Construction Update January 22-28

Three notable events happened here this week... power pole gone... pantry done... and first window got installed.

The infamous rotten power pole finally got taken down.

It didn't take long to cut up that old cedar pole up for firewood and Shirley packed it off in the wheelbarrow to the wood shed.

You can see how rotten that old pole was.  It could not have been pushed over with my little tractor if it was sound.

The second noteworthy event this week was the completion of the pantry. All except the granite countertop... everything is done here.  On our next trip to Victoria we will pick up the granite and I can install it in just a few minutes.  On the interim a sheet of plywood serves the purpose.

But to get this pantry done was not all that easy for this do-it-yourselfer. Shirley took this photo after the first cabinet door was installed.  What we didn't know at the time was that once all the doors were on we could not pull out the drawers.  #*'%&#^!  Funny thing.  They worked just fine for the past week when the doors were not on and I was waiting to buy the last missing part to install the hinges.

What I didn't realize is that the hinges did not get the doors totally out of the way, and the glide tracks for the drawers hit the edge of the open doors.  I would have to remodel the drawers, make them an inch smaller and put this all back together again.  Chalk it all up to education... Cabinetry Class 101.

In the end the drawers worked out just perfectly.

For my first attempt at making cabinets, I should not complain about having to do something twice to get it right.

Shirley now has a place in the house to keep her bird seed containers... they are on wheels and roll out on the floor.  This section of the cabinet does not have an elevated floor or toe kick... and it allows access  for the crawl space hatch door.

Shirley is getting moved into her new refrigerator.

And her new freezer.  It was pretty tight to get these appliances into place... there was not more than an extra inch to spare.

On the right side of the pantry there is a place for brooms and mops...

And a place for the vacuum hose, attachments and shelves for other cleaning and hot tub supplies.

On the right side Shirley has shelves for a variety of Costco cases of drinks, cans of vegetables, fruits and other bulk purchased foods.

The third noteworthy event this week was the installation of the first window.  I still have to trim it with wider white cedar boards around it... and the Building Inspector will review my system of trimming and flashing around it before I do all 36.  We want to be sure that some little detail does not keep us from meeting code.

See the plywood over the skylight in the workshop?  Also note that old power pole is absent!

High winds one night this past week blew this skylight off... the roofers did this piece of roofing when we were in Cannon Beach for Thanksgiving and likely didn't screw it back down properly.  It will be easier to just buy a new skylight than to replace the plexiglass.

This is one of the huge branches that came down in the windstorm... we were lucky that no trees were blown over in the storm.  We have never seen such high winds since moving here.  It was one pretty scary night.

I was able to get some scaffolding from a neighbour here on Mayne Island, Don Berkley... and it will make installing the windows and shingle siding much easier.  After working in Mexico with the scaffolding there, these frames look brand new... and he has leg jacks and wheels... and there are other parts I still don't know what to do with.  Don has been living in Vancouver these past several months so he is close to the hospital... so he hasn't told me what those extra parts will do.

Construction Update January 7-13

I have a lot to be grateful for this week... not the least of which was watching some incredible golf on TV. This week started and will end with golf tournaments in Hawaii.

It was 1995 when Shirley and I played on the Plantation Course where Steve Stricker won the Sony Open this past weekend.  What a wonderful golf course!  To see the scenery again on TV brought back some wonderful memories... like the birdie on No. 2 par 3.

This weekend it is fun to see more of Hawaii... the Wailea with it's famous #16 fairway.  I took this off the TV since it reminded me of the very first movie I ever saw in a theatre as a teenager... "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World." I never have laughed so hard in my life... but it is under this Big W that the treasure is hidden in that movie.

On Monday I bought 64,000 pounds of coffee.  No, I don't plan to take delivery... it was on the advice of my futures broker, who told me that there is a seasonal opportunity on coffee, so I picked up a few contracts.  On Thursday he called me and said he thought we should sell it since it had gone up so fast, we should take profits and could likely buy it back for a lot less and still enjoy more lift... so we sold it all and I put in another order to buy it back at $10 less.  Sure enough the order was filled after hours Thursday night... so we are hoping it will be good for another run.

What a crazy business.  An old farmer living on an island buying and selling coffee on the telephone... and he never drinks any of it.  Does that make any sense?  ...128,000 pounds of coffee in a week!  I'm guessing that would be over a dozen grain trucks full of coffee beans.  Can you imagine how many pounds of coffee Howard Schultz buys for Starbucks every year?

Trivia:  Did you know that in the last 50 years the stock market has gone up 57% of the time on Friday the 13th?

This year it went down.

This week in the mail my Kreg Jig tool arrived... and it couldn't have come at better time.  I bought if off one of those TV Informercials that run in the middle of the night... i saw it when we were in Kelowna... and it finally came... it sure works slick.  I love it!

Here I am putting together the frame for a cabinet that goes in the pantry.

After drilling the pilot holes it is pretty easy to join pieces of wood with self tapping screws.

I put in all these shelves using the Kreg Jig system... and in less than five minutes after the shelves were in place Shirley was putting stuff on the shelves.

As you know Shirley's word for the year is "Patience..."   and mine is "Faster."  She needs to a little more patience... and I need to go a little faster!

I invented a hidden hatch latch this week.  Since the hatch is mostly under the cabinet, the latch to lift it would not look very pretty in the middle of the floor where we always will be walking.  So I made a simple latch that attaches to a wire the both hide in the crack along the side of the hatch lid.  There is a 10-inch drawer just under the counter top... so when we need to go down there... which is likely next to never... we can remove the drawer to give a little more space, howbeit still pretty skinny access.

The guy who put the stupid access hatch there didn't know there was going to be a cabinet over it.  We had a totally different layout in mind in the beginning... but Plan A didn't work.  Neither did Plan B or Plan C.  We are on Plan D now.  Why is that Plan A never gets built?  I guess we all have to start somewhere.

Another first for me is the aluminum L-trim that I put to keep the tile and grout in place when the hatch lid is moved.  This will keep the grout from getting chipped away if it gets bumped in handling when opening or closing.

On Wednesday we picked up our new refrigerator and freezer for the pantry.  I also brought 15 bags of insulation... and here the cowboy is roping them all tightly together for a safe trip home.  Every time we bring home another load I am thankful for our truck... it has done a lot of work for us.

On Thursday we were thankful to take delivery of our windows.  We had the liners stained... but since I neglected to specify the stain be sealed, we had them delivered into the cabin where we can Varathane them.

There are 36 windows in all... and at this point we have about 16 of them done.  That cabin has been a real blessing... it is great to have a place where we have heat and space to work.  Next year we hope to have heat in our garage... but that doesn't count for this project.

This is the bathroom window on it's side for sealing.  Vented windows take twice as long to do.

On Friday I ordered a granite countertop for the pantry cabinet... and just to be sure we get the same colour match, we are going to do a new laundry counter at the same time.  We did a lot of shopping for various countertops with pricing all over the place between $380 to $2,000 for just the pantry top in either Corian or granite!  No we didn't buy the $380 one... it was a remnant and not Tropical Brown... but it sure was tempting.  It just wouldn't have matched the rest of our countertops.

On Wednesday when we were in Victoria I just happened to see this place called Stone Trends in Sidney.  So I stopped and invited them to quote on our countertop.   I had just been to Capital Glass to have them fix a leak that we thought was coming from around the windshield.  Turned out the leak was because of a plugged drain hole in the sunroof.  Did you know that sunroofs have drainage?  Me either.

This next week I hope to see our pantry completed.  We will pick up the cabinet doors on Monday... which we will have to stain and then lacquer.  I have two drawers to build and install... and the floor tile to set and then grout.  I have most of the tiles cut out to fit... just seven square feet not yet done and that is the part under the refrigerator and the hatch access door.

My quote of the week is very appropriate for me.

"Some mistakes are way too much fun to make only once."


It seems far too often I find myself doing things twice or three times to get it right.

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

The most significant thing that happened this week was the moving of our electrical service.  We have been looking forward to seeing the end of these ugly poles... which soon can be removed.

BC Hydro showed up on Wednesday morning about 9:35, cut off our power and proceeded to disconnect their lines from two old poles, then bring the same wire from the third pole back...

And reconnect us to the new mast on the back of our workshop.  Coming this way took about 100 feet less wire than before... but we then had to take about 75 feet of 1.75" heavy conductor from the new meter base to the house panel.

The whole thing took BC Hydro less than 40 minutes.  They mounted the meter and then turned our power back on.  Wesley, our electrician, had things set up so we would have power into our workshop panel immediately while the house was cut off.

The old 200 amp panel was right in the back of our closet where we are going to be walking to get into our new closet... so we had to move the panel.  This was no small job, so we were glad to get going on this mid-morning.   Since we needed some supplies from Victoria, Shirley went on her own and I stayed to help Wesley move the panel.  With a long extension cord we brought power from the workshop to the house so Wesley could disconnect and label all the wires and know how to get things back the way they used to be.

In about an hour Wesley had the panel removed and we set it up in a much better wall in our new larger closet, only about four feet away from the original location.  Before lunch we had the panel mounted in it's new home and we spent the rest of the afternoon re-routing the wiring so we could reconnect everything to the same breakers, right where they were before.  Many of the wires were long enough so moving them was easy... but there were about eight or ten wires that went into junction boxes with more wire added to them.

When Shirley returned from town we were almost done re-routing wires and all Wesley had to do was connect them to the breakers.  While he did that I took Shirley to the Wild Fennel for supper.  By the time we got home from eating Wesley was ready to turn on the breakers to light up our house.  He worked a ten hour day to see this all completed.  It was no small job.

Wesley said that twice before when he moved an electrical panel and he went to turn the power on it didn't work... and both times it wasn't his fault... there was a power outage on the island!  What are the odds? I fully expected that it would happen again... after all it was raining and stormy all afternoon... and you know how things happen in three's?

The next most significant activity this week was building the shelving for our new pantry.  I really have no previous experience in building or finishing cabinets... so I had a very costly class called Woodwork Finishing 101.  I really should have let Westwood make the pieces for the shelf gables and the 54" cabinet that goes between the fridge and freezer.

But you know me... I thought I could do it cheaper.  So I ordered the doors for the cabinet, bought a couple sheets of nice 3/4" maple plywood and some 3/4" ivory Melamine.  I then proceeded to cut out the pieces and stain them.  I had basically everything done and the next day after Shirley was back from Victoria I started to put the Watco Danish Oil on to the stained maple... we stained them the same colour as our kitchen cabinets. Yikes!  I got a rapid rude education in woodwork finishing.

As you can see from the photo above, I was mystified by the strange circles and blotches that developed as I applied the Danish Oil.  I was just sick.  The more I rubbed the worse it got.  The Danish oil that Shirley went to town for wasn't working for us... so she Googled it up to learn why we had the problem and she soon had the answer.  Since the stain was also oil base they cannot be used together.  Why didn't I think of that?

So out to the workshop I went and started sanding off all the finish.  What a huge job.  I spent a whole morning getting the wood totally stripped so we could re-stain it.  But when we applied the stain again we still had a problem!  There was some weird swirls that seemed to be telegraphing thru giving a really odd pattern that neither of us liked.  It was like the swirl used when we put the oil on.  I tried a second board and it also had the same problem.  What the world was going on?  It was enough to make a grown man cry!

Shirley was ready to just paint the wood a solid colour... maybe an antique look.  But that seemed like even more work that I wanted... plus how good is antique and Melamine going to look together?  So back to the workshop I went and I sanded those two boards yet again.  This time I went deeper and I used two more levels of finer sand paper.

Before I just used 80 and 120 grit paper since that was the belts I had for my electric sander. But I had some 150 and 250 sheets in my sand paper drawer... which meant some serious hand rubbing.  I found I was spending up to an hour to polish a board now.  But when I had the first one done we tested the stain... and it came out absolutely wonderful!

So I spent ALL day Friday sanding and redoing ALL the boards with ALL four sandpapers.  We had to also take off the "iron-on" maple edging and re-apply new edging to all the plywood, since the oil had also affected that part as well, and it was too thin to handle much more sanding.  So, as I am writing this tonight, all the boards have been repaired, sanded and stained and will sit over the weekend drying... getting ready for lacquer.  Am I crazy?

Sunday I will take some sheets of plywood and block off a corner of our new studio to make a paint spray booth.  I bought a new Wagner paint sprayer from Home Depot.  We want to pre-finish the cedar shingles for the siding on the addition as well... and I hope to be able to hang up the boards and end gables for the cabinet and lacquer them too.  Wish me well.  These boards cannot afford another sanding!  The maple skin on this plywood is already too thin in places!

"When you come to the end of your rope, just tie a knot and hang on."

I sent this quote to Shirley on a card in 1965 while she was in hospital for several months... after being in a car accident in Calgary.