With the coming of fall weather, the gap underneath the door finally got annoying to the point where I milled a new threshold out of Ipe and installed it. Lessons learned:

1. Despite how hard and dense it is, Ipe actually mills fairly easily.

2. The sawdust stinks, spreads a green (despite the nice color of the wood) dust over everything, and hangs in the air. Definitely open the shop doors and use a respirator.

3. No matter how nicely you prep your work area, if you do finishing outside it’s guaranteed that as soon as you get that first coat of oil on there the wind will come up and blow dust over everything.

Also got the cabinet to the left of the stove in place, the rest of the drawer slide evaluation done, and much of the wood glued up for the pantry shelves. Pictures of that coming as I get more of it installed.

It’s gonna be hotter than the hinges of Hades today, so I went out this morning and finished up the porch rails.

Project page coming, but I want to take a few more pictures with different light.

On the left is how it looks now, on the right is how it used to look. You may think it’s not an improvement, but if you look closely, on the blown-up version of the left, you can see a new lattice there.

When we moved in, the back yard had an awning, with lots of ferns and other low sun plants. Most of what we want to grow wants full sun, so we pulled out the awning, and we really need to replace the fence, but we haven’t gotten there yet. So this is forward enough that hopefully we can keep control of the decorative peas and morning glories that we want to plant there to obscure the fence, until we can get in to clean up the fence, and is set far enough forward that we can build the fence.

The wood is Massaranduba, the top rail is attached with Sipo floating tenons (The Domino, is there anything it can’t do?), and the wires below that are multistrand secured at each end with u-clamps.

The progress on the new front door continues. In my previous front door update, I’d mocked up a couple of images of what the trim might look like, including a few curves. We put a couple of pieces up there, taped out a few curves just to be sure, and rather than having just a touch of whimsy, the curves made the whole thing look affected; it became a parody of Disneyland, rather than just a subtle homage.

So we backed off and went with straight. We were initially going to do a straight joint across the top, but as I sat down to cut the joint I thought “why not?” and slapped a dovetail shape in there. I believe we’ve got enough slop in there to deal with grain expansion, but I do regret not insetting that a little bit more so that it doesn’t get lost in the joint on the side.

The wood is Brazilian Redwood, also known as Massaranduba, that we got from the surplus bin of a local high end deck lumberyard. The side rails for the porch will be made of the same materials.

When I was tearing off the old trim I had some reservations because of how far I thought this process could snowball, but my neighbor not only gave me encouragement, but delivered a ladder that fit the front space better, and a Sawzall, just in case I needed it. I didn’t, but that gave me the encouragement I needed to really get medieval on the trim.

Attachment was done with a Hitachi brad nailer (“Brad Nailer” sounds like an Owen Wilson character, doesn’t it?) that I borrowed from a friend, I have a little technique to learn, because I have to set two of ‘em manually, but wow that’s a different world from swingin’ a hammer by hand.

similar entry at my personal blog.

The ugly “security” door on the front has always bothered me. It’s indicative of a bad neighborhood, where people don’t trust their neighbors, and we were very sure that it was an over-reaction by a person growing old and settling into their fears, otherwise we wouldn’t have bought the place. Thus it’s been important to me that we replace it fairly quickly.

We’d gotten a fir replacement front door door for $10 from one of the local building materials recycling places, sanded most of the stain off of it, were ready to hit it with the chemicals to do the final stripping and refinish it, when this gorgeous mahogany door came up on Craigslist. It was a bit more than we wanted to pay right now, but it was close enough to the door we wanted eventually, and the price was good enough, that we leaped on it. I’ve put a single coat of Penofin for hardwood on it, it’ll get another coat in mid-May, but it’s been sitting in the back waiting for the right time.

On Saturday I dragged the door around front to see how it’d fit, pulled the old door off, and started with the “if I do this, how does it work”, and eventually ended up with the door on hinges, lacking only a little door frame planing to make the whole thing fit. So I took a 1/16th off the top of the frame and installed the locks.

Now we need to tackle the trim. We either need to move in the existing white trim, because of the gaps where the security door frame used to lie, or install new trim. I just got a bunch of “Brazilian Redwood” which would probably be a little redder than the mahogany of the door, but not too much, so I just used a sample of the door mahogany. We’re going to replace those rails on either side of the front stoop, so I whipped up some visualizations of what it might look like:

The door as it is now, with no trim
With a double curve, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom
With a single curve, narrow at top and bottom
Straight

Same content on my personal site.

So we’ve called and cancelled that installation, and are now on to other things.

Option 1 would be something like the Andersen maple windows. We also need to look at the Pella windows. Certainly no cheaper, but if we did the work ourselves (work that Home Depot subsequently estimated at about $1800 of the total cost) probably not a whole lot more expensive.

Option 2 would be something higher end than Andersen or Pella, one of the smaller specialty window companies. Still looking at our options.

Option 3 would be waiting for the right things to come across Craigslist. Definitely a possibility, although good wood windows don’t seem to be discounted much.

Option 4 would be to build ‘em ourselves. At first I thought this was absurd for modern window technologies, but as I look further, it turns out we can buy “Integrated Glass Unit”, or “IGU”, assemblies, with the dual panes already put together from “Low-E” glass, possibly even argon filled. Put that in our own frames and we not only get the look we want, we also get the advantages of modern window technologies.

The down-side is there’s all sorts of other hardware we have to come up with, and it’s more work. On the other hand, it’s fine joinery, so it could be really cool work…

The other down-side is that the outside of that would be wood.

However, that means no pictures and no progress to report.

Thanks to some help from fellow home refurber MRTRIM, I think I’ve got a clearer view of how to fit these things once I get them finished. For inside corners, it sounds like I take one of the boards, cut a miter on it as though I was going to do a miter joint, but then clamp it, take a coping saw, and cut away where that bevel matches the profile. I even cut it back at a negative bevel, so that the edge that mates to the straight piece of wood is sharp and can bend a little bit, making the fit as tight as possible.

Normally, with painted trim, any goofs here can be fixed with putty and paint. We’ll still be using our share of wood filler (if nothing else we’ll have some nail holes to touch up), but getting this as clean as possible is a priority.

I’m also calling up the guy who refinished our floors (and did an awesome job) and paying him for an hour or two of talking with me about the details. Specifically, we’ve got some gaps and possible wobbles in the floor that I want to make sure we’re accounting for.

And then for the hard decisions:

We need to join some of these boards for longer runs. I could just do a biscuit or Domino enhanced butt joint, but I’ve also thought about attempting to box/finger joint them, or use the Domino to cut keys, and make the keys out of a lighter wood, so that the joints are highlighted.

And then on the outside corners, I’ve been thinking about either dovetailing those joints, which could be really hard (I’d have to mount the jig and run the router on their sides), and alignment would have to be dead-on, or maybe just miter and key-joint them, which could be easier and which I could probably do with the Domino.

Yesterday I ripped the boards down to 4” wide, the widest I felt that I could reasonably get out of the lumber, and started to mill it into shape. Charlene and I ran it through the planer to take a whisker off and bring it down to 5/8”, cut a 3/8” diameter quarter round on the top in two passes, the first left to right to take off most of the stock, the final cut was a climb cut so I could end up with a smoother surface.

Then we started sanding, 320 grit with the sander running as slow as possible, so that we don’t end up putting flat spots on the curve. This evening I hope we can finish sanding and lay on a super thin coat of shellac, and then I need to find a good quartz based pore filler that we can color match and use to smooth the surface before we put the final finish on it.

Probably should start cutting it to size soon, though, because I’m fairly sure we’ll be tweaking the fit a bit with sandpaper as it goes in.

We picked up a bunch of Peruvian mahogany box beams off of Craigslist. They’ve been sitting in the attic, waiting for that task to come up on the queue. It did.

Ow, do my hands hurt, both from all the splinters and cuts, and from gripping the pliers to pull those nails.

There are a few nails in there yet, so I’m going to have to be very careful as I fire up the router, but left to be done is to select some of the thicker boards from the narrow stacks, cut them to 4” wide, plane them to 5/8” (just a hair), put a roundover on one side, and install them.

We’ll probably have to cut a few small rabbets, a few sections of the floor were repaired when it was refinished and the new wall gap isn’t as consistently 5/8” as it was, and I’ll set up a jig on the router table to cut the butt joint profiles for the inside corners. Outside corners will be miters.

(Mirrored from my personal site)