This week started off not working on the house at all.  We helped our friend Eve with the Fall roundup of her cattle.  Having never been involved with a roundup before, I had no idea what to expect.

I knew working cattle was physically demanding and I figured we would be in a lot of pain at the end of the day from spending so much time riding a horse.  Surprisingly, I came through it in pretty good shape.  When I climbed down from the horse after riding steadily for 4-5 hours, it only took walking about 30 steps to get my knee and hip joints reconfigured back to being a biped again and I really did not experience any muscle pain at all.

I attribute it to laying all of the floor tile at M.T. Acres.  The tiling took such a toll on me physically, I think I may now be numb to anything that does not rise to that pain level.

Tina got beat up a little bit in the roundup.  But even she was moving better than I had expected.  The only thing we did notice is spending so much time in the sunshine made us both absolutely exhausted.  I slept deeper than I ever remember doing in the past.

We must have done okay at the roundup because Eve and her crew already invited us back to help with the Spring roundup.  WOO HOO!!!

We did not get any pictures of the roundup worth posting because we were both too busy rounding up to take pictures.  We were done by about noon on Friday, so it was back to work on kitchen cabinets.

I started off by glueing the face frame on the top corner cabinet.

My cradle jig worked perfectly!  It allowed me to use 2 cargo straps to hold the middle of the face frame and made it really easy to clamp the top and bottom with Bessy clamps.

Although it does not show well in the picture, I always make the stiles (the vertical pieces of the face frame) a little bit wider than the cabinet.  With a standard box cabinet, I then just use a flush trim router bit to trim the stiles to the exact width of the cabinet side.

That was not an option with the corner cabinet because the face frame is 45 degrees to the side rather than 90 degrees.  Since all of my good hand planes are still packed in boxes at the rental house from the move, I had to use a cabinet scraper.

For any of you unfamiliar with a cabinet scraper, it is just a piece of sheet metal.  The one I used for this cabinet is about 2 x 5 inch rectangle made from 24 guage spring steel.  To use it, you just file an edge until there is a burr on the edge.  Then you just hold it with both hands and bend it so there is a slight bow in the scraper and scrape the burr across the workpiece.

It is a slow process and the scraper heats up because you are basically cutting with the friction caused between the wood and the burr on the scraper.  I could only scrape for about 3-4 minutes continuously because the scraper heats up enough to start burning the wood (and my fingers).  Then, I let it cool off for a minute or two and repeat the process.  So it took a good 2 hours to get the face frame scraped how I wanted it.

Then I got the crown mouldings cut, sized and glued.  And finally, I glued the inlay.

Then I started the face frame for this nasty bugger.  You may remember a couple weeks ago when I built the carcass for this monster, it was originally intended to be three simple, separate cabinets that turned into one because of space constraints and where the studs in the wall behind it lined up.  Since then, this one has turned into a nightmare.

When building face frames for box cabinets, I usually just get the dimensions right and glue them up.  Then I can flip the face frame over side to side or even top to bottom to get the best fit and the best look.  With this one, I cannot do that because the skinny part on the left is 1 inch smaller than the skinny part of the right.  So I had to be careful to make sure I got the best side of each board facing out when I cut it.  Furthermore, the 2 stiles in the middle needed to be notched to fit the range hood.  In short, what looks to be pretty simple, turned into a serious pain in the neck!

It had to be glued up in 3 phases.  First the two center stiles and the bottom center rail (the horizontal piece).

Then the top rail.

Then the 2 bottom rails and outer stiles.

Then I dry fit it to the carcass and it looks pretty good.

That was when I noticed a glaring mistake.

On the right-side cabinet, I oriented the grain the wrong way!  The top and bottom of that cabinet are perfect square pieces and I remember thinking when I cut them that I have to be careful during glue up to get them positioned right.  Apparently I was not careful enough.

But at least I was consistent; I did the same thing on the top!

So, I figure I have 3 options:

1 – Rebuild the carcass.

2 – Ignore it and hope nobody notices.

3 – Tell the story about how Navajo women intentionally wove imperfections into their blankets and appropriate that logic into Tina’s kitchen cabinets.

I am choosing option #3.  Now that I have admitted to God, the world and everybody here on the intertubes about how damn stupid I was, I can now lie with impunity about it and keep a clear conscience.  So, I meant to do that!  🙂

Tina did the sanding on some of the top cabinets with 400 grit sandpaper and got coats 2 and 3 of the varnish laid down and it it shines like steel!

 

From a better light view, she is making the cabinets look great!

Finally, we have developed a routine when we are working at M.T. Acres.  The dogs get breakfast and morning pills at 7AM.  Then Tina throws out about 6-8 balls for Belle The Amazing Water Dog to fetch.  Did I mention Belle is a fetchin’ fool?  The vet calls her “ball motivated” but that is WAY understated.

The general program is that we throw balls for Belle for about 20 minutes.  After that, Tina picks up the ball most recently brought back and puts it in the evil ball storage box.  After that, Belle goes out and ranges until she finds another ball to bring back to us.  We throw that ball 3-4 more times until Tina put it into the evil spiteful storage box.  This continues until Tina puts all of the balls into the evil, hateful, spiteful storage box.

After Tina had put away the last of the balls, Belle went out ranging to see if she could find any others and she came back with this:

If you cannot see it well in the picture, it is a wild gourd.  We have them growing all over the place at M.T. Acres.  It is about the same size as her balls and it is yellow.  So I am sure her little pea-brain thought: “It looks like a ball so maybe they will throw it for me.”