slider slaughter

Hope ya like pictures, because I've got a whole lot of 'em today. A couple weeks back I ordered new sliding glass doors for the side and back of the house. There's already one on the side, but it's a mess in every way- any sort of "track" it might've had is gone, so it's a total pain to open and close. And it's brown with ugly un-removable faux tudor mansion grid pattern. Meanwhile, the family room had a large (eight-foot wide) ugly bay window. It was not only ugly, but its presence meant that to get to the pool, you had to use the slider on the side of the house and walk around. That doesn't scream pool party.

Though brown or white vinyl frames are the norm these days, I of course opted for silver aluminum (which is slightly worse for thermal transmission, btw), and they're double-paned low-e glass, so that's all good for blocking heat. This is mostly an issue for the side of the house, because the awning plus elevated wall/rear neighbor block direct sunlight in back. Anyway, they're both getting installed tomorrow, which meant 1) we had to 100% demo the bay window, and 2) I had to remove the perimeter of stucco around the existing side slider because there's a mounting lip back there. Let us begin with Saturday, whence John and I whacked out the bay window (aka "the nook")...

Here's "before". Note the lovely wicker doors... and who doesn't love wicker? (I doesn't, that's who)

Heeeere's Johnny. By now we had most of the trim pieces removed, and most importantly we finally figured out how to get the glass out without having to break it. There were quarter-round trim pieces wedging them in place along with caulk; we eventually figured out how to remove the quarter rounds and push the glass out with minimal breakage.

John on step stool trying to figure out how to get the "roof" off. It had a top piece that was rather massively built with 2x4's, plywood and a fiberglass top piece. We never really took it apart- we just removed all the supports and let it fall. It's still sitting on my patio relatively intact. In the foreground of this shot is the "platform" turned on it's side. Once we detached it, we lifted it up and pushed it forward (the tiles are actually the surface that you would sit on, or Kim would sleep on with cushions, depending on the occasion... she is not pleased that we killed the nook).

About that "roof" I was just talking about... like I said, we just kinda knocked out all the supports and made sure we had a lot of room to jump the hell out of the way when it fell. This is also a good time to relocate hammers, pry bars, saws and anything you don't want to land on.

 With the top and windows out, we noticed that the waist-height wall would've made a nice outdoor bar by the pool. This awesome idea lasted approximately two minutes...

... 'til we knocked that down too. Which was actually pretty easy. But most of it is intact in my yard, so I'm going to have to get it all apart and get rid of it. Much of it is screwed AND glued together which should make getting it apart hell on wheels.

 

Don't hate John because he's beautiful. Here the whole thing is knocked out.

 

With that done, we screwed a couple of sheets of 5/8" OSB to block the opening until the door gets installed. The 4x8 panels barely made it so I had use some scrap wood to extend to the 2x4 frame to attach them. Other than having a pretty strong dank smell for the first couple of days, this worked fine.

 

Here's a special bonus. A couple of weeks back I had the exterminator out, so I've had every kind of insect (mostly cockroaches) making their way out to the perimeter of the house to die. This is the second of what I believe is some kind of mutant beetle from hell, with a dime to show the terrifying scale. This thing was roughly the size of a VW Beetle or at least two of The Beatles. I had to bury it in a pine box.

Moving right along to today (Wednesday)...  as mentioned, since the doors are both being installed tomorrow, I had to remove the perimeter of stucco around the existing side slider due to mounting lip which is behind the stucco. Apparently they install sliding glass doors (and probably windows) prior to applying stucco. Learn something new every day. So here's what it looked like before:

 The guy kinda gave me bad advice, because he said I'd need to take off about six inches of stucco, when in reality I only needed a couple. I already had a masonry blade for my 7 1/4" circular saw, so I started cutting a little at the bottom before I realized. I tried a couple different approaches with a big flat metal chisel, hammers, etc. 'til I figured out the best way was to set the saw to cut at a 45° angle a couple inches out. I did this because I was advised that stucco guys don't like a straight line when patching- the angle will make it easier for them to feather in the patch. These cuts were a HUGE pain in the ass to make because you're holding a relatively heavy saw at goofy angles, and it's hard to pull the "trigger" switch, especially because there's a safety button on the back that you're supposed to hit at the same time to make the trigger switch work. This is easy when the saw used at a normal horizontal height/angle, but really hard when you're practically holding it over your head wearing gloves. And once it's going, cutting stucco makes a hellacious storm of flying pebbles and general dust. Though I had heavy gloves and eye protection (an absolute must), I didn't have a breather mask, so I essentially held my breath. There's still crap in my hair, I think.

Anyway, once I had the cuts done, I jammed a big pry bar in there and whacked at it with hammer, and it wasn't too hard to get the chunks of stucco to pop out. I also grabbed my fancy ear plugs for this, because the pry bar makes a pretty painful "ping" every time you hammer it.

This is of course made a big mess of stucco chunks, but I dutifully swept up the whole thing when I was done. The little porch there hasn't been this clean since I moved in!

And oh yeah, another fun injury. Did I do this using big mean power tools, hammers and chisels? Of course not. Not even sure what it was, but I managed to cut my finger pouring trash from one garbage can to another, which apparently had a piece of wood with something sharp and metal. Tetanus time, right? (don't worry, I Neosporined and band-aided it). It looks way worse in the pic, it was actually only a hairline cut. Anyway, tomorrow I'll report back with the door install(s).

oops I made drawers. and trimmy bits.

I haven't posted any pics of the island from the other side, because 'til now there hasn't been anything to see except plumbing stubs and the empty 36" Ikea cab where the sink is gonna live. I hauled in the shiny new Bosch dishwasher from the garage and slid it into place (still not hooked up though), and finished making the little trim pieces on the sides. Those are part of my "didn't realize how wide the island would be" screw up- they cover the 2x4's that I didn't originally realize would be there. Lucky (again) for me, I had three really huge pieces of veneered mahogany with horizontal grain (around 92"x26") which were intended as side trim for the big cabs, but as you can see below, two of them only need to go from the counter top to the top of the cabs, leaving me with a lot of extra for these island trims (I cut and mounted the one below today as well). I'm waiting on the other big trim pieces, because I decided to swap the plastic legs for metal ones on the super huge cab that will contain the gas and microwave oven... that cab weighs over 100 lbs empty, and it's about to get some heavy mahogany laminate/MDF side pieces, and oh yeah, I'm gonna stick two ovens in there, so the rinky Ikea plastic legs are seeming like a poor idea. I have to remove the cab to swap the legs, so I'm holding off on mounting the trim pieces.

Getting back to the lonely island, all the woodwork is essentially done (except toe kicks), and I'm REAL happy about that, because it was a lot of work. It's not like building a pre-fab piece of furniture with holes drilled and everything magically aligning. This was a lot of measuring, cutting, re-cutting, clamping things so they go together correctly when you assemble them. Way more work than it probably looks like. BTW, I don't know what those dots are in the pic, but they don't exist in real life.

In other island-ic news, I was a little concerned about where to locate the switch for the garbage disposal. There wasn't a really good place to put one, but John told me about how his father's place has a button that looks like an arcade game button on top of the counter- press once for on and once for off. This struck me odd as an electrical button by water would be a fairly bad idea, but after researching it, I discovered that it's an "air button". They have a little remote box that sends a little stream of air through a tube to where the button is; this way there's no power near the water. I intend to have them make an extra hole in the counter near the back of the sink for it- I ordered one today off Amazon for around $50, 'tis HERE if you want to witness the hotness.

Moving along, I spent the evening building drawers:


I never thought I'd see solid mahogany veneer all over, but alas, there it is (the empty spaces in the big one on the left are where aforementioned gas and microwave ovens will live). The drawers are relatively easy to build once you get the hang of Ikea's sort of weird hardware. The good news is the sides are metal and the bottoms are thick particleboard, so they're pretty robust. They also have the nifty slides that pull in as it closes.

In yet more exciting news, with the island pretty much done, I stopped by Lowe's yesterday and ordered my counters. I had planned on doing Corian, aka solid-surface plastic, and they're having a killer sale on LG Hi-Macs, which is essentially the same thing (Dupont's patent on Corian recently ran out). This kind of thing is usually around $65/sq ft installed, the Lowe's sale price is $36.99/sq ft, so I jumped on it- the sale is over at the end of the month, so I was sort of racing to finish the island in time. I already made them a diagram, they estimated and I paid, but they're supposed to be sending someone over to precisely measure, then they come back around a week later to install. The color is "cotton dust" and looks like below, though the sample I have looks a little less "busy".

In even more exciting house news, I'm having two sliding glass doors installed next week- the one on the side of the house is being replace, plus John and I are going to demo the bay window in back (sorry Kim) and they're installing a big-ass eight-foot wide one in its place. I promise plenty of pics of that destructo mess!

glU2

Today I attached the island side panel I glued in the last entry. Starting to look like something, huh? There's a lot of major clamping involved to hold it in position (otherwise it starts "pushing out" and creating gaps when you screw it in). As it turned out, I made them a little too wide, but the vertical 2x4's in back aren't totally aligned properly, so the extra actually will give me some fudge room to shim the final trim pieces in back (this will make more sense in my next couple entries).

After installing that, I glued up the edge trim pieces for the other side panel. Pretty much the same deal as the last entry, but I went a little more nuts with the clamps this time. I'll attach it either later today or tomorrow. Next step is to cut and attach some small trim pieces on the back side (they just have to cover 2x4's), and then I'll make an appt for the Lowe's countertop folks. I also need to install the "brown-black" Ikea toe kicks, but I'm waiting to borrow my friend John's sliding-compound-cuts-at-any-crazy-angle saw so that I can easily do 45 degree angle cuts on the edges. I mocked it up the other day, and though they're currently a little too tall to slide in place (easily fixed with table saw), the almost-black toe kicks look really nice beneath the metal- I'm glad I'm using them instead of the mahogany ones.

glue are you?

Today is phase two of the fixup/workaround of the Colossal Screw Up of incorrectly specifying the dimensions of the island to the guys who made the mahogany veneer doors/trim pieces (phase one was the stainless face in the last entry). Since the sides and the back piece were all too small, I didn't use the side pieces, and essentially cut the big (but not big enough) front piece in half to use as sides. It just made it- I had about two inches to spare. The only problem with this idea was that the edges didn't have any veneer on them, they were just bare MDF. My fix for this was to take scrap pieces with the nice veneered edge, cut the edges off with the table saw and glue them to my new side pieces. The "edge trims" ended up being 3/16" thick, so I subtracted 3/8" (i.e. 3/16" x2 for front and back... stupid fractions!) from the total measurements of the side pieces (did all this cutting today too).

Knowing I was going to be doing this kind of madness, I picked up those nifty silver and blue three-foot clamps from Harbor Freight a couple weeks back for super cheap. They're actually surprisingly well made. What's going on in that mess above is the the front and back edge pieces are being clamped and glued. It's hard to tell in the pic, but the long narrow pieces of wood sticking off the edges aren't actually glued, they're just they're to distribute the pressure of the three-foot clamps (relatively) evenly across the entire surface. The orange clamps on either side have blocks on top and bottom for lateral alignment (so that the trim is even with the wood from side-to-side). This is the first mega glue-up I've done, and it's kinda hectic, because glue squeezes out all over the place, and since my surfaces are already finished, you gotta wipe it off quick if you don't want it to mess things up- have lots of wet paper towels handy! In any normal situation, you'd do all the gluing prior to applying a finish, so this would be a lot less critical. And while you're doing that, obviously you have to make sure everything's sitting in the right place. I actually did one side, let it set a bit, then loosened the clamps and added the other side. I still have to repeat the entire process for the other side piece, but I don't have enough clamps, so I'll wait 'til this one's dry. I probably won't be able to do it 'til next week b/c I'm doing day/night double gig duty tomorrow and Monday :(

Once these are done, I can screw them to the sides of the island. I still need to make some little trim pieces for the back side, but these should be real easy- I just need to rip down a couple of my unused mahogany toe-kicks to 3 1/2" wide to cover the 2x4' framing on either side. Forutnately the toe-kick pieces already have veneered edges on one side (and you won't be able to see the other edge), so I won't have to do any of the madness above.

metal island

It turns out the steel place had my stainless sheet cut yesterday, so I went and picked it up today along with the J-channel stuff. The J-channel was a bitch to cut- at first I tried doing it with my table saw, which I knew was a stupid idea because I don't have the right kind of blade, and it mangled an end. I then resorted to plan B which was to use my 7 1/4" circular saw (which I do have the correct blade for). Even with that, it still needed some touch up with a Dremel rotary tool. The corner angle cuts aren't perfect, but the imperfections aren't very noticeable. I presume there's a power tool more appropriate for cutting this stuff, but whatever it is, I don't have one.

Once I had the J-channel pieces cut, I clamped them in place and rather unscientifically whacked the sides until there was just enough room for the 3/4" trim pieces to overlap tightly- I used a small scrap of 3/4" trim, but as you'll see soon, there will be mahogany side pieces. Once clamped in position, I drilled 1/16" holes and nailed them in place using small flat-headed nails:

Once I had the J-channel pieces on the sides and bottom, I had to remove the protective backing from the stainless sheet, and that was some work- that stuff is REALLY on there. It's just plastic, and I used soapy water, which helped a little, but it took some time and muscle. Once that was in I just dropped it in from the top, and miraculously, my measurements were correct.  There's a sort of dent- it's wide, but very subtle (you can sort of detect in the pic in the way that the reflection curves at the top left), and will likely be totally hidden by countertop that's going to overhang by 15".