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Glued up one of the corner cabinets today. I’m using a my Festool Domino to cut some mortises so that I can use floating tenons to attach the sides. This is a but different than the typical way, which would ne to use dado’s and screws. I’m not entirely sure that using the dominos is a better way, but it seems to work pretty well (except when I muck up the domino positioning that is). For the regular cabinets the glue-up is straight forward, however for the corner cabinets things get a bit tricky. Trying to layout the dominos such that everything can be assembled is diffiult, but once I managed that it wasnt to bad to glue it up.

I finished cutting up all the plywood needed to make my office cabinets today. All told I used about 4 and a half sheets of prefinished maple plywood. Had to rent a van to pickup the plywood from Russel Plywood down in delaware. Breaking the plywood down was a piece of cake with my fancy Festool tracks saw. I drew all the cut lines on the sheet of plywood using my trusty drywall square, and then just layed the track down on the line and cut. Was a bit tricky to layout all of the panels to make sure that a cut for one panel didnt run into another, but it was managable. Next time I need to remeber to use a square on the track just before I cut though as I noticed a few of my cutta are not perfectly square.

To complement the desk that I made a few weeks ago I’m going to put some cabinets on the wall and some filing cabinets underneath.  Then I’ll have a nice bit of storage for all of my junk.  I drew up some plan in sketchup to get an idea of what its going to look like.  Its quite easy to do as Kraftmaid has some nice pre-made sketches that can easily be imported and arranged.

The plan for my cabinets is to make them out of prefinished plywood with cherry face frames.  The drawers will be made from solid maple and everything is going to be mounted with some nice Blum Blumotion hardware. I got the hardware all from WWhardware.com, the hardwood from Hearne Hardwoods, and the plywood from Russell Plywood.  The prefinished plywood was about $75 a sheet.  Which wouldn’t have been so bad, but I also had to rent a cargo van to get it home.

The end table I starte last week is just about finished. I made it out of maple with a nice walnut inlay.

The windows that I ordered back in April have finally arrived.  They’re all going in on the second floor, so I decided to build this scaffolding.  It took about $40 worth of lumber from Lowes, and an hour or two to put together.  This gives me a nice stable platform to work on the windows from.  The scaffolding is  12′ tall, 3′ wide, and 7′ long.  It’s a very simple construction, with 4 12′ 2×4′s carrying most of the load, being braced a number of smaller 2×4′s to prevent it from twisting or buckling.  The top is simply some 1/2″ plywood that was actually part of the shipping crate of my jointer.  I used my framing nailer to put it all together which was quick and easy.  It’s a very stable structure, and its at the perfect height.

When I redid the trim around the garage last summer, I only had two 8′ boards to cover a 18′ span.  So I put one on each end and spliced a 2′ section in the middle.  Sounds good right?  Well the problem was I didn’t do a very good job.  The two end boards were crooked, resulting in the spliced board being extra crooked.  It looked rather shoddy, but since I was tired of painting and trim work, I just left it.  Well my buddy Joe has been giving me a hard time about it ever since.  So last weekend I went and fixed it.  I got two 10′ boards and made a nice joint between them on the nice flat basement floor.  I also painted all 6 sides so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the board rotting from water being trapped behind it.

I’m sure you remember Marty,  I mentioned he gave me a hand installing a skylight awhile back. Well he recently got a shiney new giant (73″!) TV and needed a TV stand for it. I built my TV stand a few years ago, which he liked, so we decided to build him one just like it. Pretty simple design, oak plywood for the top, bottom and sides, attached with some nice dado’s. The front was trimmed out with some nice ash that was just glued and nailed on. If my biscuit cutter wasn’t a piece of junk I would have used that to put the face frame on.

I’ve already mentioned I don’t like molding, well that goes for painting it too.  To do a good job you have to take your time, and be very careful, something I’m not very good at.  There also is a suprisingly large amount of it, particularly in a room with a plethora of doorways.  I don’t generaly like taping for a few reasons.  Firstly it takes a while to do, making an already slow job take even longer.  Secondly you can make things worse if the tape peels up the paint when you take it off.  Lastly I’ve never felt it worked aprticualrly well, the paint always seems to seap underneath the tape, no matter how well you stick it down.  Well FrogTape claims to at least fix the last one.  The Frog Tape has some of that gel stuff that’s used in diapers in it, which the makers claim prevents the paint from seaping underneath it.  It’s expensive stuff, but I figured I’d give it a shot and I must say, it does work significanlty better than 3M’s blue tape.  It’s not perfect though,  I still had one spot where it seaped through.