Mazdeuce fixes the grosh

Ever the possibility, This is a great watch on sharpening low buck chisels. Worth a watch. https://youtu.be/Ki8tt-VjwqI

My fingers hurt just looking at the edge bandings and razor blades.

If there is one thing I've learned during this adventure it's to stop when I feel apprehensive about moving forward with something. Usually that feeling comes from not quite understanding how to move forward or what I'm going to do when I get there.
With the cabinets I was finding excuses to not apply the last coat of poly. I know I need these cabinets, and in this size, but I don't quite have a clear vision for the kitchen. I don't know how I want upper cabinets/shelves, don't know what counter material, what flooring, lots of questions. So I've been drinking coffee and looking at it and I'm getting closer to having a plan.
In the mean time I've caught up on the mowing and burning the brush pile and the rest of the tree I cut down in the spring. I also cleaned up and turned over the garden beds in preparation for planting a fall garden in the next couple of weeks. The upside to a 10 month summer is having two full growing seasons.

If i ever get around to building anything out of wood i am going to pester you. Mostly because i'll need a human being besides me to tell me 'you need to sit down and do some research' while not being demotivational about it. My brain is stupid but your cabinets look excellent!

In reply to Vigo:

There is a HUGE difference between making something out of wood and making something pretty out of wood. I can make stuff that won't fall over. Mostly. Thanks for thinking the cabinets look nice. They look better than some of the stuff people pay for, so there's that.
Dragged the cabinets out and sanded the flat spots with the sander, the tighter bits by hand, steel wool in the corners and front of the edge banding, and then wiping it all down for the last coat of polyurethane. For now anyway. Time to make drawers. I haven't made drawers yet. I might have to make at least a couple for the work bench cabinets first to get the hang of it.

I'm building drawers for under the workbench. The drawer slides don't exactly let you be sloppy. You can't be dropping sixteenths here and there or you're in trouble and the slides won't slide. Cutting and drilling today. Tomorrow the first two go together. Wish me luck. Also, it's hot out. I'm working outside so the inside doesn't get dusty. It's 91 with a heat index of 102 outside. Inside the Grosh it's air conditioned and very nice. I may be doing things the wrong way.

Drawer slides have more slop that you would imagine but good luck! And move inside, god damn.

mayhaps you need some dust curtains for a portion of the Grosh (capital G) interior?

bluej wrote: mayhaps you need some dust curtains for a portion of the Grosh (capital G) interior?

That would work if I hadn't moved the couch into the shop area and fallen in love with being able to turn on some music and sit down and "work" on the weekends while the Deucelings are playing video games inside and driving me nuts.

Part of the reason I'm moving slowly on the cabinets is because I'm spending an hour or two or three almost every day continuing to work on the yard. South East Texas almost has two summers separated by so much heat that everything gives up and stops growing. We're at the beginning of the second growth period of the year and that has me mowing and cleaning up a lot in an effort to go into fall with an actual clean yard. This is the first time in 15 years that the yard is actually clean and in control from the road all the way to the back. I told Mrs. Deuce not to worry, I'd get to it, and I did.
She has the patience of a god.
As I get things under control and move away from choking brush, a number of fairly pretty domestic vines keep popping up. In addition to trumpet vines (which just stopped blooming) we have the light purple flowers which I think are some sort of sweet pea, and the amazing blue ones which I havent identified yet. In fact, I'm finding the remnants of quite a lot of disorganized attempts at past gardening and I'm trying to identify it, nurture it, and move it around to suit my vision for the yard. It doesn't hurt that doing this costs $0 and let's me wander around the yard with a cup of coffee looking at plants in the name of "working".
OK, back to work on the drawers.

Clamps and glue and screws. Making square boxes is getting easy.
A bunch of thinking and measuring and considering before it occurred to me that if I screwed the drawer slides halfway on the drawer and halfway in the opening then everything should be even. I need to think about how I want to use jigs to make this quickly repeatable. My first two drawers!
And they work even better with 20lbs in them! I love the slides. I do need to measure some stuff and decide if my tolerances are where I think they need to be. I think I'm going to make the rest of the drawers for the workbench before the kitchen cabinets. This has nothing to do with being excited to load them up and be organized. Nope, definitely not that.

Looks good. Not really how kitchen cabinet drawers are usually made, but good for work bench drawers where the loads are likely to be heavier.

For kitchen drawers, you want to maximize space as much as possible. I would recess the slides into the drawer sides and use 1/4" ply for the bottom, slid into dados in the front, back and sides. This will give you the maximum cubic inch of drawer space for your cabinet opening.

For your kitchen drawers, do you plan for the faces to be flush with the cabinet?

The faces won't be flush, the hinges I'm using are for overlay. They're the same ones that are on the cabinets at Mrs. Deuce's grandparents house and I think they look spiffy.

About bottom thickness. Here's my thought process. If I cut a 1/4 inch dado I still have to leave 1/4 inch of wood below the slot to support the drawer. This takes up 1/2 inch instead of the 3/4 that my bottom does. In exchange for that 1/4 inch of space I have to buy a dado blade and set up my table saw. I also move away from my two tool set of just a track saw and a drill. Now, if I had to make a bunch of drawers the difference in material cost alone would make sense, but my kitchen is only going to have 8 drawers.

Needs more jigsaw

As requested, more jigsaw.
I wasn't sure I could get what I wanted visually out of a single board for the upright. Mrs. Deuce saw it and asked "is it going to tip over?" Right then. I was going for an illusion of leaning forward. It worked. I still need to make a matching one for under the other window.
I ate a sketchy cheeseburger the other night and that has me slowed down. Carrying a sheet of plywood outside was not physically in the cards which is why I'm not making drawers.
Also redid the trellis for the Confederate Jasmine that I bought off the sale plant rack at Wal-Mart this last spring. I wasn't sure it was going to live, so I did the-most-half assed little trellis out of some trim cutoffs and wire that kept tipping over. They both lived, so they were upgraded. If they flourish I have an idea for a big trellis that goes over the driveway but uses counterweights to open like a drawbridge if necessary.

I cut out enough wood to make the other four drawers in the workbench.
Then I drilled holes. 80 of them. And now I'm starting to think about dadoes. Even if running them through the table saw took the same time as drilling, assembly would be greatly sped up by slotting the bottom in instead of putting in all those screws. So you clearly CAN build cabinets like this, but maybe.....

You're pretty vines that you're nurturing are Morning Glory, around these parts you'd be chastised and berated for nurturing a weed. Unchecked they'll choke out a soybean field. Thank God for Roundup.

They do have a pretty flower.

I like the window planters, I've got something similar with Jalapenos and Pablanos growing in them on my back porch.

bigdaddylee82 wrote: You're pretty vines that you're nurturing are Morning Glory, around these parts you'd be chastised and berated for nurturing a weed.

If it wasn't a weed it wouldn't have survived in my yard long enough for me to notice it.

At this point in my life I like my plants how I like my women, beautiful and aggressive.

Assembling the rest of the drawers for the workbench. I'm glad I took the time to do this just to get used to assembling them. For instance when you open the drawer you really only see the overlap between the sides and the front, so making sure this joint is perfect is the visually important joint.

So if there is any slack in pieces, say, because I was cutting all of these sides from leftover pieces from all of the other stuff I've cut over the last six months, put that weirdness on the back of the drawer. The drawers and one cabinet are outside getting poly wiped on the outside. It looks like I'm going to frustrate Mrs. Deuce by finishing the workbench before assembling the drawers and doing a rough install of the kitchen cabinets. Oops.

The one thing I like about working on the yard is that it doesn't take much mental energy. I step outside, identify a task, and get to it. Working with my hands leaves my mind to wander and just think about stuff.

Today I cleaned off the flag stones by the deck. They were completely covered by grass and dirt. There are issues.
Where I spend my summers in upper Michigan there is a certain type of lawn you run across. It might be attached to a big house, a farm, a single wide, but at the beginning of August it's a perfect expanse of green. There's probably a doe and buck statue. Flowers, from bulbs that popped through the snow to huge showy annuals. Look around for the Virgin Mary statue tucked safely under the graceful curve of an old bathtub half buried. Somewhere there is an old dude who busts his ass on this lawn. Between the end of ice fishing and the beginning of deer season, this is where his energy goes.

It turns out a root was not happy about the stones and was attempting to remove them. Sawzall to the rescue!

And so I've been thinking about those lawns and the old guys who keep them up. For everything beautiful I see, someone had to bust their ass to get it that way. And not just yards, but houses and cars and garages. When I run across something that takes my breath away, someone did that. They just buckled down and worked. Maybe because they were paid to do it, maybe just for the love of creating something beautiful, doesn't really matter.

I got the stones back down, they look better and nobody is going to trip on them. I'll actually be ripping all of this up this winter, 9 years is as long as a deck resting on the ground can last in this environment.

It's taken me embarrassingly long to make the connection between work and beauty. Maybe I was a crappy listener when people told younger me. Everyone hammered into my psyche the connection between work and success, that I got, and combined with a ton of luck I'm doing ok, which is cool, but doesn't seem to be the be all and end all for my soul. So I'm going to keep getting up, making a cup of coffee, and heading off to work to see what I can do.

Well, guessing from the last year or so of updates to the Grosh/Deuce Estate, you actually made the connection a long time ago, buried it deep in the recesses of your psyche, in a dark corner where it gets an hour of sunlight a day, and that connection flourished in the darkness, like a blade of grass that takes root in a window well, but continues to grow despite the unlikely circumstances...because what you have going on at your place looks pretty good from my perspective!

Question: instead of another wood deck, why not a raised stone patio? I can't imagine the cost being much different and it should last virtually forever.

Good question. The biggest reason is that the siding on the house goes all the way to the ground where the deck sits. Doing a built up deck would require me to rework the siding I think. Also, the slab on one side is basically the same height as the ground, hence water coming into the house this spring. Building up a patio above this height might have potential drainage issues. They could probably be dealt with, but I'm not sure I want to. I am considering laying stone in basically the entire area between the Grosh and the house (maybe 750 square feet) so I'd love to learn about how to lay a base over ground that basically turns to infinate goo when it rains.

The picture makes it look like the deck is raised above grade for some reason. That was the only reason I suggested a raised patio.

As many of you know from the R63 thread, there is a lift incoming. More to follow.......

The work bay proper is 23 feet long and 11.5 feet wide. This gives me room to park the Cadillac and still have six feet in front of the bay for a work bench and maneuvering. The MaxJax is at a freight depot in Houston and will be delivered to a friend's business Monday for me to pick up. I have a lot of cleaning to do.

Observation 1: Fergus marks his territory much like my mustang marks its territory. Power steering fluid, trans fluid, etc.

Observation 2: The fort has become tire storage, which is exactly what would happen in my garage. Practical use > cool use, every time.