649 6th

complete dining room

...well not completely done, but I can fake it with this photo!

With the help of our dear friend Jordan we got the entire shelving apparatus installed in the dining room today. The four upright metal poles have adjustable posts with feet that are screwed into the ceiling and floor (4 screws per foot). Meaning, it's not going anywhere. The oak planks and cleats match the installation of the open riser stair treads (jut off to the left in this photo). They feel tight as a drum and strong enough to be building support rather than shelving.

Oh, and we finished installing all of the low voltage tech lighting. Hard to see the fixtures in the photo. They have a lovely crackle white glass finish.

table varnishing

How many coats is enough? How many coats is too many?

pedestal table base

Yesterday the redesigned table pedestal came back from the fabricator. Here it is featuring the small table top. The apron of that top still needs to be finished, but in general that's what it's going to look like. I put the large table top on it this morning and the stability issues of before have been totally resolved. Varnishing the large mahogany top begins today. As many coats as we want to get in, and with Thanksgiving only a week away, we're sort of down to the wire.

kitchen cabinets (another third)

It was a lot for a Tuesday night, but we got both of the storage cubbies installed on either side of oven vent. Lots of prepping and predrilling made it more manageable than expected. The big brown squares will make more sense once those pieces laying on the counter tops are installed (tomorrow?)

kitchen wall cabinets

and we got to buy a dancing tool!

crown molding

Final pieces of molding in the dining room are going in-- the crown molding to be exact. Well, craown molding is a pretty fanciful term in this case. It's really 3/4" MDF cut into 8" strips to match the soffit drops on the second floor.

Not nearly as hard cutting around the beams as we had expected. We decided not to trim out where the chimney juts out. We liked the implied line that passes through without a ton of fussy molding.

sticky nipple

What were you thinking of!? I've been, um, thinking to myself for the past week as I failed day after day to remove the close nipple on our dining room radiator (to center it better on the wall). WD40 to the rescue, plus lots of patience. I'd spray the seam and exposed threads every day, give it a push with the beater bar -- and strip the nipple to shiny steel. Then I'd give it another spray and prop it against the wall to seep.

The first day I tried to twist this rusty-stuck nipple I watched the WD40 in the hope I would see evidence of it penetrating the threads. Yesterday there was reference to calling a plumber to work some additional torque on the problem. This morning I asked myself. Where does the clinging pool of WD40 go? Is it working some slow alchemy or is it evaporating? Can it evaporate? Just what the hell IS WD40?

This evening I held the radiator on edge and took a seat before spraying the threads. Where does the WD40 go?  And the meniscus of light... fluxed? I watched on with re-doubled attention. It pulsed again. What else could it be but the wonderous WD40 sleekly seeping. I lay the radiator down, assembled my pipe-wrench lever, and gave it a pull. I've been stripping that nipple for over a week so believe me when I say this felt somehow the same but different. I reset the wrench and pulled again, this time closely watching the nipple's threads. They turned. See the impossible happen.

stanchions

There are two pairs of these stanchions lying on the floor on both the first and second floor of the house. Eventually they will be shelving support. Now, I'm just hoping not to trip and gouge myself.

mahogany table top

I lived on 10th street in the East village for 14 years. While there, I built bookcases out of 5/4" mahogany planks. I custom built a lot of the furniture in that apartment so it *appeared* to be larger than it really was. Clever enough to be featured in the Habitat section of the times back in 2002. A lot has changed since then.

When I moved out I couldn't part with the mahogany. I always wanted to make something else out of the lumber. It seemed like such a waste of precious rain forest material, getting rid of it felt criminal (yes I know, how'd I get it to begin with? long story, some other time.)

For years I've carted those planks around. Hoping to one day make something. That day finally came. Since Friday Michael and I have been at my friends', Peary and BK's, house up in North Western Connecticut, busy as bees.

Peary's an amazing craftsman and graciously let us use his shop to finish a half a dozen projects that needed a table saw or more "specialized" furniture making tools to really get right.

In addition to all the shop time they're both avid bird watchers, well nature watcher of all kind for that matter, and we went on a great walk through the preserve near their house.

Great weekend, great to be away and focused. If you're a true must-know craft geek click on the picture of the finished product up top and you can see more of the steps in the process via my flickr stream.