If you want a good place to watch every fireworks show in northwestern Washington state, look no further than our front porch.
The Canadians, who copy everything we do except our units of measurement, have their fireworks on July 1st, or Canada Day. So we got tons of fireworks on the 4th and kilograms of fireworks on the 1st.
This’ll separate the wheat from the chaff. If you watch this parade and you still want to live here, you’ll do fine. If you shake your head and wonder how much pot you have to smoke to do something like this, island life may not be for you.
The people in the amusement park ride were hilarious (third row of pics, left side). They walked down, two abreast, in a snaking roller-coaster pattern and every so often they’d raise their hands in the air and scream.
Figured I’d start off with a photograph that represents the pace at which this project is going. I am happy to say, though, that the list of parts I still need is down to one sheet of paper, and I now know where to find most of them. Just need to spend some time on the internet with my credit card in front of me and everything will be on its way.
The table extensions came in. These were really hard to find on the Sears website because they don’t actually go with my model of saw. According to them, they don’t fit and won’t work with my model and if I attempt to install them on my saw it will shred the warranty, condemn me to a lake of fire in my afterlife and every cut I make on the saw will be unsafe and inaccurate. But in reality, these are the best table extensions out there, and they fit like a charm.
I didn’t even need to use shims along the sides. It’s dead flat.
My new sawblade came in also, and it’s a beauty. Those of you who are woodworkers know how much those things cost. Those of you who are not, you don’t want to know. This is certainly not the most expensive blade out there but Forrest makes great saw blades and this model is excellent for both cross cuts and rip cuts. I am far too lazy a woodworker to change out my saw blades for each cut. I like to have one blade for everything.
I also started dismantling the motor today. All I was going to do was put a new power cord on it but the further along I got the more I wanted to keep taking it apart and cleaning it. I found the two oil plugs underneath about a centimeter of sawdustdirtgrease, a paste like mixture of sawdust, dirt and oil. I’m sure the motor was happy to get some fresh oil on it in there.
Then I started painting it. I figured, what the heck. I got nothing better to do and I have a third of a can of red spray paint that I may as well use. Make that motor housing shine and gleam in the light of my overhead fluorescent shop lights. It would not have been wise to spray paint the motor itself so I painted it by hand. 
I have an illness. I know. I’m well aware that no normal person would clean and paint an old motor that’s just going to get covered in sawdustdirtgrease. It’s madness. This is a lot like restoring an old antique. Or getting it ready for a museum. This isn’t necessarily the table saw I wanted to have, but by golly it’s going to be the best dang table saw I can make it into.
Besides, the paint may keep it from rusting.
I had more paint in that can than I thought I did so everything got about ten coats.
The motor I painted black, to kind of go with the red.
The last thing I tried to tackle today was the faceplate. The existing one is a little cheesy looking and I wanted to make something with a smaller aperture where the tilt indicator comes out. A lot of sawdust leaks through that big slot and I want to kind of close that up on the final make. Also, you can’t really see it in the picture but it’s coated with this layer of crackling plastic that is simultaneously peeling off and difficult to remove. I thought I would just make a new faceplate out of 1/4″ laminate paneling, but once I got it cut and in place ….
I hate it. I absolutely hate the way it looks. I know Hate is a strong word, and that’s why I chose it. It looks really tacky and I don’t think it will hold up well. I’m going to seek out a small sheet of metal that I can work with. Maybe brass or copper. Heck, how about gold foil? Platinum sheeting. Apparently no effort is too great and no expense is too much for my table saw so I may as well go all out.
Hoping to have this thing up and running in about two weeks but it really depends on how fast things gets shipped out here. It’s tourist season and I am in no mood to brave the lines at the ferry landing just for a trip to sears and home depot.
Here’s a really quick and easy project to make some decorative switchplates and power outlet covers. It’s very simple and not terribly expensive, and can give you an eclectic look in your home.
Our home, like many old houses, came with a plethora of those cheap, crappy plastic switchplates. You know the kind. Loosely fitted with stripped and mismatched screws, shattered with tiny little cracks, splotched with paint, so dirty that you couldn’t clean it with sandpaper. I really hate those things. You can replace them, of course, either by buying the same crappy plastic plates for about 19 cents each, or you can get them from the high end restoration websites and spend about 19 dollars each. Or anything in between. You get what you pay for. The expensive ones are really nice, but when you have 64 plates in your house it really adds up.
Well, we were looking for copper sheets for a completely different purpose and we ordered a sample pack to see what the colors were like. We got a variety of 36 gauge copper sheeting, each one with a decorative finish on it. It’s like malleable foil, soft but durable. The samples cost money so I considered them mine to do with whatever I pleased. I decided to use them to cover some switchplates around the house.
My only real concern was that the switchplates would look just as cheesy and stupid as the ones people cover with wallpaper. Well, they don’t look quite that cheesy. Copper sheeting is way cooler than wallpaper. Okay, I admit the final product does have a bit of cheese factor in it, but it sure beats the craptastic plastic ones I replaced.
Like any good handyman, I have a small collection of existing switchplate covers of various sizes and materials. It’s a good idea to use metal ones for this purpose. You’re going to form the copper foil around them and plastic just won’t take the beating. The cheap metal ones retail for about a dollar or two so it’s not like some huge expense. Anyway, use metal ones for the backbone.
Once you wrap it around, you can press it down to kind of see the outline of the holes you must cut. This copper foil cut really easy; scissors cut through it like paper and all it took to punch out the holes was a dull x-acto knife. Don’t use your pocket knife; the copper will dull it very quick and you’ll be sharpening it for two hours to get the blade right again.
Just follow the edge and saw your way around and it should look great. Again, this is why you use a metal backbone.
You don’t need to use an adhesive, but it’s not a bad idea. I did one without any adhesive and the copper wrapped around sufficiently to hold together, but over time it might fail, and I wasn’t very happy with it. A spray adhesive would probably work best but that’s messy and I was all out of spray adhesive so I used some double sided tape that I bought two years ago and never found a use for. That’s why I buy things like that. It may take two years but you never know when you’ll need it and if you have it when you need it you’ll be glad.
The only drawback is the tape is thick enough, believe it or not, that its contour will show through the foil if you look at it from a certain angle. Had I known, I probably would have run to the store to buy some spray on adhesive. Yeah, I’m kind of a perfectionist. But I’m also a realist. I’m making really cool switchplate covers for about $3 each instead of spending $19 each at some fancy pants restoration store.
The final product looked great. I mean, not nearly as cheesy as wallpaper covered switchplates and a vast improvement over the shoddy plastic ones I had. One of the covers I replaced was this resin bas-relief of a moose and a tree that looked like it was a rejected prop from the Red Green Show. I’d post a photo but it’s too embarrassing. I didn’t have enough to do all the switchplates in the house but I got most of the visible ones.
Sadly, they make the paneling look even worse. But the paneling is not long for this world. Never fear, it will soon come down, replaced by sensible drywall and real woodwork.
Anyway, I thought that was a good use of the samples we bought. Adios, amigos. Until next time!
We’re pretty close to having replaced every light fixture in the house. Makes a big difference. It’s a small house but it’s kind of a big space, and the dark wood and paneling make it tricky to illuminate. Not that the paneling is going to live much longer. We’re either going to paint it or put up drywall, but the paneling has to go. In many cases, the new light fixtures just make it look worse.
The laundry room got a pretty dramatic change. The Jimmy Carter era florescents were removed and replaced with nice halogen track lights. Seriously, we found a price tag on one of the florescent bulbs and it said $1.95; I think they sell now for about $12 at our hardware store. The new lights aren’t as bright, but it’s so much nicer in there without that crappy, dingy contraption of cracked plastic and jagged sheet metal. I thought about keeping the florescent lights for the shed or something but I just couldn’t stand looking at it for a minute longer. As of today, it’s in a pile at the solid waste landfill.
That ceiling fan… it was a bitch. It’s about 17 feet off the floor and the only ladder I have for that height is rated at 200 pounds. Okay, I weigh a solid 220 and the fan weighs 50 so both of us on it made it more than a little wobbly. Yes, I had to disconnect the existing fan and carry it down the ladder, then carry the new fan up the ladder and connect it. I gotta say, though, ceiling fan technology has come a long way. They make those things as convenient as humanly possible. They even think to include a spare bolt because they know, just know, that when you’re 17 feet off the ground it’s very possible you will drop a bolt and it’ll be nice to have a spare one in your fanny pack.
The new fan looks great. It’s dead silent, but for some reason Inky is terrified of it. She knows when we turn it on. Her ears fold back and she peeps a little meow. Sometimes she hides under the bed. I’m not kidding. It’s like she hears some alien mind control waves that humans can’t detect. She’s gotten better about it now that it’s been up for a while.
We even got a new lizard. Cool, huh?
These fawns are probably just a few weeks old. They’re tiny little things, not much bigger than our cat.
We learned a few things about fawns the other weekend. The mother deer sometimes leaves them while she goes off and forages. And they just nap. Like, all day. Just sit there and hide in the grass. We didn’t want to get too close to them because we didn’t want to spook them, but I got a few pics.
Mother finally returned later in the day and picked them up. Would have been nice if she paid us for day care service since we looked after them pretty much all afternoon. But no. She just came by and ate more of our grass.
And she stuck her tongue out at me.
For months, my punching bag has sat in a lonely corner in the garage, with ladders and push brooms leaning on it like it were a garbage sack full of leaves. Before that, it lay in an even lonelier corner in a storage unit far from here. It once held a position of honor, a place we went to create copious amounts of sweat and expend kinetic energy. It was a staple of my workouts.
Once we built this garage, I didn’t think the joists would be strong enough by themselves to hold the bag up. They probably were, but the engineer in me really likes to over-fortify things. So I thought to make these large brackets to help spread the load out and stabilize the joists it hangs from.
I’ve got a plethora of scrap lumber, not the least of which a few 2 x 12’s just waiting to be sawn into something useful. Some people pay extra money for wood that looks distressed or a little weathered; I got it coming out of my ears.
The piece on the left is as I found it. The piece on the right is after sanding. Turns out very nice.
Here they are being cut and sanded down. No matter what you do to construction lumber, it’s always going to look like construction lumber. But if you cut and sand carefully and give it some crisp edges and shape it carefully, it doesn’t have to look like you have 2×12’s sticking out of your wall. I had some leftover sikkens, which is basically linseed oil with some pigment to it, and that worked great for wood treatment.
The final product works great. I still need to adjust the chain a bit but otherwise the bag takes impact well and I don’t feel like I’m going to pull the whole roof down when I work out.
She’s about 12′ off the ground here.
Every woodworker has a surplus of scrap wood. It just piles up, faster than you know. I purged a lot of my scrap wood on the move out here but I did keep a few choice pieces. But after the garage was built, I inherited a small pile of lumber, mostly construction grade stuff. Lots of 2×6’s and a few nice 2×12’s, and quite a few pieces of cedar trim.
When you live on this island, you don’t let a lot of things go to waste. I get that, and I’m totally down with that concept, but at the same time I don’t want to be a hoarder. Not only do I not have the storage space, but the tenets of my religion forbid it. Thou shalt not be a freaking hoarder. Don’t own stuff you don’t need, don’t keep stuff you won’t use.
Anyway, that’s a long way of explaining why I feel compelled to periodically make a woodworking project entirely out of scrap wood. In my case, I have a crapton of 2×6’s, most of which are marked to make a deck or a shed or something but I can spare a few.
The back door of the house is a double door with these big glass panes that let the light through. They’re lovely. And they afford the entire living room a direct view of the ugliest shed in the San Juans (click here if you think I’m joking). So we figured we’d get some bamboo for screening and put it in a big planter box so we can look at the bamboo and not the shed. We’re pretty smart, huh?
The wood, I discovered, was being guarded by a small army of carpenter ants. I’d ask them to work for me since I have a myriad of carpentry jobs to get done but they’re union and I’d have to pay out the wazoo. Well, the rule of ants is that where there’s one, there’s a million, so I had to make sure the wood I took from the wood pile was ant free.
The planter box would be pretty simple, I hoped. I’d just cut notches in the ends of each piece and stack them all together. I’d like to thank my mother for buying me Lincoln Logs for Christmas in 1972. They taught me a lot about how to build things.
I was actually hoping to not have to use fasteners or nails of any sort but I decided to toe it together with some tenpenny nails just to make sure it didn’t fall apart. Since I don’t own a nail gun, that involved me hammering nails at an angle into corners and hard to reach places. Yeah, there was a lot of colorful language coming out of the garage in that particular hour.
The bottom was a piece of scrap plywood that had been sitting outside in the rain for about eight months so I figure it’s already acclimated to being moist and moldy. I did line the inside with some thick plastic, just to help the thing live longer. This planter box should age well. I expect within a year it will be gray and pitted and have moss growing on it, which is the intended look I’m going for. A bald eagle stopped by and gave my planter a little nod of approval, and I took that to be a sign of good fortune.
So there you have it. Nothing but a few 2×6 beams and a sheet of plywood screwed to the bottom with like twenty decking screws just to make sure it stays affixed for as long as possible. I didn’t even treat the wood with anything, I’m just leaving it outside to rot. In a good way. It should weather well out here, and should look great for many years. When it’s finally ready to be put out to pasture, literally, it can be simply taken and set in a field where the planter and whatever’s growing in it can just become part of the earth. It happens faster than you think out here.
It sure beats staring at that ticking time bomb boiler in the crappy shed.
I fully expect that bamboo to take off like a weed on steroids. There’s actually two species of bamboo in the planter, both known for their aggressive growth and screening properties. If the whole thing gets overtaken by bamboo growing out the sides and bottom, I’ll be happy.
They outnumber us, even in tourist season.
The bald eagles hang out at the solid waste facility. Yes, the dump. When you throw away your half eaten chicken sandwich, well, they get first dibs. We saw three or four of them in one tree last week. Also on any given day at the dump you’ll find about 7,000 seagulls and blackbirds picking at the loose bits of cocoa puffs and other scrap. But the eagles wait for real food to appear. Sometimes, they eat seagull.
