It’s hard to follow up the ambry project with something interesting in the woodworking department. Even more so since I had to get back to the house projects that were idled while I pressed to get the ambry done. Exciting things like running 150 feet of oak trim to finish out the basement remodel.
With the basement (finally) put to bed, the next project is remodeling the living room. We basically don’t use it much, the room is crowded with furniture and drafty in the winter, and I just don’t like the couches. Jess has been inspired by a neighbor to make it more comfortable and inviting. So, here we go, fixing up the living room.
Step one was ordering a new custom picture window. That will take care of the draughts, and it’s the last of the original windows in the house. As you might imagine, it’s not cheap, and that’s why it’s taken me 20 years to get around to getting it replaced.
Step two is trying to make some space. As with any remodeling project in the living space, you need somewhere to put the stuff from the room under construction, like the empty space in the magic square game. But, given a small house and having been here for 20+ years, that’s not easy.
The biggest user of space in the LR is books. Shocking, I know, right?. Long a source of geek cred, especially in the SCA, most people are bibliophiles and have extensive collections of books in their area(s) of interest in addition to whatever leisure reading they might do.
The fireplace is flanked by two 3′ wide, 3 shelf bookcases that are “built-in.” Lightweight pine and not super useful. They held VHS tapes and DVDs back when that was a thing. Now, mostly junk. In addition to that, there are 6 IKEA faux oak tall bookcases, full. Two half bookcases that are refuges from the office remodeling at work. And a small desk that Jess used to use when she worked from home for a real estate appraisal company.
The first to go is that desk. Too small to be much use, and she works for our tool business now and has a dedicated space (more on that in a minute). That went to neighborhood dumpster day. Next, we have to remove the two commercial bookcases. They held wood planes that we had listed on eBay. They got condensed into one case, and the other when to the curb, where it lasted about 2 hours with a “free” sign on it. The other one got moved into the small bedroom, which is being turned into the Worldwide Headquarters and Shipping Center of the tool business.
We are starting to get some elbow room, but it’s still pretty tight in there. What next?
Well, I mentioned the small bedroom. It was formerly Joseph’s bedroom before he moved out. At the start of this evolution, it held the bookcase mentioned above of planes, all the shipping supplies, and my smaller camp bed set up as a guest bed. Well, it is. It’s just covered with trash bags full of bubble wrap and air pillows. Another 3/4 high bookcase that I made when I worked at the university for my office there and brought it home when I left. Also, a country-style work table that I built last year for Jess. As I recall, it’s top is 22″ by 50″ and covered in a self-healing cutting mat with a shelf for her laptop and label printer. And piles of as yet unlisted tools.
Mostly late 18th Century wooden molding planes. Like 20 flats of them. I ended up with a lot of them from an auction where I couldn’t seem to win anything else. Each one has to be looked up as you list it to get the pertinent details and an idea of the rarity/value. And I have to be in a certain frame of mind for that. It’s slow going, and most of them turn out to be nothing special, and I get about $20 each. Some are junk and are $10; some are either an unusual maker, odd profile, or whatever and go for $30-$50. The rare one will be $50-$80.
Meanwhile, Stanley cast-iron planes start at $50 for the common ones in average condition and go up steeply from there. Tell me, which would you rather spend your time on? Yeah, that’s why there are all those planes waiting for me to be in the mood (i.e., out of better things to list).
So now we are at a crossroads. We need to move at least two full bookcases of books out of the living room (permanently) and put them…somewhere. The obvious choice is all my woodworking and furniture history books. They take up most of the two bookcases, and I’d rather have them in the home office where they are more available. But the office has our computers and all the rest of the listed tools in bookcases.
OK, so the new plan.
We need to take down the camp bed. We rarely have visitors, much less overnight guests. And there’s this whole pandemic thing that isn’t going away anytime soon. Then remove the 2 refuge bookcases with their fixed shelves and fill the room with IKEA Ivar bookcases. Then move ALL the listed AND unlisted tools in there with the packing stuff. This will be much more convenient for Jess to pull and pack orders and reduce the tool business’s footprint to one small bedroom (more or less).
Sidebar–
IKEA Ivar? Are you kidding me? I thought you were a woodworker?
Yeah, Ivar. I love this stuff. Some of the parts in the home office I have had since I moved out of my parent’s house. It’s inexpensive (which is how I could afford it at 19) and super flexible (which is why it’s still around 35 years later). Over the years, I have added parts, and now the office has 4 units.
To do the shipping room right, I need 6 units. None of which can be spared from the office. Again, it’s cheap. The side frames are $14 each, and you need N+1 of those (assuming you are connecting them together). You need one $7 cross brace for every other connected unit and any stand-alone ones. Then shelves. You can have as many shelves as you like, from 2″ above the floor to 86″. Each shelf is 33″ x 12″ and costs $8. I can’t buy wood for that, so that’s why Ivar.
The end units are good to go as they are. In a perfect world, I’d slap some finish on them as I have with the ones in the office. But I don’t have time for that now. The shelves, though, need work. They come wide belt sanded at like 60 or 80 grit. They are flat and smoothish. Certainly useable, but experience has taught me that a year or 3 from now, they will be dusty, and the rough surface will not cooperate with dusting. My allergies will go into revolt.
And even the pragmatic woodworker in me has limits. So each shelve gets a quick sanding with the random orbital sander and 220 grit discs, including the front and back edges, to remove all the machine marks and make them actually smooth. Since I am pressed for time, I decide shellac is my finish of choice here. Even in my cool shop, it practically dries on contact. I can recoat in an hour, and 1-2 hours after that, I can sand lightly and do the 3rd and final coat on the top. The bottom gets only one coat and maybe a light sanding.
My limitation here is horizontal space. I can spread out 11 in my shop to dry before running out of places to put things. I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s not in the context of this build. I bought 60 full-width shelves and 6 narrower 1/2 width ones. So that was the Christmas break, processing 66 shelves and reprocessing an old corner shelf into a 1/2 wide shelf so I wouldn’t have to make a 4th trip to IKEA (buy online and pick up, so it’s as safe as anything, but it’s OUTSIDE, and for some reason, a lot of people are shopping at IKEA.
It also took almost a gallon of amber shellac. That’s not a fast mover in your average Lowes and Home Depot these days, and now neither of them in Laurel have any left, nor the local Ace. It’s totally going to fuck with their stocking algorithms. Sure, I can mix my own, and for a period piece, I would, but the pre-mixed stuff is more than adequate for IKEA shelves.
Shelves like these are great low stakes practice items for shellac. You need a special touch to lay down even coats because it really does dry almost on contact. And this project has nearly 800 ft2 to do (twice) at 3ft2 a pop. If you don’t have it down to an art after all that…
It’s also essential to have a good brush with real bristles, not nylon crap or the lame “chip brushes” from Harbor Freight (I do use them too, but not on the real finish; they are cheap after all). And a gallon of methyl alcohol to clean the brush and thin the shellac and clean up the mess. You can also erase runs and other imperfections with a wet rag of alcohol. Shellac never cures as varnish does, so it very readily solvates in alcohol.
Fast forward a week, and all the shelves are done, and it’s time to play the magic square game. We set up 3 connected units along one wall. They’ll hold most of the listed tools starting at (Jess’s) eye level down to knee height. Above that is packing stuff: padded envelopes, plain and Priority Mailboxes, etc. Below that are flats of unlisted tools (wood planes mostly). There was room for a single unit next to her desk, so one went there with (listed) wood planes eye level to the floor and packing stuff above.
The last unit went into the closet. That was a bit tricky since the unit is taller than the door, and the 28″ opening was too narrow to spin an assembled unit in there anyway. I had to build it in place, which wasn’t too hard other than screwing the support to the backside, but there was just enough depth to the closet to manage that.
Note that I had removed the closet door about 20 min after we moved into the house. Closets don’t need doors and having one in a small room takes up twice the width of the almost uselessly small closet (the door has to open somewhere). I also removed the door to this bedroom. There’ll never be a reason to shut it, and it’s a small room. It just gets in the way. I kept it and will rehang it when either we move out or the space is repurposed into something that might want a door from time to time.
With the tool stuff sorted and most of the shelves emptied in the office, I could convert the corner Ivar unit to narrow shelves and then move the books mentioned above. The concept of corner shelves is interesting and all, but they are too deep and the entrance too narrow to be useful in practice. Switching to narrow regular shelves means the connected unit took up the same footprint (essential), but the corner area would be quite a bit more useful.
With all the woodworking and furniture books moved, we could remove those two big bookcases from the living room. As a finishing touch to this first part, we moved Sasha’s cage from the front window in the living room to the tool room’s window since there was room, and it would keep her out from under Jess’s feet while she did shipping. That only leaves Rigo’s cage in the living room window (for now).
Now we have some room and can start rearranging stuff. To do the real work, we’ll have to push it all to one side, then the other, but now we’ve thinned it down enough to make that possible.