Spice Jars!

It seems like, for the first time in months, the house is not a total disaster. I mean, it's FAR from clean or organized, but since I finished the Gramophone cabinet, put it back together, and moved a few other things, I have so much extra space in the dining room and kitchen.

I badly need to sweep upstairs, since I did drywall a few weeks ago, the entire floor is coated in fine dust. The fact that I have glossy wood floors doesn't help. I ALSO need to clean the bath/shower. It's getting gross.

Otherwise, I have been a little bit productive around the house. I spent the last 2 days completely reorganizing my spices. Since I moved in, my spices have been disorganized and in 2-3 places. The main ones were literally all tossed in a cardboard box on the floor in the kitchen (I don't have any cabinet space to store them anywhere - YET), and most of the others were in my wooden spice cabinet. A few others were on a shelf next to the sink.

Yesterday I went to the Dollarama to see if they had any kind of decent spice jars (I wanted something fairly specific), and I came across the PERFECT ONES for my needs. They are a pretty decent size, and they can fit an entire "spice packet" of 150g (standard No Name and Wal-Mart type packets) and have easy to use screw-top lids in several colours, and the jar openings are large enough to fit a big soup spoon. I bought 20 of them, but I might want another 4 or 5. These would be a perfect fit in a cabinet drawer, and I will label the jar lids for easy and quick reference.

This is something that I've been wanting to do for YEARS after my aunt did something very similar (she always has such great ideas).

I went through ALL my stuff, and I combined several stray/forgotten duplicate bags, emptied dozens, and finally got rid of all the cheap, mismatched plastic spice jars. Now, the bulk of my most used spices are in the new glass jars, and all the others and refill packets are in the spice cabinet.

The only issue right now, is that I have no space for the new jars yet. I'll figure something out. I also need to make labels, but for now, the spices have loose tags inside, although I can tell what 99% of them are simply by looks or smell.

Shop Storage (Hutch)

Alright, around 2 weeks ago, I started building a very large cabinet for the shop that will hold a large number of tools and other shop goodies. I had little to no storage, and the existing "shop table" was a joke.

I had just recently pulled-up the floor in the dining room and office, so I have all this random plywood in the garage, so I decided to use what I had available to build this cabinet.

Some of the materials I used were:

- 2x4s
- 2x3s
- 5/8" plywood
- 1/4" Fir plywood
- Random old pieces of painted pine t-g
- An assortment of old doors from the laundry room (not shown)
- 5 old basement windows from 2-3 different houses (garbage pick-ups)
- nails, screws
- 9 sets of hinges/catches, 4 drawer pulls (not yet purchased)

BASICALLY EVERYTHING BUT THE HARDWARE WAS FREE JUNK!

I decided to make the cabinet with a counter top at 96" wide (8 feet) and I sized everything else accordingly. The base is around 22" deep, and the top is around 12" deep. The height is around 8 feet (3 foot tall base with a 5 foot tall upper hutch).

Since I have very few decent tools, most of my cuts were made "rough", and then cleaned-up with a belt sander. This was the fastest and easiest way for me to build this, and I got most of it built in 2-3 days (what you see so far). Alternatively, you could use a router with a straight bit and a fence, but this is hard to do on plywood, and hard on the bit and router. The easiest way to do this (should you want to make a similar large piece) would be to get the pieces cut for you at a lumber store (many places will do this for free if you're buying the materials there).

I wanted the piece to be semi-decent looking, and paint-grade. I also wanted something hefty and SOLID. The base was made from screwed-together 2x4s:





The back and bottom sheets are 5/8", but the sides are thin 1/4" sanded Fir (which is smoother than the cheaper plywood). Note that the bottom boards are notched around the corner 2x4s. The side pieces are just glued and nailed on with small nails.



The entire face frame is made from painted scrap pine boards with a fairly rough texture. One of the main points in making this was to see if I could build the entire thing out of scrap wood. The doors were arranged so that I could reuse (cut down) some of the old laundry room doors from the cabinets that were upstairs. The narrower centre section will have 4 drawers (just plain wood-on-wood plywood).



I used some scrap MDF baseboard for the bottom.



The top hutch portion will have 5 doors made from old basement windows. I re-cut them slightly to make them all the same size. I made the top pretty high at 5 feet (making the full cabinet 8 feet high).



That's as far as I got on this project. The next step will be to build and attach the upper face frame, and attach a back. Once that's done, I can attach doors, build the drawers/tracks, cut shelves, etc. I plan to paint the finished cabinet a green colour (shop tool green).

Other Stuff:

I finally installed the smoke alarm upstairs. It used to be in the guest bedroom (former laundry room/kitchen) but it was a pretty stupid place for it. I decided it should go in the hallway (in the middle of the second floor). I kind of hate to have it there, but it's one of those necessities you just have to have, even though it's an eye sore.

Last weekend I also decided to do a bit more of the drywall mudding in the office and the dining room, and I was able to finish the corner in the office, and reinstall/patch the crown. I was able to reuse some found scraps, and it came together very nicely, considering I used just a mitre box with a HAND SAW. The ends that join up with the exterior wall mouldings were coped, and any gaps were covered with caulking.



The next post will cover the porch work from the past week.

Master Bedroom Lighting

Alright, this has been a project that I've been putting off for a while (with no decent excuse other than not wanting to work on it), and I'm very pleased that it's done (at least half done since I did only one of two fixtures).

This fixture needed to have several small dents removed, several paint touch-ups, a complete clean and rewire, and I had to find 5 matching shades. I also converted these two fixtures from pull-chain to turn-key since I have no other pull-chain fixtures (and I didn't like the look of the chains).

The reason I didn't work on the second fixture is because I'm missing a piece for it (which I haven't ordered yet).

I think it turned out very nicely. Another side note: The fixture looks REALLY nice and shiny in the photos, but I did not refinish or polish any parts on it. It's exactly as-is (original finish) except that I cleaned it, and touched-up a few paint chips (mainly on the shade holders).





Note that the shades have a somewhat lavender/purple shade to them. This is not a camera or lighting effect, they are in fact this colour. I'm not sure why, and I'm not too fussy about this, but again: I had to find at least 5 matched shades for the two fixtures (I actually have 6 in this set), and they are very hard to find, so I'll just live with them. They were well priced, too, so I can't complain too much. They look wonderful when lit.



Side note: I somehow lost or misplaced the two screws for both canopies on this pair of fixtures. I thought I had them, but I couldn't find them. I ended up modifying an existing spare screw that I had (perfect fit) and painted it a dull brown to match. So now the canopy is in place, but I didn't take new photos since the daylight is now gone.



Boxing Day:

Since this is a short side note (and I don't want a third separate entry for it), I went out on boxing day and bought 18 of these nicely sized 68L Rubbermaid bins at Wal-Mart. I have been wanting to get some good plastic bins like these for the items I'm currently storing in the basement (which sometimes leaks in heavy rainfall), so over the past few days I've been reorganizing/repacking boxes in the basement. Already I've gained a LOT of extra space since I can pile these bins at least 3 high.

Major October Update (Part II)

Alright, so as I was saying last night, I started working on the "L" room* upstairs. The plan is pretty simple: Rebuild the closets (which were too tiny to be useful), redo the floors, redo the ceiling (new drywall), and general stuff like clean-up the mouldings, patch the walls, paint, etc.

* Note: I only call it the "L" room because it's L shaped.

I had started to tear down the closet walls ages ago, but I did a lot more work recently by opening-up the hallway wall. The reason for this is to add a built-in linen closet. The house has very little storage space other than the basement, so I wanted a spot near the bathroom to store bath towels, bedsheets, toiletries and other items.

Here's the spot where the built-in will go. I originally wanted to make it almost up to the ceiling, but I took a look at all sorts of gathered photos of old 1920's built-ins, and none except for very rare exceptions were taller than an average door, so I plan to make this one the same. This means that all 3 openings will be done in one set of continuous casings(mouldings), with the doors to the spare/guest room, and the "L" room on each side.

This is viewed from the bathroom door (the doorway to the right is the main staircase).



Doorway to the "L" room:



From the "L" room looking towards the bathroom:





From guest room (aka Laundry room):



The ceiling in the "L" room will be a fun job. I plan to drywall over this, but some of the plaster/mud that they added is caked-on super thick in places. If it's still fairly easy to scrape off, I might take it all down, otherwise I'll keep going until I'm at a relatively thin spot.



I also started to patch the floor. These are spots left to fix.







Lastly is the porch window. I removed the porch window in spring or early summer so that I could replace the missing muntin in the bottom (see main blog photo for the before).

I don't think I posted about the muntin repair here, so here's a very quick recap.

Match the profile (as close as possible) on some clear pine. In my case, I was able to do it entirely on the table saw (close enough profile that no one will notice a difference).



Carefully cut and notch your pieces to fit (measure carefully, and aim for a snug fit).





Glue, clamp, putty, sand, prime.





So yeah, fast forward to Monday night, when I finally decided to install the glass and do the glazing. I did the top 2 1/2 panes on Mon night, and the large bottom 2 last night. For an idea of size, the window is 3 feet wide by 5 feet high.



The glazing job isn't perfect, but the entire window is in rough shape, with many edges gouged, chipped, puttied, filled and re-filled, etc. But the new centre muntin one looks great!



This is what the porch has looked like pretty much all summer/fall. Notice all the dead leaves starting to drift in by the opening.



I have the window in the MB (since there's lots of room to work), so I'm hoping that the crappy Dap33 will dry in a week or so. I'd like to paint and install the window before winter.