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Category: General DIY

Was’sup Monday? It’s ya Boi Marko here with another installment of : Domestic Duties Monday, Ba-Ba-BAAA!

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Here we are just past 9:00am and we’ve got the kids dropped off, clothed, fed, watered & teeth brushed with lunches packed. The first load of laundry in the wash, the dishwasher emptied, and the main floor vacuumed. Followed by a general light tidy up, as fair entries dominate the space, and nothing can get thrown away yet until all tags, and art works are present & accounted for. I think our vacuum now has craft herpes with the amount of glitter I got off the floors near work surfaces. That shits going to be with us through Christmas, if every other previous year is any indication. Ha!

Even managed to get some banking done too, so we’re off on a roll this morning. If it stays dry long enough I think I’ll mow the lawn today too. Expecting a week of rain. Naturally, it being fair time, I should not be surprised by frosts, flurries, or the heavens opening up and dumping buckets of icy rain on us for the four days of the fair. Then afterwards we’ll have a heat wave or two, and I’ll attack the fallen leaves with gusto. Speaking of which, I did two full mulched bags already, so I’m only about ten more from finishing for the season. Just need all of those leaves to come down first. Then it’ll be a matter of tearing down the patio furniture & outdoor kids toys, and making sure the pressure washer hose is disconnected and emptied so it won’t burst, or rupture the gun/nozzles. Same goes for the front garden hose, trigger needs to come off, and the hose dried before storage. And the valve inside the house shut off, and the spigot emptied. All the solar lights can get packed away aswell.

Maybe this year I can get some of the bikes in the shed too, now that we’ve gotten the gazebo out of storage and shipped off to the cottage. A man can dream can’t he? Well the work emails have begun, so I best get going. Ciao Bella!

The right tool for the job.

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So I recently discovered that our aged, and busted dryer vent cover was not put in place properly the first time. Instead of being held in place with masonry screws due to the brick/concrete combo, it was glued in place with silicone. So now I needed to pull off the broken cover shards, scrape away the silicone, and then mark & drill four proper holes to mount the new cover. Sounds easy enough. Well I don’t have any masonry bits. I don’t have a dedicated hammer drill, I have a combo from Black & Decker that’s seen some hard wear in the last three to five years. No good. So I grabbed a 6 amp hammer drill from Canadian Tire on sale no less, down from regular $129.99 to $59.99!, and the masonry screws I’d need and pow! 90 seconds later and all four holes are drilled to depth. Nice! Worked like a charm. 5/32 bit to set some 3/16th concrete screws. Love it. It feels great when a plan comes together.

But here’s the kicker, in between finding the 1/4 inch socket from the set, putting it on my impact driver via adapter, and walking from the garage to the yard I lost the gods be damned socket. I heard no clatter. It’s a tiny 1/4 socket so it wouldn’t clang very loudly if at all, more like a ‘ting’ sounds if that. So boo. My 1/4 socket has disappeared into the shrubs, the grass or flipped into an alternate dimension. I retrace my steps five/six times, and bubcous. Damn! But the drill came with some assorted bits, one of which is a 1/4 inch so I plugged that into my driver and away I went. Another 90 seconds and all four concrete screwbolts are locked in nicely. Spend more time looking for the damn socket than actually fixing my dryer vent issue. I’m happy and annoyed. Strike one more item from the list of things to-do, but lost a socket I’ve never used before, and may never use again. At least it wasn’t my 10mm. Ha!

The Coffee Table Build Episode.

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The one that started out being about turning two book matched Hickory slabs into one monolithic water fall edged table, with a fat & chunky Ash leg on the opposite end. Then I pulled the slabs out from storage and the small one was perfect, and the show piece was cracked in three so badly it snapped in my hands. So new idea. A smaller coffee table using one live edge slab as the top, and the broken pieces of the other as the legs. Then I hated the live edge aspect, and cut it down into a more traditional rectangle. Chopped the Ash chunk into four legs, and decided it was a boring blob of a thing. So I cut skirting, and then I thought, what if I use a Dado to inset the skirting on the interior side of all four legs. After that I figured I should add a drawer that was shallow, and use the skirting to hold up and slide the drawer out, rather than metal drawer slides. Much cheaper option too. Then I thought, well the drawer is so shallow I could build a slatted shelf about 6″ up from the bottom of the legs. I looked at my available raw materials and saw I had to go front to back with six slats rather than across the width. I was hoping to make it look and feel longer by running the open slats across the longer axis, but materials dictated I go otherwise. Not angry. My last vestiges of doubt were on just doing a clear coat vs staining with Danish Oil with a Walnut Tint. I don’t like the bleached look of Ash, so tinted stain we go!  Now once all of this dries I will clear coat with a Varathane brand Diamond spray finish from a rattle can.

I did my glue up in stages to try to offset my amateur hand cut mortises. The tenons I did on the table saw, so I knew they were as good as I could get those. I hand chiseled out a few other odds and ends, but the bulk was done via circular saw on a track, and my Rigid 4512 Table saw. This was the first time I’ve ever used a bow tie to stop a crack. That took some doing, but I don’t hate the end result. I used a flush cut saw to trim off the bulk of the bow tie that sat proud of the table top. Finessed some other over hanging bits with the flush cut saw as well.

Come the fall, I would like to purchase either one long slab or two matching from the same species and actually try a waterfall edge coffee table. I opted for my electric hand planer, and manual hand planes to finish the top surface. I built a router jig out of angle iron to try to flatten the surface of my slabs, but I haven’t yet built the rails/ Saw horses it is meant to stack on top of. I have it ready for next time.

It’s not perfect by any way, shape or form, but I’m slowly getting better at whatever I’m playing at. Should look fine at the cottage or in the basement with my first ever coffee table build from years ago.

Table build progression from raw materials to stained end product. Clear coat finish not shown.

Ooh they do take lovely photos though, don’t they.

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I get subcontracted to produce marketing reports on the semi regular (when Covid isn’t being super shitty) and one of the external clients produces some of the most consistently amazing photos that I get to see. I don’t go to these events, but after reviewing the photo sets, oh boy, sometimes it feels like I went. The colours and composition is just fantastic. I tell you, paying a good photographer real money to capture your event is worth its weight in visual gold. You could live off of these photos for weeks if not months, building social media engagement, advertising, internal intranet posts, newsletters and what not. Don’t skimp. Just because most folks can afford an SLR now, doesn’t mean they know how to frame up a shot or get the best out of the available lighting. It makes a real difference when I get photography from a paid professional, vs a bunch of volunteers snapping random shots, that are blurry, poorly composed, or the lighting is flat, too dark, to bright. I can only do so much to remedy that on my end. But these bad mamma jammas are legit. Can’t show none of it to anybody but the client, but woah buddy, you’d like these pictures of the events.

The same thing applies to product photography. Get your shit infront of a professional, don’t try to do it yourself. Or failing a real photographer get the best 3D model/rendering you can afford. Will beat a cell phone image any day of the week. But I digress.

Hot one today. My friend who works in weather forecasting says we have potential for tornadoes in southern Ontario again, today. As well as a wind storm front passing through here tomorrow. Going to be a wild couple of days around here. Hopefully not another Derecho. Because that shit tore through our farm property and did six figures worth of damage is not more. Yikes.

Getting very close to final assembly and glue up of my small multi purpose table. I have a slight issue to fix with the shelf, but otherwise should be good to move forward and complete it sooner rather than later. I also stripped my ninja turtle sculpt back down to the armature. I hated the pose, and then a bunch of stuff was miss proportioned, so as I have no dead line nor client in mind, I took it back down to bare wire, and reposed the armature. Had to drill out new holes, but I’m ok with that. I may add water or sewer features to the base to hide the extra unused holes. A chance for some mixed media materials to be incorporated. Fun times!

I figure I will wait until my turtle is done before I do any painting. My Ogre is baked and based. Ready and waiting on my turtle to get done. Ciao Bella!

Attempting to fix the fridge freezer snafu.

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The freezer works, now a little too well. Instead of reading zero, it’s at minus six, which means the vents have iced up all the way through, which makes the fridge portion hot as it has no cold air coming into it. I tried scraping the ice off, not very effective, as I can’t tell how deep the ice goes back into the vents. I tried hot water on the vents, but that made a mess. So next steps are to unplug the whole thing for forty five minutes to help the unit reset itself. Or I attempt to defrost the freezer portion, or… gulp. Hire a repairman to fix it for us if parts are readily available. Bah hum bug!

In other news the sculpture got a really solid head start yesterday. I have the torso, abdomen, legs and feet on, plus both arms down to the wrist. No head yet, or hands. I haven’t given much thought to the shell yet either. Or how I will get it to attach to the main body. The shell will be 75% tinfoil and masking tape, so I think I can reasonably contain the overall weight for that portion of the free standing sculpture. I don’t know if it will be any good, but why let fear of sucking stop me eh? Never has before. There is no confidence like that of a mediocre man! Give’r!

I have some finer hand cuts to make on my table build and that should mostly finish up the structural portion of the project. Then on to sanding for the foreseeable future. Top surface, four legs, three sides of the skirt/rails, drawer front, drawer panel, cross braces, inset slats, and the internal drawer dividers. Plus I need to stain the drawer panel, and then wax the panel edges, and the internal rails so it pulls in and out smoothly without catching, or snagging. I hope to avoid racking this way too, but I’m no craftsman. This way also meant I didn’t have to buy drawer slides, which are expensive. To have those on here, I’d need much wider skirting, which would reduce the space on the shelf, if I could even have one at that point. Maybe a larger Walnut drawer would have been a nice touch. Or if I’d cut more Hickory strips I could have glued up a wider panel to do the same floating drawer. Maybe when I build a waterfall edge coffee table I’ll add a deeper Walnut drawer to it for storage. If I can afford a darker hard wood to use that is.

My family is on day six of their journey out west. They are currently in Alberta where they will receive upwards of 100mm of rain today and tomorrow. Not a trip through the mountains that I’d want to do in such heavy rain. I don’t envy them much. Manitoba and Saskatchewan were less than impressive if I were to go by what my mother wrote. Flat & empty. Sounds like no fun at all.

I wonder if the fridge went bad after the 26 hrs power outage, because I’ve never had this particular issue before. Mind you the fridge is almost twelve years old now. Hopefully we can remedy it ourselves as inexpensively as possible. This is not my area of expertise. Down right terrifying.

Sculpting: Ogre Rogue progress.

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I am turning the corner on my Ogre bust sculpt. Adding in the clothes and details. I have a modified war hammer axe in the works to pin onto the left shoulder. Should have an attached left hand to go with it to finish off the silhouette. Haven’t sculpted hands in a while. Should be a frustratingly difficult addition to my project.

Dashing pretty boy Ogre Rogue.

I think I’m going to tackle a Ninja Turtle next. I have done a bunch in clay over the years, eight or so to he more precise. But never in Super Sculpey. I’ll do one up so that I can paint it. Maybe a full figure and not just an armless bust this time around? I’ve got months to figure it out. I’m in no rush.

Also my table build is progressing at a good pace. Still cutting down and building the pieces. Going to be a lot of sanding to do before final assembly and then moving on to finishing. Flat slab top, thin drawer below, with a slatted shelf near the bottom. A mixed utility small table. Adapt and move forward!

Phew! That was a mad scramble…

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But now it’s time for something a little different. I’ve been tasked with building two new replacement newel posts for my FIL. The current ones have rotten over the two decades since they were installed, so I’m hoping that the two new Cedar ones I’m making as replacements hold up just as long or longer. I will prime them in thick white oil based exterior paint, so I hope that helps.

My conundrum is that I have two slightly different pieces of trim, enough to do one newel post cap each. Do I do them in similar but not the same trim (which I have on hand, and is therefore free) or do I go buy a full length so they both match, but it’ll cost me money to do so. Hmm. The problem with being cheap/frugal is you gotta be ok with things being eclectic, or slightly off and not at all matchy-matchy. It’s for an exterior entrance that nobody ever uses, so I think I can get away with it. The Cedar I bought for a Christmas gift for my BIL where in I didn’t need all 8 lengths, just seven of them to complete my signage gifts. So the cost was sunk in another project. I think I have answered my own question.

My wrist is aflame from yesterdays mad rush of 182 images, with an additional 74 this morning. I am done on my end, awaiting review and any change orders or additional requests. Glad for the work. It made Friday fly by without any fuss. Our holiday plans changed on us by way of “The ‘Vid” so we are searching for a way to remedy that in the near future. Oh well.

Still no new progress on my childrens book. I might shelve it for the time being. Mind you, I still have five more weeks of school days in which to pick it back up before schools out for summer and my minions are home full time for 9 weeks. Then I will get very little done by way of hobbies. But I will accomplish paid work, don’t you worry about that. I think I have one or two reports coming for the summer and one more for the fall. Not terrible, not great. I hope for more than that. Or some extra can labels, t-shirts & apparel, retail signage, catalogue work or build from the ground up branding/packaging work in the alcoholic beverage space.

Though, maybe I should stop chasing the nostalgia of my alcoholic beverage packaging days. Rose coloured glasses and all that jazz. I once had the opportunity to build, from scratch a proprietary glass bottle, and it was looking amazing, but the job was put on hold during a personnel issue inside the brewery/distillery and I never got to see the design go to market. We had built a series of eight flavoured cans too for a Mimosa project, well ahead of the curve, but that got stopped too. Much to my chagrin. It was good work on my part, and that of the brand team. I was very upset to see it go nowhere.

Amazing how much better everything looks…

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When the leaves are out on the trees and the blooms are all as colourful as ever. A slight sheen of rain on the grass, and a shine on the rustling leaves in the breeze. A quiet morning, rich with the scent of damp earth and wet pavement. The slight crunch of grit on the asphalt as you walk about your day. Peaceful and serene.

It is Thursday, and I haven’t put any work into my childrens book in about seven or more days now. I think on it some times, but not enough to move forward with it. I have three backgrounds left to paint, and then the characters left to populate the scenes. It all feels oddly disjointed, but that’s how things are these days. I am slowly coming to terms with building over days, weeks and months, rather than rushing to complete a task in a day. I have to actively stop myself when I feel that draw to rush ahead, move faster, just “get it done”. Not that by being slower I’m getting closer to perfect. I just don’t want to take short cuts because I feel pressed for time. Take the time I need to complete the task properly. Not just to get it finished.

The screen door is now built and assembled. I need to measure and cut my hinge slots. Do the same for the frame where it will reside, and then hang it up for good. I pre cut some internal trim, to keep out bugs and such, and have a latch to attach, but I am otherwise very close to done.

I started to cut strips for my kitchen window screen as well, so that is progressing along side the door. The window is a combination of Cedar and Walnut. An odd combination, to be sure, but one that will hold up over time, I hope! These will be mitered and require a little more finesse than the bulky, chunky Ash door, that is outward facing. Thus, not seen as much as the kitchen window over our sink.

Back in the shop for a partial build day.

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Yesterday I milled down all of the Cedar trim I would need to fill in the inside portion of my screen door. I cut a 1x6x8ft board down into eight .25 strips, and then trimmed those to be .75 inches wide by 8ft, by .25 inches thick. I pin nailed in the first layer. Now I have to cut up and staple in place the actual mesh material. Another big step forward. Makes me nervous. I have the second layer of trim cut and ready to sandwich in the mesh material. Fingers crossed I don’t screw this up, as I only have so much mesh to work with before I’d have to order & wait for more to arrive.

Once this goes in, I’ll affix the handle, and push plate. Then we are on to hinges, and hanging the heavy thing up in the door frame. Wish me luck! I’m going in.

Waiting on mesh! Almost done the build.

I forgot to mention (not really) that today is Day 150!

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Which I think is a pretty decent milestone to reach for having written something here on my blog every single day. Weekends, illness, good times and bad. I’m pretty happy with that. Not only that, but the discipline to keep writing has helped me develope a commitment to lifting weights and exercising again. Which my heart will thank me for in the long run. If I can psyche myself up to run or bike that would potentially go a long way to help reduce my waist line. It has made it easier to pick up something new and do a little of it more often than not. I switched to home reno projects, and away from my children’s book last week, and this one. But I did manage to get an awful lot of it onto paper, and I’m in a great spot when I go back to it. I’m reading proper books again, not just twitter and the news, which is great. I miss reading when all I do is scroll twitter and read about politics 280 characters at a time. I’m currently painting my screen door frame, waiting on primer to dry actually, if you must know. Then I need to cut down Cedar strips and keep this bad boy rolling. I want to have it hung up before June 1st, which is attainable, if I don’t all of a sudden become paralyzed by fear of fucking something up. I’ve even made plans on an interior window project next. So I need this one to go fairly smoothly, now that I am committed to finishing. The trim will have to be cut twice, into 8ft long strips from a 6x1x8, and then taken to a .75 down from an inch in width. My door, after sanding, planing and lots more sanding, is no longer two inches thick where the mesh screens will be inset. So slight tweak there, but nothing too awful. Maybe i don’t have to take it to .75, i could potentially go thicker. I need to double then triple check my measurements before I cut it down too far.

So Day 150 huh. Seems like a lot. But isn’t really all that much. Not even a full half a year yet. My “streak” began about two weeks prior to Christmas when I was panicking about how little I had written last year vs. The year before. Far more traffic with short/micro stories than my regular blog jabber. No surprise there. I’m not an interesting person, nor am I famous or grotesquely handsome. Just run of the mill me. Running my mouth and thinking thoughts like a person.