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.