This week was all about drawers.  I got the bottoms made for all of the drawers requiring 1/4 inch bottoms.  Then, I got all of the drawer bodies glued up.

Even after making literally dozens of drawers over my woodworking life, it always spooks me when I glue them up, how absolutely awful the joinery looks until it is properly sanded and finished.

I really do not like the style of drawers we had to make for this kitchen.  But because we had to use the stupid European hinges for the cabinet doors (because we could not find decent looking half-lap hinges), we had to build the drawers as basically a wood box with a face panel glued on it.

The problem is, the stupid European hinges hold the door fully outside the face frame of the cabinet.  With the old-school half lap hinges, the cabinet door edge actually sits halfway inside the face frame of the cabinet – I.E. It only protrudes 3/8 inch outside the face frame.  But because we have to have the front of the cabinet doors and the front of the drawers protrude the same amount in front of the face frames, this was really the only way to go.

After making all of the drawer bodies, I was able to begin making the face panels.

In this case, Tina chose a really simple design for the drawer fronts.  It is just a Red Oak panel with a simple 1/2 inch roundover around the edges.

She chose this style due to the high amount of dust in the desert.  Anything with any type fillet or ogee would collect an insane amount of dust.  But this incredibly simple design does nothing to showcase my woodworking abilities.  And frankly, the whole reason for having kitchen cabinets (or even an indoor kitchen for that matter) is to show off my woodworking skills.  After all, Tina has done just fine for the last 8 months cooking our meals on a propane camp stove and storing her cooking stuff in plastic bins hidden away in a closet somewhere.

Figuring out how to glue the face panel to the drawer body and keep it straight was also a bit of a challenge.  The problem is, wood glue is extremely slippery when it is wet.  So, keeping the drawer body straight with the face would be a challenge without some kind of process in place while the glue is wet.  I have to admit that I was proud of myself for the solution I came up with.

I started by cutting some scrap wood to the width of the inset I wanted for the drawer body and clamping it to the face panel.  Then I drove 3-4 wire brads about 1/4 inch into the face panel.

I nipped the head of the wire brads off with a pair of dykes about 1/8 – 1/4 inch proud of the face panel.

Then I coated the front of the drawer body with a good amount of yellow glue and spread it around into a nice even coat with a rubber roller.

The wire brads allowed me to get it perfectly positioned before I clamped it down.  Since the cut ends of the brads were embedded into the drawer body before the glue surfaces ever touched, I had no problems with slippage.

Of course, some of the more odd shaped drawers required us to come up some unusual ways of clamping them.

But in the end, I am pretty happy with how they came out.

Before Tina started the finishing process, I did rough fit all of the drawer glides and made sure we could at fit them into holes they were built for.

Presently they are awful tight on the drawer glides and will need quite a bit of fine adjustment.  But I will do that when we do the final fitting.

But they sure look plain.  I really pray the finishing and hardware dresses them up some because right now our kitchen looks like it was made by a 3 year-old from crating lumber.

The real killer this week was a drawer that I had not even originally planned on making.  It is a very and deep drawer, but also very short.  It is under the double ovens.  It is one of those things that was not part of the original plan, but I found myself with some extra space and did not know what to do with it.  So I decided to make a drawer that is 24 inches deep, almost 30 inches wide and only 4 inches tall.  I figured, under the ovens, it would be a great place for Tina to store her cookie trays.  Thus we dubbed it the “Cookie Drawer”.

I had a set of cheap 100# drawer glides left over from building our Minnesota kitchen.  I remember I did not like them which is why I chose to go with another brand, but I could not remember why.  Anyway, I thought the cookie drawer is something Tina is going to opening at most, once or twice per week (except during Christmas) and it is never going to hold much weight.  So I decided to use the cheap drawer glides I had rather than paying shipping for a good set.

Bad idea!

When I was trying to rough fit the drawer into the glide, I was not even pushing hard, the entire bearing assembly on the left side blew apart into hundreds of pieces!

Needless to say, I was not happy!

I’ll get a new and better set of drawer glides and somehow figure out how to make it work, but damn this one is depressing.

Beyond that, Tina got started finishing drawers.

The joinery does come out looking nice once Tina gets done with her magic.

And I got all of the towel racks and mirrors up in the bathrooms.

Once we get the drawers done and fitted, we are going to take a week or two off from building, to move all of our stuff from the rental house.  Our lease is up at the end of March and we really do not want to extend even though the house has quite a bit of work left.  So this week we are going to pick up a 20 foot storage container that we can store some of our stuff in while we complete the build and make sure we get our stuff moved out of the rental.  Therefore, I may or may not make posts over the next couple weeks. – Building is cool and folks like to read about that; moving, not so much.

The electrician came out on Tuesday and our inspector came out Wednesday to sign off for the final inspection!  We are fully legal to live at M.T. Acres!

Of course that required me to apply for a “Certificate of Occupancy” from the county, which our gal Debbie Lee sent out post haste.

I am not sure what “CONSPICUOS” means since it is not a real word in the English language, but I assume it means they want to be able to access this document somehow.  So I figure I will happily allow them access to it (if they have the proper warrants, correctly spelled, prescribed by the 4th Amendment) via a prostate exam.

Regardless, we are now officially residents of the Sulphur Springs Valley and we could not be happier!

On the build, we got the heavy-duty 200 pound drawer bodies assembled.  I started by cutting the drawer bottoms from 1/2 oak plywood, then covered the top with laminate.  The laminate was a serious pain in the neck to work with mainly due to having to glue it down with contact cement.

Then I trim the overhang off with a router using a flush-trim router bit.

Next was to glue up the drawer bodies.

The corner joinery generally looks horrible until after they are sanded and finished.

Technically, 4 of the drawers are not drawers at all.  They are actually pull-out shelves for the center island in the kitchen.  I was able to get them drilled and fitted to the drawer glides before Tina started the finishing.

And Tina started the finishing.

Lastly, it seems every February we get a few days where it is cool, wet and crappy.

In our case, this could not have come at a worse time.  When I cut all of the joinery for the drawers the weather was warm and (more importantly) dry.  When the rain and humidity came, the wood swelled up and twisted some of the drawer parts and made some of the joinery almost impossible to fit together.

I am really having to fight them to straighten out this bloody noodle wood after it twists and worse, having to use a dead blow mallet to even get the corner joints to fit.  It got so bad on Sunday that I brought the drawer parts into the house and put them in the guest bedroom with the fan on just to dry them out enough to fit them together.

The rain also introduced a few other problems.

We are getting sinkholes all over the place!  This particular one is not even in an area they would have dug for the house.  We have 3 more that are over spots that were dug for the house.  Thankfully, Tina made the builder leave about 5 yards of dirt he was going to haul away, so at least I have dirt to fill them in.

The plan for the coming week is to get the rest of the drawers including adding the drawer faces and maybe move a couple loads of stuff from the rental house.

I did not think we had accomplished much this week until I started gathering together the pictures for this post.  We actually got quite a bit done.

Tina has been down and out all week with a bad cold.  But she did manage to break in her new ovens baking some brownies.

The first couple days of the week, I spent getting ready for the final inspection.  The first order of business was to get a door on the water softener closet in the garage.  As it turned out, that was not a requirement for the final inspection, but I did not know that at the time and it was good to get it done anyway.

The doorway was framed for a 26 inch door.  Unfortunately, nobody stocks 26 inch doors and I was unwilling to special order one.  So I bought a 24 inch door and closed in the framing.  Since I was not sure if the inspector would be a jerk or not, I decided to hide my impromptu framing with some mouldings.  I did not have any cheap moulding for it, so I took a few #2 framing studs, re-sawed them and planed them down to 5/8 inch thick.  Then a couple passes over the router to make them match the profiles of the oak mouldings inside the house and some quality time with a sander and boom.

I also made enough to trim out the utility closet as well.

I almost do not want to paint them because with the knots and such, they would look really nice with a few coats of varnish.  But it is just a garage…

The inspector, Zach, came out on Wednesday and although he did not pass us (I did not expect him to on the first go-around), he was not nearly as bad as I feared.

To call for the inspection, I had to look up the permit.  The permit was very adamant, in BIG BOLD TYPE, that we are not allowed to “live in, or in any way ‘use’ the property until passing the final inspection”.  It is arguable whether we are living there, since we do not have any of our real furniture there.  But we do have a bed, a bunch of cooking stuff, all of our work clothes, etc.  In terms of “using” the property, the garage is a full-fledged woodworking shop; is that “using”?  Needless to say, we were both a little worried about that one.  So we packed all of our “living” stuff into the cargo trailer, but there was not much we could do about my shop.

Zach was great.  He did not give us any grief about anything even though it was pretty obvious we are spending extended periods of time at the house.

He got into the kitchen and looked around and asked “Did you build all of these cabinets in garage?”

“Yes”, I said.

“Wow,  These are really nice!  Really nice finishing too.” he said.

“The finishing is all Tina’s work” I responded.  At which point, he gave a look of genuine admiration at Tina.

The only things he dinged us on were not having sediment traps on the propane lines to the furnace and hot water heater and he wanted arc-fault circuit breakers on the “living areas” of the house.

The plumber came back the next day and installed the sediment traps.  I expected them to be some kind of actual “thing”.  No, it is just a 2 inch piece of pipe hanging down before the gas goes into the furnace.

The electricians are coming back on Monday or Tuesday of the coming week to replace the “regular” breakers with the arc-fault breakers.  Then hopefully, Zach will be back to sign off and we can legally move into our new incomplete house!

Beyond that, I got the rubber base moulding up in the pantry so Tina can start hiding her cooking stuff in there if the inspector finds other issues.

After the stress of the inspector coming, I got started on my favorite part of the house build: the technical part.  I started with building the drawers for the cabinets.

I am making the drawer bodies out of popple, because it is cheap and easy to work.  So the first step was to plane the boards down to 5/8 inch thick.  It always breaks my heart to plane good wood because you end up throwing away a LOT of wood in the form of sawdust.

I am using box joints for all of the corner joinery because they are very strong and they look pretty nice.  So the first step is to cut all of the sides and fronts/backs to the size of the outside dimension of the drawer.

The key to getting good looking box joints is planning ahead because, even though I am machine cutting them, there are slight differences on each part just due to any number of factors when cutting them.  So I like to index each part with the part next to it.  So I always start out drawing an arrow pointing to the top of the drawer.  Then I number each joint.

Then I make sure I have plenty of scrap so I can cut several test joints to get the jig setup exactly right.

Actually cutting the joint is pretty easy.  I made a jig which is just a fence that fit on the crappy old mitre guage that came with my table saw.  The jig has an indexing peg that is used to size the joint.

The first cut is made on the front/back piece with the arrow pointed toward the blade.  Subsequent cuts are made by moving the board to the next cut on the indexing peg.  The process is repeated for the whole width of the board.

To cut the sides, the front/back is flipped (so the arrow is pointed the opposite direction) and the indexing peg is in the first cut.  The side board (with the arrow pointed toward the front piece) is pushed up against the front/back.

After the first cut, the sides are cut using the same procedure as cutting the front/back.

When the joint is complete, the two pieces should fit together nicely.

That was when I noticed a problem.  There was a LOT of tearout on some of the parts and it was a lot deeper than what I could just sand away.

After farting around with it for a while, I determined my old jig was just plain worn out.  So I took a detour to make a new jig.  The new jig worked much better and I was able to finally get my first complete drawer cut.

Then I set about cutting the rest of the drawers.

There are 2 parts that are not quite as clean as I would like.  One was due to me not having the part firmly against the indexing peg for the last cut.  But that one I think I can fix during glue up by just glueing a chip in the joint.  Another part got some pretty bad tearout.  So I may have to remake that one if I cannot hide the tearout.

It was getting late in the day when I finished the drawer sides, so I did not want to start cutting the bottoms until I had enough time to dedicate to getting them all cut.  So I spent the rest of the day getting the rest of the case mouldings hung on the doors.

The only doors that do not have mouldings now are just the doors inside the guest bedroom and inside my office.  But those will have to wait until we figure out what we are doing for flooring in those rooms.

Lastly, Saturday afternoon we looked out and noticed Mt Glenn was on fire (again).

This is the same mountain that burned last spring in the Lizard Fire.  That fire was much worse than this one.  This fire only burned about 2000 acres and they had it under control in a few hours.  We had really strong winds, but they were blowing directly from the south which pushed the fire right into the area that burned last spring.

As much as I hate wildfires, I do have to admit the smoke does make for pretty spectacular sunsets.

This week was a hugely productive week at M. T. Acres!  I had to work on computer stuff from the rental house all week, so Tina spent the week at M. T. Acres letting workmen in and out.  We have both been slammed pretty hard with a cold recently, so our productivity was down but that did not stop us from getting a LOT accomplished this week via the workmen.

The countertop people came out on Tuesday and got the countertops installed.

The plumber came on Wednesday and got the sinks hooked up and more importantly, the propane hooked up and hot water heater installed!  That means we have hot water and heat!

He also got the bath fixtures installed!  That means we can actually shower with hot water at home!  WOO HOO!!!

Our good friend Eve, who lives about 3 miles from us, has been gracious enough to let us come over and shower at her place for the last several months.  That has been a HUGE help and I really enjoy hanging out with Eve for a couple hours every night.  But it is still a great luxury to be able to clean up at home.

The showerhead in the master bath has two settings, one where it “spits at you”, another where it “pees on you”.  Tina likes the “pee” setting, I prefer the “spit” setting, but now we do not have to fight over the shower setting because it is just a simple switch.

Once the plumber was done on Wednesday, Tina was able to get all of the caulking done on both bathrooms.

I came out to M. T. Acres on Friday evening, after work.  The electrician came by on Saturday and between him and I, we were able to get all of the remaining electrical done.  The remaining electrical involved a lot of “bull work” that one person could not do by themselves.  I was pleased because he did not even charge us extra because I helped.

We got the ovens installed.

And the range hood and under-cabinet lights.

He also got the last few outlets and switches installed, plus the Edison lights over the center island in the kitchen.

The plumber also came back Saturday to finish off the few outstanding items he had.

He had partially installed the water softener on Wednesday, but did not finish because he needed to get some other part.  I am VERY pleased to report, the stuff that he did install on Wednesday had a leak because we had a pretty good sized puddle in the garage.  I say that I am pleased because if a professional can get leaks, I do not feel quite so stupid for some of the plumbing debacles I did in our Minnesota house over the years.

Saturday, he got the water softener completely installed (with no leaks).

And the garbage disposal and dishwasher.

For my part, I have been doing a bunch of little clean up jobs that need to be done before we can get the final inspection.

First I got the last deadbolt lock installed on the door between the laundry room and the garage.

Why the county requires me to have a deadbolt lock on an interior door is beyond me.  If Tina does not want me inside all she has to do is tell me to stay in my garage.  That is my favorite place in the house anyway.

Then I made a door frame and some doors for the utility closet in the garage.

Stupidly, I did not think to check and see if the studs were plumb before nailing up the frame. – They were not.  So I ended up having to trim up the top of the left door with my belt sander and jam a couple shims in the bottom of the right door to get everything to look decent.  You can see it a little bit on the bottoms, but otherwise, it looks fine.  Plus, it is a damn garage!

Tina spent today cleaning and cleaning and cleaning the kitchen.  Then she started moving stuff from our temporary kitchen (which is currently in my office) into the real kitchen.

It is looking pretty dang awesome I think!

This week’s plan is to get a door hung on the water softener closet and get a frame on the attic access in the laundry room and get the first (of what I am sure are many) final inspections from the county.  Then I will be able to focus on making the drawers and doors for the cabinets and getting the last of the mouldings hung.  And that should be the last of the build other than some “touch up”.