A friend of mine was remodeling his house, and planned to replace all the appliances, too. He offered them to me – stainless steel commercial grade stove, refrigerator and dishwasher. Considering one burner on our stove never lit without a match, I think it was time for the stove to go…
Still usable, but not great. It’s done it’s part. Of course, nothing goes perfectly smoothly: The old gas line interfered with the new stove, so I had to move it.
But wow, this thing is fancy.
And the ‘fridge: It’s been making some funny noises, but still works fine. But a free new stainless steel fridge, with the freezer on the bottom…
This one wasn’t as easy: The new fridge is not as deep as the old fridge, so that will fit better next to the table, but it’s six inches wider, and has an ice maker (needs a water hookup). We barely use ice, so really don’t have a use for an ice maker, but I still plumbed it into our water filter. I moved the cabinet on the right side of the fridge up, so that the bottom aligns with the cabinet next to it. Things are starting to look spiffy down here.
And I made a new cabinet to fit on the right side of the new fridge. Actually, I made two cabinets: a smaller one above, and a new one below.
Oh, and I got a great new addition to my workshop (Christmas present). It may not look like much at first, but on the right is my dust collector with a new high efficiency air filter. It used to be a fabric bag that allowed fine dust to get into the air: Effectively it was only collecting the large dust, and blowing the most harmful fine dust particles into the air. It should have been called a “dust circulator.” I had to work with a respirator on if that thing was running, and eventually everything would get covered in dust. Mole bought a cover for the car, because she got tired of the dust coating. Oh, and the new filter is so much more efficient than a bag, so it picks up the dust at the tools better. I attach a plastic bag to the bottom, and the bag fills up with all the dust – none in the air. Thank you John and Judy.
Here I’m clamping together reclaimed wood to make a butcher block top for the top of the new cabinet. Beautiful fine vertical grain douglas fir saved from the dump.
Sometimes there were nail holes in the wood: I filled them with wood plugs. The picture above is before I’ve drilled out the hole and added the plug.
More reclaimed wood for the cabinets. This is before it’s gone through the planer.
Comes out beautiful afterwards.
Here are some of the pieces for the cabinet doors. I made them with mortise and tenon joinery. You can see all the tenons cut above on the left. The pieces on the right will be the panels for the doors.
Here’s a close up of the mortise cutter: It’s an attachment for my drill press. It’s a square chisel with a drill bit in the middle. The drill bit drills out most of the wood, and the chisel squares up the hole. You cut a longer hole by joining the holes up next to one another. Much faster than by hand, but still it takes a while. The fastest way to do it is with a floating tenon machine, but I don’t have one of those.
Here are the doors after the first coat of polyurethane.
This is the new lower cabinet in place, next to the new fancy fridge. At last this corner is not an afterthought.
And sad news: My neighbor’s son Nick died. He helped me many times working on the house when we first moved in. His mental illness got a lot worse over the years, so he no longer was able to help, but I have some blog posts in this blog about the work he did. He was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known; single handed he picked up and put my 200+lb drill press on my workbench, carried thousands of pounds of concrete into the back yard to make the footings for the back stairs. I made some picture frames from two thousand year old redwood for some pictures of him working on the house. This piece of wood came out of our house; the density of the grain cannot be matched by any redwood you can buy now. The picture below is him working on our front steps. I feel the imperfection of this piece of irreplaceable wood represents Nick well.
