The first item I refinished was an antique rocking chair which I tackled in May & June of 2019. That was my first taste of tearing down, repairing, sanding and refinishing an actual piece of furniture. It was hot, difficult but ultimately rewarding and educational. So much so I wouldn’t do an other item until 2021, ha! But seriously I swore a lot, and picked away at it, 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there, every so often over a two month period. Seems to be the way I work on my hobbies.
The OG rocking chair, and various states of sanding and stripping the old finish.Even more sanding of those damnable spindles, and then the dark walnut stain I ended up using.
It was pre-covid times, and I didn’t document all the steps I undertook all that thoroughly. If I recall I used 80/120/220/320 & 400 grit sand paper to make the seat, arm rests and head rest as silky smooth as you can imagine. Felt amazing under my finger tips. Had a rich warm colour when finished. All in all a pleasant project to undertake.
Some of you might know that in late summer through until late fall I had attempted to build a screen door for the back of my house, which I started far too late, and missed open window / wide open door season by several weeks. So that lead me to putting that project on the back burner until Spring time when I feel as though I can devote time to it, and the weather will warrant my doing so. So, after putting that on hold I wanted another project to do in my down time between paid graphic design work. The table was delivered in several pieces on November 2nd, as I recall, and was in a state of disrepair.
It had cracked and crumbling paint, water stains, mould, flaking lacquer finish on the top, and smelled a bit funky to boot. It didn’t have any middle leaves, and the leg attachment points were worn out or missing or entirely broken. So it required me to strip it all down to bare wood, cut new hardwood braces for the legs, glue/ screw / pin nail portions together and then to be refinished with stain & paint and possibly if the weather holds out a clear coat on top of Varathane’s Diamond Wood Finish.
Follow along on my mini wood refinishing project from November / December of 2021
The original Table top with water stains and mould patches.Breaking down the table into its individual components for sanding and cleaning.The original state of the four legs.A comparison of one sanded table portion and the untouched side.
As I stated earlier, the table arrived in pieces, and I needed to break them down into smaller parts for cleaning and sanding, and looking for any major cracks, weakness or damages. This didn’t take me more than about thirty minutes for the whole table. I knew the leg braces were either missing or broken, and that the lower portion of the table legs would need some putty work. No big deal there. I opted not to use any chemical strippers on the table as I don’t have an exhaust fan at the moment, and smells from the garage make their way into the basement (which isn’t ideal). So I used sanding, a whole shit load of sanding. I went from 40 to 60 to 80 to 100 to 120 to 220 grits on all of the parts. The table top I went an extra step and went up to 320 grit, because I had it, and it gets so smooth, it feels like glass. My work flow was to do every piece using the same grit, so that I always knew where I was with my sanding schedule. It helps that this old workers table was put together with a lot of screws, so I could disassemble it easily to get to all of the nooks and crannies. Also made putting the sections back together a breeze.
The legs were stripped using a heat gun and putty knife, and then a card scraper.Keeping track of my pieces in between grits when sanding.Started to glue up the skirts and leg braces where they bolt to the table.Adding Danish oil with a dark walnut stain embedded in it to the skirts and underside of the exposed table.Adding the Danish oil to the table top.Admiring the colours of the Danish Oil finish.
The legs were by far the most difficult portion to work on. I had originally thought I would chuck each leg into my lathe, turn the speed right down and sanding them with little to no physical demands on my body, but my four jaw chuck choose this moment to crap out on me, and replacing it was too expensive at this point in time. So the forty dollar heat gun makes an appearance and storms the barn! It was great. I could get through one leg in about 1 hr. After I had the heat gun and putty knife put away, I turned to a curved card scraper to really get in there and get those layers of nasty chipped old paint off of the legs. Leaves a nice finish that is easy to sand – relatively. Then it was about four hours of hand turning the legs with one hand, and sanding vigorously with the other. My forearms and hands did not appreciate this at all. Once I got up to 150 grit, I used an air compressor to blow off the dust that gathered in the crevices. I used the bolts to hang them up along my garage door, and then used a rattle can of white paint/primer 2X to paint them a bright white again. Originally I wanted to go with a softer off white, borderline yellow – feel more french with the walnut top, but I couldn’t find any, and I wasn’t going to drive all over town just to not find it. I let those hang dry, and then I artificially antiqued them with some 220 grit sand paper, and they were done.
The colours have a stark contrast.Finished table – all assembled and ready to deliver.
If it weren’t so close to zero degrees celsius here in Ontario I would venture to add the spray on clear coat of Varathane Diamond Wood Finish, but I don’t want it to get chunky or spit out blobs that you can feel under your hand. So all in all it took me about twenty hours over six weeks to get this project done, and I enjoyed just about every minute of it, except those spindle legs! Straight blocky chunky legs only next time!
Two years ago I refinished a rocking chair, but I can’t find any of those images. Next year I hope to tackle either another table or perhaps a chest of drawers or an old hutch of some kind. Hope you have a great Holiday Season, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year! May your wood working DIY projects go smoothly or at least teach you a valuable lesson. ~M
Some of these titles came out well before 2021, and I also ended up reading all seven of the Harry Potter® books out loud to my eldest daughter this year, but I’d read those myself when they came out back in the early 2000’s, so I won’t count them here, but that took up much of my mental capacity to read this year.
The selection of books that I read for pleasure this year (2021).
The two Fart Quest books were meant to be read to my daughter so that we could think about starting up some short D&D sessions now that I had built a bunch of terrain panels (pictured inset). But I enjoyed them immensely and didn’t feel like sharing yet. Plus the text is still a little above her reading comprehension level so perhaps next year! I have the third book on order, which was initially scheduled for September, but has been bumped to February of 2022. Chasing New Horizons was an amazing retelling of the Pluto missions, and I was riveted throughout the whole book. The pictures are incredible as well. Black Star Renegades was a fun romp in a Star Wars adjacent sand box. Project Hail Mary was a clever and entertaining entry from The Martian’s Andy Weir, which still proves to be one of my all time favourite books, alongside Jurassic Park, and the Death of Superman novelization. Martha Wells has a fantastic short story series in the Murder Bot Diaries, with the newest installment called Fugitive Telemetry. I had heard a number of people talk about The Forever War, and I can see why, it was pretty good, although a whole lot of current science fiction has leaned heavily on this book, so if I’d have read it much earlier in my formative years, I think it would pack a heck of a wallop. Mars Rover Curiosity was pretty much a text book, which means it was dry, but also informative. A trade off for certain, but, worthy of a read if you love space exploration and drones. The Goblin Emperor was a slow burn, but still exciting and very interesting. It is probably the most off the beaten path for me from this years selection of reading, but I really did enjoy the palace/royal intrigue elements. Out of nowhere comes the last on the list Troll Fell, which was a quickly paced story of rural viking woes, and trolls, and gold & treasure.
As I mentioned earlier I have the third Fart Quest book on order for early 2022, and I also have the last installment of The Expanse, book #9 to read after Christmas. There is a Shiflett brothers sculpting book that was supposed to arrive in November, but hasn’t shipped yet, due to supply/shipping issues with paper coming out of the USA.
I hope you’ve all managed to find the time to read great books of any length. I used to be such a length of novel snob, but since I wrote a book of short stories myself in 2020, which I published in March of this year, I am far more attentive to the story itself rather than the page count.
These are typically the type of thing that most people don’t bother to read, and I’m cool with that. As this sort of thing is for the poster rather than the audience. There was a definite shift in my workload and type of projects this year, compared to last year at least. Usually I would devote the majority of my off time to sculpting in clay or Super Sculpey®. Of which I did do some, but no where near what I have done in years previous. By that, I mean that I produced four this year. Two in plastercine and two in Super Sculpey® that I have yet to paint, though I did manage to get them baked and cured. My day job was fairly slow in the first half of the year, but I managed to pick up two new clients that have done a fair number of projects each, plus my returning clients all had work for me to do this year, which I am very thankful for. The big To-Do this year was Wood working. I was able to get out and into my shop and do a number of new and exciting projects this year in various types of wood. I have a good portion of Ash, Spalted Maple, Walnut, Pine and Cedar sitting around so those where what I worked in primarily. I was also able to add some textile work into the mix with Felt, Faux Leather and some real Sheep Skin Leather. I used the textiles on my dice trays, tool box trays, and to line the insides of my Harry Potter® Trunks. Below is the list of wood working projects from this year.
(3) Dice Trays – Lined in Felt or Faux Leather – Spalted Maple, (1) Die Tower – Spalted Maple, (2) Dice Vaults – Spalted Maple, (3) Harry Potter® Trunks – Pine, Cedar, Elm – Lined in Felt – Trimmed out with Ash, (1) Walnut Leather Working Tool Box – With (1) matching Tool Tray lined in Faux Leather – Trimmed out with Felt, (2) Walnut paper towel holders, (1) Pine Skid/Organizer for Pool Noodles and Towels, (1) Ash wheeled cart for old table saw, (1) Cedar box joint job box, (1) Cedar Porch Tray/Shelf that fits over the railing, (1) Elm Craft Supply box – Lined in felt, (1) Mixed Wood Antique Table that I am currently refinishing, (9) Cedar routered orchard signs, (3) Cedar name plates for gifts.
I have this feeling that I did a few more projects that I can’t immediately recall because I gave some stuff away to friends this year because it took me a while to sort out how best to approach some projects and I had to make more than I needed in order to be able to throw away the first iterations that were done incorrectly. A case in point, would be to use ply wood inserts for the base of the dice trays and trunks because real wood warps and twists after it has been milled flat in such a humid province like Ontario, Canada. I always hated the look of plywood, but a 3/8’s sheet with rich, thick felt glued over the top face is super sturdy and you’d never know unless you look underneath. A few years ago I refinished a rocking chair which was a lot of work, but also very satisfying, so I’m taking a crack at an old weather beaten table that was improperly stored at the cottage. I can’t make it look brand new, but I can make it look much, much better. Something you’d be proud to have in your home for playing cards on, or having a board gaming session.
Besides those things, we have done as much as we can to stay safe from Covid-19, I qualified to get a third dose early, and our youngest are finally eligible to get their first jabs in the coming weeks. I managed to get out while the numbers were low in October, to go and see Dune® in a D-Box Atmos seat late one Sunday night, and it was pretty great. It spurned me on to finish the first Dune® book, which was pretty dense but ultimately enjoyable, as I now look forward to Part Two in 2023! I was fortunate enough to get to read a bunch of great books this year. If I can find them I will write another post about them as a heart felt recommendation. Some of them were early Science Fiction classics written decades ago, and some of them came out this year or last year, so there’s a pretty good spread of the new and old in that reading list. The holiday season is baring down on us, and the new year approaches. I wish you all well, and hope that you are all safe & sound.
I’m also going to plug my book of short stories again, available through Kindle Unlimited.
Colonoscopy, I am reminded of just how difficult it was to be in high school with an undiagnosed case of Crohns Ileitis. The trick was trying to get through all of my classes whilst also having to make upwards of eighteen or more trips to the toilet on any given day. Every day I can get chills thinking of that building pressure in my abdomen, just churning away. It made me wish for one of those relief valves they put on cows with an open flame, when they get too much methane trapped in their stomachs, and you can lie the cows down, and they go off like a gut powered Bunsen burner. Oh, the relief that would have provided me at the time. I could have killed for something like that. And I will tell you what, you may think, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that, in high school? No way! , you’d feel too ashamed or indignant!’ , and I’d say, after the twelfth pit stop in the men’s room, that I frankly don’t give a shit, and I want this bloating and belly crushing pain to go away, if only for a few hours at a time. I had some real doozy days in high school. I puked all over the inside of my principals Benz on a trip to my doctors office at one point. I know I’ve thrown up inside the office a few times. Had to race home in order to change clothes on many an occasion. IBS and the like are not glamorous maladies. Not to mention all of the fatigue and depression that follows closely behind. Oh, some of it was just awful. Any one with stomach or bowel issues understands the adage of “Never trust a fart”. All too well. But I’m a lucky one, I’ve been in remission for the better part of a decade or more. I had one flare up several years ago, but that was brought on by Mono/Epstein Barr, and I don’t really count it. It still lasted about three months, and required a nine week course of steroids, but eh, not my doing, so I don’t count it. If you want to hear some funny and embarrassing stories, get into a room full of people with moderate to severe Crohns or Colitis and listen to them tell very humbling stories of missed body cues and being mere steps away from the salvation of a toilet bowl, sink, drain, bush or a bucket. We’re a riot when we’re not laid out with a thousand yard stare, and intestinal cramps that feel as though they could crack vertebrae. Here I am, one of the lucky ones, so… yeah. Get yourselves looked at if something feels amiss.
How the hell did you manage to do that!” He shouts from the front door, his voice carrying down the length of the hall to the occupied bedrooms. His breath steaming in the icy morning chill air. “Sweet cheese babe, the two swing arms that are supposed to move up and down are bent entirely outwards. It’s a steel plate you’ve bent, how? Just how? Why would you – why on earth, just what were you even trying to do?” The stream of consciousness is rambling out of the man in an irritated staccato. Followed intermittently by loud sighs and and gasps of suppressed rage. “You had to unfold it to use it, didn’t you look to see how the mechanism worked when you set it up?” With a sudden whoosh the front doors shut, and loud stomps across the front porch can be heard. His voice fades into muffled exclamations of indignant confusion. It is Friday morning. The sun is shining, though mostly obscured by wispy clouds on a brisk early morning breeze. Life moves on.
In mid November, and the day was dreary, grey and cold. The leaves have long since fallen from the trees, and everything is a mucky mixture of crushed leaves and water logged grass clippings in mud. The wind has started to pick up and what was a bland flat lit day is now quickly deteriorating into a murky black dusk. Perfect timing for it to begin to down pour now that we have to pack up all our things, muster the kids into the car, and head home after the impromtu long weekend spent at the cottage preparing for the coming of winter. It has been a bitterly cold, and long weekend spent out of doors, tackling chores that were better suited to the warmer days of late September or even early October. But alas, priorities for all involved were not exactly aligned at that point in the year. So here we are, two tired and mopey children, a cascade of rain hammering down in sheets, and the prospect of a three hour drive home, and then school early in the morning. Our youngest has napped fr the first time in two years today. Not a good sign. But she doesn’t have a temperature and isn’t coughing or sneezing, so onward we press, towards home. Fifteen minutes into the drive, she begins to vomit all down her front, and into her car seat. She manages to do this in near silence. But my wife, whom is driving, notices her rolling forwards in the glare of the rear view mirror. “She’s throwing up!”. She says, nudging my arm. I turn to look into the back seat, and there is the eldest, hands on chin, deeply engrossed in her movie. “Not her, it’s Ashley!”. Twisting to look directly behind me, I can see the dark grime on Ashley’s chin and chest from where she has thrown up her chocolate milk and what looks like a first full of Cheetos. “Oh!” I say. I frantically dig around at the kids feet to find any old containers. Finding an old cookie tin I hold it up to Ashley’s face as she bucks and heaves into a coughing fit followed by a glob of vomit. “No…. no… I don’t want it daddy….!” She screams in between heaves. “It’s ok baby, this will keep you cleaner, I can tip it out once we stop off the highway.” Variations of this follow until we pull off the rural highway, and come to a stop under a street lamp outside of a road side restaurant. Opening the door to assess the level of destruction. It’s not too bad, a bit on her chest, face and hands, and a glob on her leg and a dribble or two on the chest harness of her car seat. In a wave of miasma the smell hits me full in the face. To my dismay I then realize, our Ashley has been out of diapers for more than a year, and we no longer travel with a diaper bag, or wet wipes. Thinking quickly my wife hops out of the drivers seat, while my eldest quivers at the sight and smell of her younger sister’s stomach contents. Rooting through her luggage to hand me an old worn t-shirt. I unstrap Ashley and proceed to wipe her down, face, chest, hands and legs. I pick her up for a look over and shuffle her off to the back of the car for a change of clothes. A few heart beats later we’re strapped back in, she is sound asleep, and we are back on the road. It is still raining heavily, and the night is both dark and cold. The youngest, Ashley, will not be attending school the next day.
Due to my missing a summer and early fall deadline for my hand built screen door build, I’m going to shift gears for a bit and move on to refinishing a table for my in-laws that has some water damage, fifteen layers of paint and needs some TLC. I’m going to break it down into the smallest allowable pieces and then sand the hell out of it, before I decide if I’m going to repaint it white, or stain it to make it look a little more classy. I had hoped to get further along on my screen door build, but my hand cut mortise and tenons are taking forever, and I can’t seem to cut a straight line for shit. On the up side, the reason I didn’t meet my warm weather deadline to hang the screen door, was because I used those eight weeks of school term without kids around to tackle every other home DIY project, so I’m not too upset about it. I may very well be worth it for me, to practice some of those mortises before committing to an exterior door. If I can remember to i will attempt to take some photos of the table to be finished, but I doubt I’ll remember. I was fortunate enough to get through one of this weeks two marketing reports over the weekend, freeing up some time to do more woodworking. I thought I’d have to wait to start until next week, but nope! I hauled ass, and did page by page proofing as I went. It also helps that I spent some time on the front end building up my pages so it could be a smooth process to build out my reports with actual, factual data sets. Time to clean up the yard, and put away the summer toys, as we’re in Canada and it could start to snow at any minute, and we’ll not come out of it until late April. Cheers! to you all!
Well, that is unless I decide to trim out the basement bathroom, but that’s another matter. This project that I picked up again today is the screen door for the back of the house. Now I originally started this last year, or possible the year before that. I know the Ash took forever to flatten on my Busybee planer, and it pushed my Ryobi table saw to the near limit. Since my project is just shy of 2 inches thick, and i had to cut all the pieces down to just under four inches wide. The snipe on such heavy pieces was a real nasty pain to have to deal with, but I went longer than needed to try and limit that to the outer most edges that I could cut off, which kind of worked, but not as well as you might have expected. Plus my garage is tiny, and building an eighty inch long door, that’s about forty inches wide is harder than you might have guessed. But I took a day or two’s worth of time and milled it all up, and jointed the edges and then left it to sit in my garage for a year or so. Now, after all this time, I am once again, back at it. Today’s foray into wood working saw me using a SKIL® circular saw to cut the beginnings of my tenons on the long pieces of the door body. Took some getting used to holding the saw 90 degrees to the floor, but I see it done regularly by Youtube® peeps like the Samurai Carpenter, and his stuff always looks clean AF (Never mind he’s been at that sort of thing for a decade or two!). So after getting my heart rate back down to normal, I put on my head phones and goggles and I fired up the saw and took to making all eight of my cuts. At least, that was the plan initially. Then I quickly stopped after only four, because I’m shit with the circular saw, and want to see how I progress with a hammer and chisel to take out the meat of my mortise. If that proved to be a less dangerous affair then I would cut those out now, and get my nerves back for more circular saw cuts later on. One hour of hammering, shaving, peeling and general buffoonery with hand tools later, I had my first full through cut mortise completed. And she’s a dogs breakfast if ever I saw one. But I got it done, and I think I know how to improve for when I go back for numbers two through four. The tenons will be done on my radial arm saw, because that I’ve done before and I’m more confident there. I also need to leave more wood on the tenons so I can make a snug pressure/friction fit due to my shaky saw work previously. If I don’t manage to get the door together and up by November first, then it’ll be a May 2022 project for sure. Don’t aim for perfect, aim for done!
to be in in order to write creatively at the moment. I have a couple of one off short stories rolling about in my head but I can’t seem to get them out on paper. I mean, sure I’ve done a very brief point form outline, but that’s not helping me find the voice of either set of characters. I have had a few spells of just plain day dreaming where I have thought up something fun, but then just couldn’t get it to come to life. Which is irritating to say the least, but at least I am not where I was a few months ago where I had no ideas at all. Here I was thinking that after I had published my book of short stories back in March, that I would wile away my time adding a couple thousand words more in the time I had before me. But besides three of four small posts here I haven’t written anything at all. I will amend my list of outstanding short stories as ideas come to me, and I hope that I will soon be able to work towards fleshing them out properly in my own idiosyncratic style.
Actually here I’ll just tell you what sort of short stories I have in my bag which I want to write out. I do usually tend towards micro short stories of about five hundred words or so, but if it really grabs me, I have been known to add on additional stories in that line of thinking. Sometimes there are multiple peoples perspectives in the same event, or just different people on the same side of a conflict having wholly different experiences. So the next three stories I intend to write revolve around the creation of the first AI in my interconnected space stories series, which revolves around a character named Kelvin, whom you may recall had a whole portion of my book; The Chronicles of Kelvin. I like him, he’s an interesting guy that has done some pretty weird shit. He’s also comfortable alone, much like myself. Now that story line could have one long but sort of abridged last chapter, or could be broken down like I have in my outline into five meaty chunks. But, you know, sometimes my eyes are bigger than my fingers and I can’t possible write interesting, character driven stories with that many chapters right out of the gate. I’ll have to build up to that, if I ever get a head of steam in me. The second story involves a father and his young daughter, where they are playing out of doors, in a forest, and the young girl is regaling her father with stories of mystical whimsy from her imagination, but the father is transcribing them and adding in all the sorts of details young kids leave out of their stories, but then she gets bored and he’s absolutely hooked, and she looses her train of thought in the middle of this fantasy of epic proportions (due to a vivid childhood imagination unencumbered by things like, logic, physics & linear thinking) and the father goes mental trying to tie it all together in the end. Which is a sentiment I understand completely. The third story is more anecdotal about one of many situations brought about by having Crohn’s Disease. It has a comedic bent to it, because how can you not when you are dealing with such a shitty topic. Ha. That’s all for ranting and whining right now. I’m off to get blood work done at the lab, so stay safe, and have a great autumn season.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
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