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[Photo Gallery] Despite some extra help from dvh3 and an 8-32 screw, I managed to finish applying the poly to the drawer fronts. The last of the hardware arrived today. We spent the last couple of nights attaching the drawer fronts and installing the last bits of hardware. It's finally done! It's been over a year since we started tearing the old bathroom out to carve out the laundry closet, but it's been worth it. Both the laundry room and the bathroom have exceeded my initial expectations. There are of course a couple things I would do differently, as is the case with every project, but we are very happy with the results.

After toying with various basic kitchen layouts in my 2D CAD tool (QCAD), I decided I really needed something kitchen specific, that had 3D renderings. I found a simple winderz program called Kitchendraw 5.0, and am running that in a KVM image. It comes with 30 hours of free use, and is pay-as-you-go after that. This is a pretty good model for me, since I'll not likely to create more than just a handful of kitches, at around four hours a piece.

Key Changes in this design:

• Eliminated bump out into garage (reduces width by 2 feet)
• Range moved from corner to garage wall
• Changed pantry cabinets to bases and uppers with a counter (right of fridge)

I've included a couple renderings of the latest kitchen design, one with cherry and one with painted cabinets (the island is white in both). A couple of points left for discussion include:

• Range placement along the garage wall (all the way to the right, or right in the middle)
• Counter space or full pantry to the right of the refrigerator
• Corner cabinet configuration

Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.

We finally picked up two of the final bits of hardware for the master bathroom remodel: the towel rods and the paper holder. I also finally finished the four doors of the cabinetry and have moved on to finishing the drawer fronts. More cabinet pics. The weather turned wet and very cold, so I could no longer do the finishing in the garage - which turned out alright as the garage isn't well suited for finishing anyway (it's very dusty). Mary Lou has been very tolerant of me turning the master bedroom into my finishing booth - so long as I get the last coat of the day done early enough that she doesn't have to inhale solvents all night long :-) I definitely learned a lesson in the experience - let SprayKote do the finishing. They're equipped for it and they do great work - it just takes me too long to get an hour here and hour there so I can apply each of the six total coats required, not to mention the 5 sandings and various buffings in between! So the drawer fronts are finish sanded, cleaned, and have one side and the edges stained. I hope to be able to install the drawer faces by the end of next weekend - marking the completion of the master bath! More bath pics Wish me luck.

It took only a few hours, but it was spread out over nearly two weeks - but the cabinet face frames and drawers are finally "finished". The drawers got two coats of a thin shellac (marketed as a sanding sealer) and the face frames got one coat of the Java gel stain, two coats of the shellac (this time used as a sanding sealer), and three coats of oil based polyurethane. I sanded or scoured lightly between each coat, and wiped it down with a tack cloth, and the extra care paid off, the finish is very smooth, and there is no dust or grit anywhere. The java stain was tricky as it dried quite quickly, I didn't remove it quite fast enough on my first attempt - so I had to go back and wipe some off with a rag dampened with mineral spirits. The shellac dried extremely quickly (sandable in only 45 minutes) so I had to work quickly with that. The poly though was a dream to work with. I had plenty of working time, and it went on smooth and quickly leveled itself out - nice product. Thanks to the guys at my local Rockler for the tips, as well as Bob Flexner, author of Understanding Wood Finishing. More pics when the doors and drawer fronts are ready...

We are starting to see some real progress in the bathroom. We finally decided to pay someone to do the tile and after a 7 days of tiling (6 of which were spent in the shower) it is looking very good. We also had the vanity counter installed yesterday. Very excited about that. There is still a little bit of tiling left to do (1 day of laying 1 of grouting) but we have to wait for the glass shower door and panel to be installed first (and they won't be ready until the last week of November). If everything goes well our tiler will be back around December 10th to finish off the tile. Then we have to seal everything, install the toilet, plumbing fixtures, lighting, the mirror, etc. and then we will be ready to use our bathroom again.

As you can see from the pictures Darren is taking advantage of the break between tiling & glass installation to stain the cabinets. Hoping to get that done this weekend (before we leave for thanksgiving) and then we'll paint as soon as we get back. We are hoping the paint color we chose still looks okay, the tile looks a bit more pink/peach installed than it did pre-installation. Here's hoping.

I am very excited to have our master bathroom back though since it has been over a year now, I think a completed bathroom may end up being my Christmas present. YEAH!

If you'd like to see pictures of the progress check out Master Bath Album and don't forget to look at the Cabinets Album.

I picked up 34 board feet of cabinet grade alder from Emerson Hardwood and got started on the bathroom cabinetry (the vanity and linen cabinets).

Step 1: Plane the material to a uniform thickness. My neighbor was kind enough to lend me his planer - again. We put brand new blades in it and it did a fine job taking everything down to 3/4". Rough lumber can be tricky to rip to width for a couple reasons. First, it doesn't have a straight edge to start with, and most of us don't have jointers with 8 foot beds. Second, the full width boards still have some pretty powerful internal stresses that like to come out as you're ripping them into narrower pieces. To address the first issue, I simply ran each board through the tablesaw with its concave side sistered up to an 8 foot long straight piece of cedar I had lying around, with a little stop at the leading edge to help make sure they pushed through together. For the second issue... well... there isn't a lot you can do except rip things a little wide and hope you can take out any new twists with the planer.

Once ripped to a 1/16" oversize, I ran all my stock on edge through the thickness planer a couple times. This removed all the saw marks (which I think are inevitable on rough lumber) and made all the like pieces exactly the same width. I then took a moment to make sure my miter saw was setup at an exact 90 degrees, and started the process of cutting the pieces for the face frame to length, starting with the longest ones, and finishing up with the short ones.

I decided to follow the advice I have heard so often and assemble the face frames with pocket screws and no glue. I figure worst case I can add the glue later. Having planed everything myself, made using pocket screws a lot easier than trying to use pre-planed lumber (which isn't always all the same thickness). The vice grips held the pieces tight, and it went together pretty quickly. The end result was square and nearly perfectly flush on all joints. Unfortunately, I didn't account for quite enough waste, and will have to rip 6 more feet of 2" stock for the face frame of the linen cabinet. The vanity face frame however, is done!

Scientific America featured an article a few years back titled "The Burden of Choice". It discussed the pros and cons (mostly cons) of the many choices we have available to us on everything from socks to what to order at dinner to houses and how those choices affect different personality types, specifically the satisfizers and the maximizers (I fall squarely into the latter category if there was any doubt). After reading said article, I have made numerous changes in my life to reduce the amount of stress I experience due to the numerous decisions I have to make. I now try and reserve my obsessive compulsion to research the bloody-hell out of every purchase to things that I truly care about: power tools (not dish brushes), cameras (not printer paper), and yes, toilets! Let's face it, after 3 years of plunging that hateful late 90's 1.6 GPF POFS (if you don't know, you probably don't want to) I was determined to get a toilet that did its job without needing me to hold its nasty little hand through the tough parts. Amazingly, good quality toilets range in price from about $200 to an obscene $1200 - and I'm sure you _could_ spend more if you really wanted to. The interesting bit: I haven't found anything functional that warrants the higher price tags on the spendier models - it appears to be designer line markup. Following the sage advice of my local George Morlan we picked up a simple bare-bones regular height (for the many children queued up to use it) elongated bowl (for the one male child queued up to use it) Toto toilet. It took me much longer than planned to install due to my rather ... sub-optimal ... existing closet ring, but I got it done (and done right). It's survived its first day, here's to wishing my $5 plunger (a non-critical purchase) a pleasant behind-the-utility-sink-dust-covered retirement.

We got the doors back from SprayKote Shop Finishing and installed them. The laundry room is now 100% d-o-n-e. Finally. We're very happy with how it all turned out, but more than anything it's just nice to be able to do laundry indoors, away from the dust of the garage/woodshop. It's also nice to have finally checked something off the todo list, so many of our projects have been lingering.

I finished my first architectural column this "holiday weekend" - hey there must be a reason they call it "labor" day. We are really happy with the look of the finished column, and I think it should last for a few decades with all the biscuited construction. However!!! It took me 4 days (a few hours each) to finish this one column, and I have 8 more to do in the back, 2 of them only being 3 feet tall, 1 being 16 feet or so. So, I desperately need to speed things up. I'm considering eliminating the biscuits in favor of stainless steel finish screws and Gorilla Glue, rather than biscuits and Tightbond III. The screws will keep the joint clamped tight while the glue dries - less clamping is a time saver, the Gorilla glue will completely cure in 4 hours - rather than overnight, not having to install the biscuits will also save some time.

So after months of deliberation, I finally decided on an architectural and construction design for the column wrap for the post on the front porch. The wrap is made up of 4 identical pieces of 5/4 finger jointed clear cedar. Each has a chamfer with a radius stop, and slots for biscuits on one edge and one side. I assembled three of them into a U shape in the garage with some help from Vernon and Mary Lou helped me install the last of the fourth after I installed the partial box around the post. The last board had to have both sides done at once, a total of 14 biscuits. If you haven't worked with biscuits before, they expand on contact with wood glue, leaving you only seconds to get the joint clamped up, or they'll never go together (or come apart for that matter). Fortunately we had prepared for the glue-up quite well, and all went fairly smoothly (big Thank You! to Mary Lou - no way I could have done that on my own!). I still have to install the 3/4" think mitered base up to the 11" mark and then add the base cap and crown to finish it off. That might be a few days, and I thought you all might enjoy seeing something other than that 4x4 PT post sticking out of our front deck.