Finishing Up

There came a time in the project when I decided that my trim carpenter was actually doing more harm than good while every week I was still having to pay him. I assessed what work remained and decided that there was really nothing left that I could not complete myself. It had become apparent earlier that he really was no craftsman at all and while he certainly had much more carpentry experience than I have, his lack of attention to detail and his refusal to listen to my direction more than made up for any difference in our relative levels of experience. On the other hand, while I have much more limited experience when working with wood than with metal (long ago I completed and 4-year machinist apprenticeship and was employed for several years as a journeyman machinist), I will take the time to do things right. I might not be as productive, but in the end I will definitely have the final product quality that I want.

One major oversight I had made was to grossly underestimate the amount of finish carpentry work that is required in a house of this size. When I took over the carpentry task the deck, door and window trim, kitchen cabinetry, flooring, and some of the decorative trim were complete, leaving baseboards, pantry, closets, built-ins, and a lot of little odds and ends to finish up. This house has 13 closets and most of them required 4-5 shelves each, at a minimum.

Early on in the project we had looked at shelving options and had agreed that neither of us much cared for the ever-so-popular wire shelving, which is about all you can find in the big box stores. We opted instead for some form of solid wooden shelving and I decided that in most cases I would use poplar lumber and laminate a one inch thick oak strip on the front edge of each shelf for a more finished look.

When I had initially cleared the lot 5 years earlier I had milled several of the large trees that had stood on the site into lumber and those boards had been drying ever since in my pole barn. Using that rough-sawn lumber to make shelving was by far the most labor-intensive way to make shelving, but for me it would also be the most satisfying; and after all, I really had taken on this project for the joy of doing it as much as for the final product.

So the process would be to cut the boards to length, plane them to thickness, joint the edges, laminate several of them togther to obtain the desired overall width, trim them to finish size, prime them for paint, and apply the final coats of paint. Then I would take rough oak lumber, cut, plane, and joint them, round over the edges, and stain and finish the pieces. These finished trim pieces would then be laminated to the front edge of each shelf. I could then prepare the shelf supports (requiring basically the same set of steps), fit them and nail them in place, and then install the shelving. While this was a long and involved set of steps, I was no stranger to assembly line work and kind of looked forward to the whole thing. The big issue was that I was building the shelving at the same time as we were moving and we needed to have the shelving in place before we could unpack. This was also spring, which meant that I had fields to prepare and crops to plant and tend, so prioritizing the work was essential.

We had planned on installing mirrored closet doors on the his and hers master bedroom closets and had ordered them in plenty of time to have them onsite while my finish carpenter was still with me. I had special ordered them through Lowes and even with the 4-6 week lead time we should have been fine. But when they arrived they were mirrored doors with no mirrored surfaces. Yep, the Lowes guy had apparently ordered them that way. We already had the frames installed by the time we noticed so I figured we could reorder them and then when they arrived, return the new frames and not have to remove the old ones. The Lowes guy agreed. Apparently though the Lowes accounting department did not agree and two weeks later cancelled our order. So I tore the frames out and returned them and reordered a third time. By time they finally arrived my carpenter was long gone so Mario and I installed them and they looked good.