okay, months), I had been building a new desk top to put on some table legs I had gotten at IKEA (Mother’s Day 2016), and everything was finally good to go. We assembled the table legs this morning, and once those were done, set the desk top over the legs:
After dinner and once my parents had left, I collected all of the gear I had dumped on my bed and put my desk back together.
I am beyond happy with the result. It was exactly what I had pictured in my head a year or so ago when I decided I should build a desk and a standing desk in the office. The standing desk is another project for another day (although looking at the space left in the room, I’m not sure I’ll be doing that here), but at this point I’m just a desk lamp, some new displays, and a couple of new display arms away from having the desk setup I’ve been dreaming of.
Oh, and since it was almost 60 outside today, I brought out the grill.
It was beyond delicious.
Next weekend’s forecast: 34 and cloudy.
It is still February, after all.
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