So You Wanna Be a Workbench

When we inherited our barn, it had a dirty old workbench in the corner.  The bench had a bunch of drawers that didn't slide anymore, full of a bunch of weird old tools that I had no idea what they did.  Some of them looked like things an old-timey doctor for ladies would use, others maybe for shoeing and/or putting down horses.

A while back, I pulled the drawers out, and found a family of three mice living inside.  The weird part is that all three seemed to be fully-grown-- it was like a couple with their grown son living with them.  They freaked and ran in circles for about two minutes before high-tailing it into a hole in the wall.  I felt bad about displacing them before the winter, but in the long run I think I did the parents a favor.  Hopefully, in the confusion, they ran in the opposite direction from their son, giving him the "tough love" new start he so desperately needs to jump-start his life.  I like to think of him, living in a new barn, or probably just a different part of my barn, he's got a mouse job now, his own little sawdust nest, and he's saying, quietly but swelling with pride, "thanks for the kick in the pants, Nate.  I needed that." You're welcome, guy.

Recently I decided to rip out the old bench and build a new one.  I was going to buy a pry bar for the job, but I ended up just using a regular hammer and a rubber mallet.  

 

Also, in the barn I found a thick slab of wood that looks kind of like a fraternity pledge paddle.  It was a perfect wedge for prying off that top piece of plywood.  I'm going to keep it for next fall's rush week, too.

The design and building of the new bench was very straightforward, so I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow account.  It's 8 feet long by 2 feet wide, and I made it 42" high.  That's higher than a lot of people build them, according to the Internet, but I plan to use it more for storage and detail work than for everyday tasks, so hopefully the height will seem right.  At the very least, I'll lie and rationalize to myself to that effect and try to ignore the aching in my shoulders.

 I also installed a couple of hooks on the end, though I'm not sure what I'll hang from them yet.  All told, the new bench cost me about $47 in materials, though I had some random lengths of 2x4 and wood screws lying around that I used.

Here's the finished project.  Note the Screwdrivers sticker already installed.  The adhesive is kind of dried up, though, so it's not really sticking.  Maybe it will hang in there for a while and then fall off, like we did.  How apt!  Though in a way, isn't the bench itself the best metaphor for being in a local band?  For example, I spent more money on it than I made.  Also, the only people to see it will be my current special lady and a few random friends and family over the years.  And it will spend its time in a dank, poorly-lit space next to a power strip.

Coffee Tableau: Part 3, Table Manners

The stain took several days to dry, due to the extremely cold weather (down below zero at night) and the fact that the boards were probably still wet from the water-painting phase.

 As I waited for the stain to dry, I was able to paint the large (6") casters the table sits on.  I looked around online for actual antique ones (or at least ones that looked vintage enough), but they were generally over $100 a piece.  Too much!  So I just bought these regular shiny metal ones from Lowe's for $10 a piece.  I spray painted them black with a faux hammered-finish paint.  (I'm not sure if "faux" is supposed to be in italics, but I'm erring on the side of pretentious.)

Once the stain finally did dry, it was time to assemble the table.  As I mentioned, I generally followed this plan from Ana White, with a few modifications.

I attached the apron with Kreg jig pocket holes, to avoid having any screws visible on the outside.  The plans called for 2x4s running flush along the bottom of the short side of the apron, to be used as the support for the casters.  But the mounting plate of the 6" casters was too big, so I had to upgrade to 2x6s.  I bolted the casters on and tightened everything down.

 
The eight top boards fasten to three 2x4s running the long way down the box.  (You can see a side one and the middle one in the picture above).  The plans call for the tops boards to be screwed on, but I wanted to go for the same look as our old wooden floors, which have old-timey square-headed nails.  So I ordered a bag of 2" ones from here.  I also intended to glue the boards as well as nail them, but the wood glue was frozen solid, since it was about 10 degrees out when I working on the table.  The label actually said it shouldn't be used below 55 degrees.  Stupid fair weather glue.  Since I wasn't going to wait until April to finish the table, I did it without glue.

The nails went in easily and didn't split the boards, which I was kind of worried about. I set the heads just a little below the surface, but high enough that you could still tell they were the kind of fancy square-headed nails you have to order on the Internet.

And that's it!  I'm very pleased with how the table came out.

Coffee Tableau: Part II, or, the Stain

The next step in distressing the wood for the coffee table involved staining it a couple of times.  I followed a technique the couple at Young House Love did, but adapted it a little bit.  We wanted a brown finish, but first I did a "quick" coat of black stain, to bring out the indents, divots, hollows, holes, crevasses, gullies, caves, and whatever-it-was-that-Yoda-lived-in-on-Dagobah.

To keep the black stain from soaking in too much, you first brush water onto the wood.  I got the best results from brushing a good amount of water onto the wood, then immediately slathering on a healthy amount of black stain.  I generally left it on somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds, I think-- the fumes kind of made time fade away.  Also, the stain I used was really, really old, so you may get different results.  The guy at the local hardware store where I bought it told me that this rusty can of stain came over with him from a previous hardware store he owned when he opened the current store 15 years ago.  I think he said something about how this stain had "boot black in it, like the old timers use"; I wasn't 100% listening after the whole hardware-store-timeline thing, but he did give me the can for $2.00 so I politely nodded.

After the 60-90 seconds of fume-enhanced reality, I sort of half-heartedly wiped the stain off with a paper towel.  I didn't remove all of the stain, since I wanted to leave it in all of the aforementioned Yoda holes.  I guess I would say I used the amount of pressure you'd use to give a backrub to a child with a sunburn.  Oh, and this is important: don't change out the paper towel.  As it soaks up the black stain, it becomes more forgiving and removes just the right amount.

Once the black stain had pretty much dried, I painted on a regular coat of brown (I chose MinWax Colonial Pine, because our house is a colonial-- great simplistic reasoning, huh?)  To my relief, it wasn't too dark, and it let the nice black distress stain show through:

The stains on the bottom of the board on the left are from when I opened the can of black stain and it sprayed all over the place, including onto that board; it was very distressing, if you catch my drift.

Here's a side-by-side of a stained board next to a pristine piece of white plywood.

Tomorrow: the assembly of the table.

Coffee Tableau: Part I, or, Scraping By

If there's one thing I love, it's propping my feet up on something in front of the wood stove.  We have an ottoman, but the cat has staked that out as his territory--our daughters even call it "Harvey's couch."  Displacing him would be an unpopular move with the ladies, whether it was to free up the ottoman or, more eccentrically, to use the cat himself to keep my legs raised up.  That kind of thing might fly in a Dr. Seuss book, but out here in the real world it's frowned upon, no matter how much that cat might deserve it for non-playfully biting your heels and darting inches in front of your legs on stairways after you've had a few drinks.  You're the worst, Harvey.

Anyway, I set out to build a coffee table. I found a great plan for a rustic-looking one at the incomparable Ana White's blog.  Since we have wood floors dating from the early 1900s, I figured I'd try my hand at giving the coffee table a similarly distressed feel.  I didn't really want to go to the expense of buying reclaimed lumber, though, so I decided to cause the distress myself.


I found another cool blog that discusses ways to distress wood.  I borrowed a lot of the techniques they used, and added a couple of my own, too.  The idea was to take soft, brand new pine and bang, scratch, and sand it to make it appear way more experienced.

In the picture below you can see what I used.

 Orbital sander: I used 100 grit sandpaper to sand the surfaces, edges, and corners of each board.

Bag of screws:  The Young House Love guy used this (along with many of the other techniques here).  Basically, you put a bunch of 2-3" wood screws in a sandwich bag and drop or throw the bag at the wood.  It creates a bunch of random indents in the surface.  It's a really cool effect; kind of the canvas upon which the other effects are painted, if you're prone to really pretentious metaphors.

Hammer:  A few clusters of hammer hits here and there.  The only downside to this move is that if you end up having to put a nail in the area of one of these clusters later, you look like an idiot who couldn't hit that nail.

Long metal rod: I laid this across the surface of the board and hammered it:

Eyebolt screw: I hammered this on the board to create semicircular indents.  You can see one above.  I also stood it on its threaded end and banged the eye end to create fake nail holes.

Threaded hook: I used the coarse threads of a hook for hanging up your bike or whatever (I bought these hooks, and have no idea what I intended them for) to scratch the surface of the board up a bit.

Screwdriver:  This was one of my favorite techniques, which I came up with.  I used a regular screwdriver to create deep, narrow, sharply defined holes in the wood.  As you can see below, I often did a few parallel ones next to each other.  It sort of makes you think, "Oh Lordy, what has been smashing into that wood now?"

I also used the screwdriver to just kind of scrape long flat lines into the wood.  The trick is to do it quickly to make the line more or less straight.  Not only will doing so make the table look better in the end, but this is by far the most intimidating technique if someone is secretly observing you distress wood. You're doing this fast, dramatic thrusting move, and they can't help but know you'd probably be really good at stabbing people, if it came right down to it.  Maybe you wouldn't even be doing it in self-defense; maybe you just wondered what it would feel like to shiv someone while you're looking them right in the eye the whole time.  That kind of thing makes folks think twice before tangling with you.

Ella was very interested in helping, so at first I gave her the hammer to let her bang some dents into the boards.  But her backswing was bringing the claw of the hammer to within inches of her eye.  I kept telling her to swing the hammer to the side, but to no avail.  Finally, we decided she might be better off using the hook to scrape the board up a bit.

 

 In the end, we got a lot of cool markings on the boards.  They're kind of hard to see in the pictures here, but wait till you see how the wood stain really brought them out...  

 

(As those ellipses at the end of the last sentence there strongly implied, I'll do another post tomorrow about the staining process I used.)

Shed Collapse

It's been quite a while since I posted here. The last you all heard, I had announced my plan to spend a weekend in early October trying to "get as much done on the roof as I can." That was nearly three months ago. Do I owe you an apology? Quite the contrary, friends! Have you any idea how dangerous it is to be up on the roof of a structure built by an amateur?  And yet, when I abruptly disappeared from the blogosphere, no one even thought to come look for me! For all you knew, I was laying in a pile of rubble, dead leaves and torn shingles all this time, waiting to be rescued.  It's also quite telling that you read the title of this post and continued to just sit there, clicking and reading an obscure blog, without calling to check on me.  In fact, the shed has not collapsed. It's still standing, nearly a quarter of a year later!

Anyway, I know we're all sorry for what we've done-- me for not posting in a while, you for leaving me for dead--so let's just move on.

I did work on the roof that weekend and another. First I got all the rafters up:

Except I marked but forgot to cut the end of one of them perpendicular to the ground.  Oops.

Luckily, I was able to resolve the issue by executing a tricky maneuver involving a circular saw and a wobbly ladder. It was pretty precarious. Not that you care.

 Next I got the roof sheathing up (9/16" OSB) and then started papering and shingling.

 Ella wanted to come help me, but Erin and I both told her she couldn't come up on the roof. Except she found the ladder and snuck up anyway.  She was a great helper, handing me nails and shingles. She even drove in a nail herself.  We had a lot of fun, especially when Josie was playing outside and we yelled her name, then snickered as she looked for us.

The shed is now done, save for a few things I plan to do in the spring. For one thing, I want to paint it, and for another, I'd like to put up some slats at the halfway point to split it into two compartments, each sized for a single cord. Otherwise, the logs tend to want to roll if you have them stacked to one side.

I may also figure out a way to hang a tarp from the front in the event of driving rain or snow. So far, the logs have stayed pretty dry, but we haven't had any big snowstorms yet. Oh, and a hook for a lantern. And a whiskey shelf. Because if the shed ever does collapse on me, I'll need something to do to pass the time before I'm rescued.

For the Birds

When we left off with the woodshed, it was a mere platform on the ground. It was still a platform a couple of weeks ago, when Erin's brother Pat and his family visited for the weekend. We woke up at 6:00am on Sunday morning (there were four small children present), and it was pouring rain. A few hours later, though, the weather had cleared, and Pat offered to help do a bit of work on the shed. So we went and got some lumber for the walls and got started.

First we built the back wall, hoisted it up, braced it into position, and nailed it in place. We realized we didn't have enough 2x4s for the header, so we borrowed the crossbeam from one of my sawhorses (no, not those sawhorses).

sorry, guy!

Next we put up the front wall.

Here's me sneaking up on the miter saw, while Pat steadies the end of what appears to be a 30-foot board. Damn you, optical illusions!

Next we built the side walls, and made the two end rafters.

Before I started this woodshed, I had a pretty good idea of how to do most of it, except for one part--I didn't understand how the roof attached to the walls, or wherever? I spent a whole Saturday night looking up different plans online, but rejected all of them, because they required "birds-mouth cuts," a term I didn't understand and refused to look up.

Next I called my dad, who has been advising me on this project all along, giving me direction and encouragement. He promised to send me a diagram showing how I should do the roof and the walls. He did, but sure enough:

At first I though, "ahh, well, 'birdsmouth' is in quotes, so maybe it's just a figure of speech." But then I also thought "hmm, what I just thought makes no sense." So I gave in and looked it up.  Good news: a birds-mouth cut is just a triangular cut to allow the rafter to fit over the front and back headers. You know, like all those birds you see flying around with their beaks open at really wide angles!

This weekend I'm planning to cut the rest of the rafters and get as much done on the roof as I can. Thanks for the help, Pat. I wouldn't be nearly so far along without it.
 

I think I canned, I think I canned...

By this point in the blog, I'm sure many of you are pretty intimidated, thinking "Christ, Nate is pretty manly! Look at this guy, talking a lot about building a woodshed, and getting his brother to use a chainsaw on some branches!" It's true, I talk a pretty good game, or have others bring the game for me. But if, because of that, you think I can't make things happen in the kitchen, you couldn't be more wrong.

Erin is off at a bachelorette party this weekend, and Ella is having a sleepover with her cousin at their grandmother's house. That leaves Josie and me to hold down the fort here. I did a little more work on the woodshed today while she was napping, but I didn't want to be outside tonight after she went to bed and it got dark-- I've read In Cold Blood. So I planned ahead to find something to keep me occupied for the roughly 6 hours between when Josie goes to bed and I do.

That "something" was making jelly. Specifically, raspberry and blackberry jelly. One thing I never fully realized is that when you're eating jelly, you're mostly eating sugar. I guess that makes sense, since fruit doesn't just start turning into jelly in everyday life, but still-- the amount of sugar involved is shocking.

I don't drink when I'm using power tools, but jelly-making was uncharted territory for me, so I thought "what the hell?"

The first thing you have to do is boil the jars and lids to sterilize them. You don't want to catch, nor transmit, botulism.

See all that smoke? That's the germs burning off! Also, I don't understand basic physics concepts!

 On the substantive jelly side of things, you basically smash up a bunch of fruit and add some pectin and an obscene amount of sugar and some lemon juice, and boil it for awhile. Here's the fruit by itself:

I didn't get a picture of the whole mixture boiling, I kept procrastinating and then suddenly it was boiling over. But before it boils over, you have a few minutes to do whatever you like. You might take this oportunity to set up the cooling racks the jars will cool on later. Or you might say to hell with the cooling racks, and do something else. Totally your call. Could you cautiously try out a few dance moves, holding your wine glass out at arm's length, like a dance partner?  Of course you could. Especially if you just moved into the neighborhood a few months back, and want to let the neighbors know who they're dealing with.

Anyway, the thing will boil over while you're dancing, so you'll have to snap out of it and pour the jelly into the jars, then put the jars back into the boiling water to process them. If you want to be able to brag to people that you just "put up some preserves," this last step is absolutely crucial.

The jars processing. That vapor/fog is probably a spirit materializing.

Once the jars are done processing, you can take them out and let them cool on a cooling rack for 24 hours.

Go ahead, put them right next to the amazing salsa you also made and jarred today but didn't feel the need to brag about on your blog. Yeah, that's right! What a twist ending!