Router bits tend wander across the face of the wood I’m working on if I don’t clamp a stout piece of finished wood in place to use as a guide, and oftentimes they will even if I do. It’ll happen in spite of the fact that I’m anticipating it and think I’ve mustered as tight a grip on the router’s handles as it’s possible for a human being to have. Moving slowly and deliberately, I’ll press the bit into the edge of the wood, concentrating on the router’s path as if willing it to proceed in a straight line, and whoops! There it goes in a crazy curlicue. A router is very headstrong, the adolescent of power tools.
This is what I get for trying to save money by doing it myself instead of paying a contractor a couple thousand dollars to do it for me. Not that I think a contractor wouldn’t have done exactly what I did. He totally would have, if he’d wound up stuck in the position I was in yesterday afternoon after I framed the new windows with brick molding, then built up the frame around the back door with lumber I had to rip from larger pine planks for a custom fit, then whacking it all into place with thirty gojillion nails half again as big as railroad spikes.
I got a bug up my ass after lunch, grabbed a wrecking bar and a hammer, and started tentatively picking apart the framework around one of the windows alongside the back door to see if I could figure out how to take it apart. When I start a project like this I begin by rather carefully picking my way through each step while a little voice inside me says, This is insane! I don’t know the first thing about home construction! How am I ever going to patch this back together?
Although I planned to knock together a proper book case to stash some of the books in, I got to thinking, as I was looking over the lumber on sale at the local do-it-yourself store, that I could rig up something more like a multi-media organization and display center than a piddling book case. Besides needing a place to set our books, I also need shelf space for my ever-growing neato typewriter collection, as well as a rack to hold the stereo components I’ve cobbled together and a nearby shelf for the LP phono albums I keep finding at the thrift store. Obviously all these considerations called for a shelving system, nay, a structure that would be a bit more suitable to the various needs of each different tenant.
I’ve always had this far-away, make-believe kind of idea that I might be able to finish painting the house. Actually, in most of my “Thank God I’m Finished!” house-painting fantasies I slap the last coat of paint on just moments before I suffer a massive cardiac infarction and shoot off into the cosmic void, but that usually happens only after I’ve spent hours frying to a crisp in the summer sun while scraping and painting, scraping and painting. I much happier fantasies I finish well before I die but long after I go bald and grow a beard down to my knees.
This, my friend, is possibly the most overbuilt cabinet carcase on the face of the planet. That’s three-quarter inch plywood you’re looking at. Orson Welles, were he still walking this green, effective earth, could perch on that, after it’s put together of course, and it wouldn’t give a fraction of an inch in any direction. …
I passed a couple of quiet hours yesterday afternoon pursuing our never-ending attempt to repaint the house. You read that right: I said painting the house. We started the enterprise almost two years ago after inquiring of several professional painters how much they would charge us for them to paint our house instead of us, …
My goal today is simple: Fix this fubar attempt I made to replace a window in the garage two years ago. And to chop that tomato trellis to pieces. Two goals. My two goals today are simple: fix the window and chop up the trellis. And clean the bathroom. Three! My three goals! Okay, among …
I do love Ubuntu (like Windows, but free) (yes, free), but getting it to talk to my wireless network is going to drive me to drink. Or something. What do maddening things drive you to when you already drink? After spending about an hour and a half trying to get my laptop to talk to …
One of the unusual features of Our Humble O’Bode is a dining room that was once a hallway into the house from the back door. Some people call it a mud room. I like to think it was a breezeway because I like that word a lot and think it doesn’t get used enough any …