cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digesting the Christmas Bolus The Christmas bolus is swallowed and continues to make it's way through the house. Bags of assorted toys and ribbons and God only knows what litter the hallway. Stacks of books and boxes make the living room all but impossible to traverse. Fortunately, Trish has reserved a U-Haul truck for Friday. She will be taking an entire truck load of assorted crap to the dump. Furniture, excess household goods, broken toys, old clothes and linens. All sorts of hideous crap that just needs to be gotten out of the house. I spent much of the last 2 days working on a dining booth for the kitchen. Trish asked me to build a built-in table and bench in an alcove where there had been a narrow counter top. The table is essentially done except for paint and polyurethane. I ran it up pretty quick out of scrap wood in the workshop and it has turned out quite well. A piece of 5/8" plywood for the top, 1"x4" for the skirting and diagonal bracing within the skirting. The legs are made from a standard 2x4 stud that I ripped lengthwise in half on the table saw. There are only two legs, as one end of the table will be attached to the wall. Strangely, the bench has proven to be the real pain in the ass here. I had most of the pieces built and was ready to install and assemble them when I realized that the alcove into which it will be set has no studs on either of the 2 ends where I'd planned to put ledger boards. One side is drywall over masonry (for an old wood stove chimney, blocked up and no longer in use) and the other side simply falls within the standard 16" spacing between studs. Dammit. I'd planned to nail the thing in on either side and with nothing structurally solid to nail into, that's just not going to work. What I needed to do was just build a bench to those exact dimensions, slip it into the alcove and nail the back of it into the rear wall to keep it from moving around. This would (will) give the impression of a built-in bench while actually being free-standing. Once I realized this I started trying to convert what I'd already done into a free-standing bench. But after a while it became clear that the result would end up looking kludgy and unappealing. It was well after dark at that point and my shop light randomly burned out so I gave up for the day. After work today I'm probably going to have to scrap the whole thing and start over. A damned waste of perfectly good wood, I'm afraid. The tricky thing with this thing is that the floor of the kitchen has a rather dramatic slope on account of this being a shitty old house apparently built by drunk elves. So each leg of the bench needs to be of a precisely different length than it's fellows. Meanwhile I can't install the table until the bench is in, since the table would be in the way and make it awkward to come at the alcove where the bench needs to go. This whole time, Trish has been an absolute bitch about this. I have given up literally half of my Xmas vacation to building a dining booth to her exact dimensional specifications and all I heard was constant complaint. "You're making it too complicated!" "I didn't want a cross piece there!" "The legs are too thick!" In fact, this table has been made as simply as humanly possible while also being sturdy enough to hold up to kids climbing and jumping around on it (which will inevitably happen). Her constant complaints are the words of someone who has simply scribbled some dimensions on the back of an envelope without spending so much as 2 minutes thinking about the details of how such a thing must actually be built. For example, the cross piece between the 2 legs is structurally necessary to prevent them from gradually splaying out from one another. Sure, we could do without that piece IF I made the legs 3 times thicker. But she said she wanted the legs to be on the thinner side. Were I to follow even half of her idiotic dictums, the table would last no more than a month before collapsing and then who would be blamed for it? I would. So there's no pleasing her either way. Even her original dimensions turned out to be flawed, as she had asked for an overall length that went the whole length of the alcove for the bench. Which would make it impossible to get in and out without climbing over the table. So I had to go literally chopping 6 inches off of the thing and completely re-doing that end of the skirting when I realized the problem with her design. Oh, and she did something rather irresponsible a few days ago. She left the car in neutral rather than park while getting the mail and the car rolled forward into the closed front gate. The car is fortunately fine but the gate is now shaped into a very accurate model of the front end of a 2000 Ford Taurus. Great. So since I have basically no money right after Christmas I'll just wave a magic wand and make $100 appear for a new steel gate to keep the dogs in. Thanks for that. But I mustn't bitch too much. Things aren't too bad. I got the only 2 things I really wanted for myself for Christmas, which was a book called 'The 39 Steps' and a Dremel Moto Tool and it's attendant accessory kit. The massive contractor-grade pnuematic nailgun was just unexpected icing on the cake. 11:41 a.m. - 2008-12-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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