I blogged a few months back the I created a knife drawer for the farmhouse kitchen. No sooner was it installed did I realize it had room for improvement.
The bamboo block that holds the knives sits low in the drawer and I thought that was waisting space.
I removed the block and shortened it by 1/8th inch which was enough to allow for a small piano hinge to be installed at the back end. (BTW: it’s easy to use a good quality hacksaw to cut piano hinge so do not worry that you can’t buy a really short one.) I measured and install the block so it was low enough to allow my largest knife to fit below the top of the draw. I installed a small stop block under the front.
Now the knife block has plenty of space under it for the steel and even a heavy butcher’s knife if I choose to add one to the arsenal.
A friend once said, “lock me in a room with a cricket and give me no way to kill it and I’ll give up all the secrets of the world.”. Well, he didn’t exactly say that but he did make it clear that the sound of an unrelenting cricket is a powerful torture device.
Now that the aircraft hangar is clean and empty and echoes madly, a single cricket is a very loud and annoying sound. Multiple crickets are multiply so!
I’ve furnished the “not completely finished” second floor of the farmhouse with random left over furnishings. For the time being, that includes an inflatable bed.
The bed was my temporary sleeping surface during the transition to Virginia. It has also served as the guest bed in a pinch.
I had forgotten it was a double-deep mattress. So, when planning what would go up stairs, I *thought* I needed a platform to get the mattress off the floor. I had a half dozen rustic wine crates so I set them out and put a top across them.
When I rolled out the mattress, put the memory foam pad on top, added the goose down duvet, and then inflated the mattress …. well …
The farmhouse spiral staircase came out of the paint shop several weeks back and was installed. However, I was waiting for the stair treads. That wait is over and done.
Back when I was planning the kitchen and chose to use bamboo, I visited ECO Supply in Richmond, Virginia. While there, Greg introduced me to some other materials I might be interested in – one of which was PaperStone. PaperStone is made of 100% post consumer material (either cardboard or standard office paper) and uses a cashew nut shell liquid based resin. The most common use of PaperStone is as a counter top material.
After discussing my ideas with Greg, I chose to use 3/4" PaperStone in Mocha for the treads on the spiral Staircase, the fireplace mantle and the window-box sills. The treads needed to have a series of curved cuts so I worked with Aaron at Acorn Fabrication who have a CNC machine and experience working with PaperStone. Aaron picked up the stock, machined my parts and delivered everything back to ECO Supply so I could pick it up along with some other supplies.
I did the final milling of the treads. This consisted of easing the edges with a 1/4" round-over bit in my router and boring holes for all of the mounting hardware. I have chosen to leave the handrail off. With such a large diameter stair, the natural tendency is to rest your hand on the pole. This aligns your feet with the most comfortable rise/run tread ratio which also happens to be well inside of the mid-point on the treads (leaving ample space out to the edge and alleviating vertigo). In the future, when the second floor becomes more used, I will install the balusters and handrail. For now, I want to place planters on some of the treads – spider plants and other ivy.
The finish on the treads starts with a urethane sealer I created by mixing 50:50 of semi-gloss floor urethane and ‘reducer’. I applied two coats. After it dried, I lightly scuffed it using a scotch brite pad on an palm sander. Then I applied a coat of paste wax and buffed it out. The result look like the leather blotter of an old writing desk but is extremely hard.
I finished and install the fireplace mantle much the same as the stair treads. I still have the window box sills left.
It seems, no matter how much space you have, you end up filling it up and wanting more. The shop is no different.
The “uncluttering” solution is to (1) sell, give way, and throw out the stuff you don’t need and (2) use space more effectively. I did a little of the first and a lot of the second. My problem was I needed to use my vertical space better so I installed the industrial equivalent of a closet organizer – warehouse (or pallet) shelving.
My first challenge was to find shelving that I could afford. New stuff is nice, bright, clean and expensive. Craigslist yielded something that is old, dented, dingy, a little rusted, and affordable. A road trip in between “climate chaos” snow storms got them the last 90 miles to the farmhouse where they sat for another few weeks for the weather to cooperate. This weekend was the perfect.
It took a couple trial & error attempts before I came up with a process for installing the 10’ high up-rights and connecting the 10’ long spreaders. BARRETT did most of the heavy lifting. I would load two of the 50 lb spreaders on the pallet stacker’s forks and then lift them to 10 feet. I would then position a ladder at one end and bring in one of the up-rights. Once I locked the spreaders to the uprights with funky connectors and a 3lb sledge, I moved the ladder to the other end and repeated. Once all the bents were in place, I used BARRETT to position all of the lower spreaders then cut 2’x4’ cross braces and again used BARRETT to help deck the shelves with spare press board.
Currently, the shelves are holding some spare construction lumber, a pallet of pre-finished plywood for the home office cabinetry, and in a bit of chicken-vs-egg, the shelving hold the left over shelving.
