A long break after Christmas

Spring finishing

Wow, that was a long Christmas break from the Tea Room project!  My last blog post was four months ago – Dec. 19 – in the hectic holiday season. I was scurrying around making the room habitable for Chris to bunk in because the other bedrooms were reserved for our distinguished visitors from Britain. Speaking of which . . .

. . . Dear Betty, my favorite Scot, presented us this hand-made sign from England as a Christmas gift. We also received tea cups and cake plates, and, of course, some proper tea.

Another Christmas gift came from Anne: a Hitachi compound miter saw (photo below) that I had specifically requested for use on the finish-woodwork in the new room.  When I told her that I might also be able to use the tool to rebuild the stairway, well, the gift was in the bag.

So why did that Christmas saw remain unopened for 4 months?

Well, admittedly I had a minor a mental block against learning how to use a complicated new tool. But, mostly, I was swamped with multiple other projects. Things such as rebuilding shelves to accommodate new garage doors, trimming  trees, planting a spring garden, refinancing two properties, organizing office goodbyes, doing the income tax, and, most importantly: traveling as much as possible to stay sane.

Four months just flew by.

But I'm back at it and hope to wrap it all up within a few weeks – and then start on the stairway. Once that's done, we can carpet the Tea Room along with the rest of the house.


This new room is actually a decent woodshop too. I bolted the compound miter saw to the floor for stability and began work on the door frames, quickly discovering that with this wonderful tool I can effortlessly cut all sorts of complicated angles.

If I had had this saw 30 years ago when I built my house in Texas, I could have saved months of time spent cutting trim by hand using cheap miter boxes.

 

Having one cool new tool sparked an urge in me to get another – a finish nailer. This 16-gauge Freeman nailer, which I bought on Amazon, shoots the ammo through the pine trim, counter-sinking the nails just right. If I hammered nails in by hand, I'd have to counter-sink them with a punch before applying wood filler and sanding. I have been impressed with how the super-thin nails in this gun cause very few splits in the wood.

Between the new saw and new nailer, this is basically just an arts-and-crafts project!





The saw has pre-set positions for common angles (i.e. 45 degrees, 30 degrees).



Above and below:  Because I had rounded the drywall corners to match the style in the rest of the house, installing baseboards around such corners requires an extra little piece. The angles are 22.5 degrees (half of a normal 45-degree angle that would be used on trim over a square corner). 

I know. Cutting these pieces looks like a total nuisance. But with the precision of the compound miter saw, I did this perfectly on the first try – and it only took me 10 minutes.

The tiny corner piece would likely split if I attempted to nail it, so I glued it and placed a temporary brace against it (below) to hold it in place until the glue set.

In the outside hallway (formerly the bridge), the baseboards required a 22.5-degree outside angle to go around the 45-degree wall angle.

The next project:  It has bugged us for 20 years that the builder of our house cheaped out on the stairway, wrapping the carpet through the spindles and around the edges. It might be fine for an apartment, but we've always thought it looked stupid in our house.

Worse, when we had this berber carpet installed about 12 years ago the company charged us an extra $1,000 for the tedious work of slicing the carpet around each spindle and stitching it back together so that the seams would not be visible. (The first installer made such a mess of it that we fired him halfway through the job.)

The ultimate solution is to remove all the spindles, line the edges with wood, and do a carpet runner down the center of the stairs.  Unfortunately, the stair experts want anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 to do this work.  I cannot stomach paying that much after managing to add the Tea Room to the house for less than $6,000. (Roughly $1,000 in permits and $5,000 in materials and tools.) For any of you who hire contractors, rest assured that most of what you pay them for is labor.

So, armed with my new tools, I'm going to become my own trim carpenter and do these stairs myself. If it turns out that I need a table saw, I'll either rent one or buy one or take the wood to someone who will cut it for me.

Below: I might just use this Tea Room as my woodworking shop as I do the stairs. It's so handy having this workspace upstairs that Anne is afraid I might want to keep things this way!