Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part II

I've sketched up the remaining parts of this project in 3D to get a visual of how it will look. The doors and drawers are inset 3/8" and overlap on the face frame 3/8". Where possible, the face frame is 1-1/2" in width. The box in front of the window seat is the baseboard heater and must be in that location. The rectangular box in the middle of the dresser section represents the 2 outlets that we needed to work around in the design.

I'm at a loss as what to do with the face frame on the shelves above the dresser. Specifically the left one, it needs an extra half inch for wall factor. The face frame below it on the dresser must be extra wide to accomodate a window sill sticking into the room from the left edge by 2-5/8".

Having talked with my friend and reviewed the images on the blog, I'm going to attempt to rearrange the spacing on the shelves on the upper left - hopefully giving it a better transition from wide spacing to narrow. The abrupt spacing change that currently exists really detracts from the piece (in my opinion).

I also need to add two vertical dividers in the window bench seat. Basically going with a 2 - 1 - 2 so the dividers will be to the left and right of the center door. Then I need to work out the framing for the dresser. I held off framing it properly in the 3D rendering until I could present it and get feedback on whether the 2 shelves in the middle of the dresser were going to stay - since the shelves dicate needing solid dividers as well.

I'm starting to get much more comfortable with Google Sketch-Up. The last time around the bulk of the time was figuring out how to use the program - living room units, this time the bulk of the time spent is in figuring out the framing and how the parts will go together.

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part I

I'm starting a new project for a friend - building a built-in dresser - book shelf and window seat unit out of southern yellow pine. I've been procrastinating a bit on starting this project but yesterday I started to dig into it more seriously. I went out and remeasured a few things in the room to make sure I had clear in my head the gotchas before I started modelling it.

There are a few pain points - the corner this will be sitting in is not square - at 22" depth it is already a 1/2" out of square > 90 degrees. On the same side, there is a window that will be just in front of the unit - sitting maybe 3" in front of the unit and the sill protrudes 2-5/8" into the room from the wall. I almost missed that little point. I had the unit all drawn up with a 1-1/2" face frame and then I remembered the sill. A quick call confirmed my worst fears. I had to change the left most stile of the face frame would have to increase from 1-1/2" to 3-1/8" (2-5/8" + 3/8" (draw front overlap) + 1/8" clearance).

I finished modeling the bottom - dresser unit. The two missing drawers is a design decision by my friend. There is an electrical outlet and a phone jack behind the center spot. She didn't want to block access to either of these. So instead of drawers there are two fixed shelves.

Here is the initial rendering showing the bottom dresser unit. The white block on top is a set of shelves that extend up to the ceiling. The block size is  a bit too wide at the moment. The block to the right is where the window seat will be. There is another window that will butt up tight to the right side of the dresser unit. So we are working around two windows, the one on the right along the back wall and one on the left wall just in front of the dresser unit.

I will see about modelling the other two units tomorrow. The shelf unit above should be easy, the window seat has the potential to be a bit more problematic. There is a base board heater that will sit directly in front of the window seat part. I can't build directly above it because of heat. But I'm concerned that someone sitting or laying on the window seat will constantly bash their heals against it. I'm thinking that I might try modelling it with the actual seat part at the very top extenting out about 3 inches so that it forces the knee and legs ought from the heater. But I don't know if I can get that to work or look decent.

Portable Saw Mill

For the last month or so, as time permitted on either a Saturday or occassionally during an evening, the boys and I would go out and cut down a few trees. The trees where on the future drain field of our church's building site. Going out and running a chain saw or just moving limbs was a good stress relief from a very hectic and trying project at work. I think from Feb 1st till April 11th I averaged 70 hr work weeks. So getting out and away from a computer was a huge relief. All that work also kept me from going out in the shop and playing and hence the completely lack of posts on this blog.

Part of the deal with cutting down the trees involved cutting all the trees on the drain field and making sure that all the branches/trunks 2" or larger were set aside for firewood, smaller branches were disposed of in piles around the perimeter of the field. In total we wound up with 20 logs - ~11 ft in length and ranging in diameter from 14" to 24+". With the gracious help of two friends from church we moved the logs from the church site to our "milling site". The milling site was about 2 miles away in an open area of another woodlot. The effort to move the logs was almost herculean, 11 of the logs were loaded with a loader the remainder were loaded manually using chain falls, winches and jacks. The mill site looked like this after we got all the logs there. These were primarily oak - mostly white, a few red oak logs. In addition there were 4 soft maple logs - these logs have ambrosia beetle damage to them, making the boards interesting.

My friend Steve, who is the land owner at the mill site also had a few logs that he needed milled.

We were only able to do some of them as the maples in the middle were spalted and a few were too small in diameter to make it worth while to mill. However we did do the majority of them - cherry and walnut.

I hired Jim Hart - Brookside Farm Sawmill to bring in his portable sawmill. He was scheduled to arrive at 8:30am, I got there a half hour early figuring on standing by the road ready to stop traffic while he turned into the site. But I barely got the van parked and he was already pulling in.  He had the mill setup and ready to go within 10-15 min of getting to the site. It was amazing to watch him in action as he set up the saw mill - extremely efficient. We parked the mini-van and the U-Haul trailer off behind the mill to make it readily available to load the boards onto. We could only hold about 1/4 of the boards in the trailer as the mini-van would not have handled all the weight.

Here we have the first log onto the mill. This was one of two logs that I had sitting next to my driveway since last spring when I cut down two trees in my yard.  Hence the reason for the bark falling off. Despite its outer looks, the wood it produced was beautiful.

The first cut:

The first boards:

The mill in action on the 3rd log. You can begin to see the trail of sawdust collecting on the ground. By the time we got done that pile was about 30 inches high along the length of the mill.

As the morning wore on out came the umbrella. The sawdust is already starting to stack up on the left. The basic process of sawing the log depended somewhat on the size of the log. Once loaded on the mill and levelled so that the pith was approximately level front to back. the first cut was made to remove a slab containing the bark and a majority of the sapwood and generally any imperfections such as curvature, limb stumps etc. On larger diameters, often a second cut was made before turning the log to get the next adjacent face. The second cut was not discarded but rather any second cuts before the log was squared were set aside on the log lift. When the log was complete, these were brought back up on the mill set on edge and squared up removign any bark and sapwood. Yielding more boards.  The initial slabs were discarded for later recycling into firewood.

It was interesting to watch the mechanics of flipping the log over to get to the next adjoining face. Here you can see the hydrolic arm with a mechanical hand starting to lift the log:

Ready to begin cutting the next face.

After 8 hrs, we had cut all 20 logs that I had as well as 8 logs from Steve. We had to cut some of Steve's logs due to large crooks in the trees and previous saw marks. When you have a severely twisted log it may be better to cut the log into two shorter sections in order to maximize the output vs. attempting to cut the longer log with a bend or crook in it. There is a tradeoff - longer effort to handle 2 logs vs. 1, but some of that is offset by the amount of work to deal with the crooked log as well as the higher yield. Its amazing how much wood gets lost when dealing with a crooked log. I got to see it first hand when doing one of the red oak logs.

We moved one load home on Saturday night and setup the first base for stacking the wood and unloaded the trailer and returned it to Charlottesville. We were exhausted - 8 am till10pm with only a short lunch and supper break. My frient James volunteered to bring the remainder of the wood on his flat bed trailer pulled by his 4x4. Where my van and U-Haul trailer we could only get 1/4 of the load, with his trailer we managed the rest of my wood and we brought Steve's wood as well since he hadn't really put much thought into where to stack it after it was milled. I didn't want to leave the cherry and walnut just sitting out and we had room in our stacks.

 Here are the stacks with Johannes standing next to give perspective. The stack bases are 4"x6" x 12' pressure treated boards with 5 - 4"x4"x48" pressure treated boards going across between them. We laid plastic under the long runners. Then levelled everything off front to back and side to side. Then laid a sticker board on each cross piece and then the first layer. The tarps are temporary. I need to get some corrugated roofing material and make a small frame to act as a roof over each pile and hopefully run shade cloth around the pile to basically hide it and allow it to blend more into the evironment. This also will help in air circulation.

Steve wanted a nice walnut mantle cut from one of the boards and Jim Hart did a fantastic job of creatively cutting the log to give a remarkable mantle. Its difficult to see but one side is natural edged with semi-symetrical bulges at either end.

Well thats all for this post.

Built in Wall Unit Part IV - Woodwork Complete

I know its been almost two months since I've last posted. In what spare time and vacation I've had I spent almost all of it in the garage working on this project. I wanted to post some completion pictures so I'm not going into detail on the construction.

We built it out in 3 phases:

1) Right most unit with 12 little drawers
2) Base Cabinet
3) 3 Upper shelving units.

The client already has the first unit so I can't show what it all looks like standing next to each other yet. She is going to finish the cabinets then I need to go over and fit and install them.

Finished Right Cabinet:

Finished Right Cabinet next to Base Cabinet

Finished Base Cabinet and shelving units:

Roughly what the stain glass doors in the middle shelving unit will look like assembled (the outer edges of the doors have since been rounded over with 3/16" roundover bit):

That's it for now.. hopefully I'll have more time to walk through some of the actual building process.

Hearth Installation

Back in October we had to make a decision. Replace the thin firebrick veneer in our manufactured fireplace or consider replacing it. We like the fireplace but frankly, we were getting tired of it, while it looks pretty it burns  a lot of wood with minimal heat contribution to the house. Last winter neither of our heatpumps could really keep up with the temperatures outside, even on modestly cool days. We replaced the upstairs heat pump this spring at cost of about $5700 but we couldn't afford to pay the same for the downstairs unit. So we headed off to town and did some shopping around at a couple of stores.

It seemed that if we could find the make and model of the old fireplace we might be able to buy the proper firebrick sheets otherwise we needed to buy generic material and cut it down to size. Both stores we went to estimated approximately the same price for the material, not cheap but not super expensive. This would get the fireplace ready for another year (after getting the chimney cleaned of course) but we would still be at the same problem. Lots of wood burned, very little heat.

We explored the alternatives, based on our existing chimney and zero clearance manufactured fireplace our alternatives were:

1.  rip out the existing fireplace and chimney and put in a new chimney with proper chimney pipe for a wood burning stove and close in the existing openning and place stove in front. That was a pretty pricey option as the chimney alone with all its pieces etc added up to > $2000 and that didn't include a stove.
2. rip out the existing fireplace and put in a new one that was a bit more energy efficient. Still a substantial amount of money - perhaps the same amount as option #1 or even more depending on variables.
3. put in a chimney liner and route it out through the front of the fireplace and place a hearth heater type "insert" infront of the fireplace - approximately $3100 installed (liner, stove and installation).

Depending on which store we went to we got slightly differing opinions on option #3 with one suggesting that we could line the chimney and put a standard woodstove in front. In the end we chose option #3 with the Regency H2100 Hearth Heater purchased and installed by Wooden Sun in Charlottesville, VA.

I chose to take on the task of upgrading the hearth myself as I wanted to alter its appearance. The original was black slate and it really didn't look that great in my opinion. I wanted the hearth to match more of the stone work of the fireplace. I also assume that because the original fireplace was a zero clearance manufactured fireplace, the existing hearth only needed to be non-combustable as it was just black slate about 1" thick glued to the engineered hardwood floor with a ton of construction adhesive and then grouted. The H2100 Hearth heater specs stated that the floor protection must be R1.1 or greater. So my first step was to do a bit of research.

Turns out that stone itself has basically no R value, even ceramic tiles have a limited R value on their own. Concrete backer board actually seems to have slightly more R value then does 1" of stone, but still it also provided limited R values. In order to get the values needed without building a 12" thick hearth  I needed to start with a 1/2" Micore base. 1/2" Micore alone provides the full R value required for the hearth heater. Micore is a fairly soft material and is actually used as acoustic panels as well. You can get it in 4' x 8' sheets but its hard to come by locally. I wound up buying two 6' x 18" panels at ~$40 per panel.  All the sites I looked at on the Internet suggested that it wasn't adviseable to simply place stone directly ontop of the micore bur rather put 1/4" or 1/2" cement backerboard over the micore and then the stone. The combination would exceed the requirements by about R 0.2 or so which is actually a good thing - better too have more insulative value then not enough.

Chandra and I went out to Charles Luck Stone center  in Charlottesville and bought new flag stone - five 18" x 24" x 1" and two 24" x 24" x 1". We chose a light tan colored rock that was rough but seemed to match the colors in the stone veneer on our existing fireplace. We picked up the Micore panels from Wooden Sun and 1/2" cement backer board from Lowes as well as mortar, screws and some construction adhesive. With everything in place we got busy starting on Friday Oct 29th. We had to be completely done the project before the installation on Wednesday Nov 3rd. Lots of fun :-)

To get rid of the original hearth, I first tried to pry up the existing stone but that didn't work very well. The construction adhesive was so well attached to the engineered hardwood floor that prying it up resulted in the flooring coming up with it. While we wanted to go down to the oriented strand board subfloor, I didn't want to wreck the whole floor in the process.  Plan B involved getting out the circular saw, using my oldest and most worn out blade and setting it so that running the saw on top of the slate with the blade about 1/4" out from the stone it cut just deep enough to cut through the hardwood flooring but not the subfloor. Then it was a simple matter of popping up the stones with the flooring still attached.

Then using a straight edge and skill saw, I carefully straightened the cut line between where the stone would end and the hardwood would begin making sure once again only to cut the hardwood and not the subfloor. Because the hearth heater sits in front of the fireplace opening, we also needed to extend the hearth out in front by another 20" or so in the middle where the stove would sit. We went out 24" based on our understanding of the clearances and went 48" wide to match the stone we bought. We probably could have gotten away with only 18" x 40" after seeing the stove installed. But its actually better to extend more in front and the sides then the minimum requirements. Again we simply used straightedge and skill saw to cut the flooring and then pried it up. We scrapped off any remaining construction adhesive and vacuumed up the dust and small stuff.

With the subfloor exposed we cut down the sheets of Micore to fit and then using construction adhesive and screws we attached it to the subfloor. We ran out of micore on the far left edge so I patched in using a piece of 1/2" cement board. Since this is well outside of the "heat" area and way outside the required 6" on either side of the stove I don't believe this constitutes any kind of problem.

With the micore in place I put down the 1/2" cement backer board and screwed it down. Then we laid out the stones and figured out the arrangement to best match color and texture. 

We had to trim the two end stones and then trim 4 of the stones to work around the veneer. I bought a DeWalt Diamond masonary blade for the skill saw. I was amazed at how easily it cut through the stone. I'll be honest, I've had the saw work harder cutting through oak boards then it took to cut the stone.
We set the stones in a 1/2" of mortor using a trowel with 1/2" x 1/2" notches. After it dried for 48hrs we grouted it and then let it sit another 36hrs before we sealed it. We got the sealer on and dried just in time for the installation. Not much time to spare waiting the required times between steps.

The final installation came out really nice. They closed off the front of the fireplace with  a piece of sheet metal. The stove is about 1-1/2" in front of the openning.  I still need to finish off the trim around the stone to hide the floor/stone line. Being the first time I've ever done stone work, I think this came out pretty nice.

We've been running it over the past month, mostly during the evenings and overnight to keep the heat pumps from kicking in. It really warms up the house amazingly well for such a small box. It heats the lower floor, especially the living room and kitchen but we have the fan on the air exchangers running to circulate the air into the rest of the house. Upstairs it gets up to 74 degrees in our bedroom and probably around 76 in the loft (directly above the living room). The stove came with a fan that circulates air around the outside of the firebox which really contributes to warming the air. I haven't seen an electric bill yet, but I'm guessing we'll see a decrease in it relative to last year. For the first time since we bought the house I can honestly say that it is actually warm on cool days.

Built In Wall Unit - Part V - Design Mistakes

Its been a busy week, as I balance work with pleasure. I've spent a lot of time working in Sketch-Up. I'm actually starting to get the hang of that program. To date I've only posted renderings that don't include the face frame. When I added the face frame I suddenly realized that I had made a major design snaffu.

When laying out the available space, I did not take into account that the face frame does not necessarily center itself over each vertical case side. In some cases, like in the middle where two cases butt up against each other, the face frame is centered perfectly over the side case. But when the case is an end case in the run, the face frame is aligned to the edge of the case and not centered. So when I place the frame on the cases, and started measuring the opennings I realized that I was totally hosed. Almost every case had a different openning width and almost every door in the lower case was a different size. Okay not quite there was some obviously pairing on of sizes and some symmetry between one side and the other.

Okay, having realized that 5 evenings of work in SketchUp was pretty much hosed, I took a step back. Basically in order to design it correctly I had to start with the face frame and layout the face frame with equa-distant spacing on the various opennings. With that complete, it was a simple process of moving the case sides and lower case partitions to their correct locations - either centered or aligned with the edge of the face frame as needed.

The end result was nice even opennings but with the face frame removed the sizes of the cases went from equal widths to varied widths. This means that a shelf from one of the middle cases cannot be used in the adjacent case. Each case will have its own set of shelves that are unique to it. Its a trade off - nice visually pleasing cases that look uniform in their opennings. Or uniformly sized cases that all have different sized opennings. I went for the visual layout.  The following 3 images give a feel for what the final case will look like.

The following images show the dimesions of the case with and without face frame. It was a great learning experience discovering this in SketchUp vs. after cutting all the material . That would have been disastrous.

Built In Wall Unit - Part IV

Tonight I spent the evening playing in Google Sketchup 3D modelling a part of the room that the cases will be located in - including the outside wall, hall entry and ceiling. Part of this was done to start getting a better feel for any complications.

The first thing was to ensure based on my measurements that there will be a gap between the edge of the case and the wall. The door frame sticks out 3/4" and the face frame frame needs to be show its full reveal infront of the door frame. There is enough gap between the door frame and the case to allow the face frame to slide between the case and the door frame. The wall toes in at the top so the gap near the top will virtually disappear.

On this right case the face frame will overlap the shelf fronts by at least 3/4" (if 1-1/2" face frame) or 1-1/4" if 2" face frame. The face frame I think needs to be uniform across the entire cabinet. Because 2 cases butt against each other the minimum is 1-1/2". Where I'm slightly perplexed is how to deal with the scenario when there is but a single board on the edge. This happens in two places, the middle right cabinet where it meets the right most cabinet - remember right cabinet is 9-1/2" deep and the right middle is 12" deep.

And again on the left most edge of the last case:

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) just put the face frame on flush with the outside edge and let one side have a signicant overlap similar to the narrow case on the far right and ignore the fact that there is a marginal 1/4" overlap on the joints between two adjacent cases.

2) I could add a second board in the left most case so that it is double thick. There would still be an overlap that is deeper then the others but only by a 1/4" vs by 1".  Same goes for the right middle, but there one could double only for the visible part - front 3" and use spacers between the narrow and wide cases to fill in. Less wood wasted.

I've been searching high and low for examples in design books and on the web but thus far I've struck out.

If you can visualize it, this is what the case (minus face frames and cabinet doors, etc) would look in the space allocated for it.