Update : Desk Reconstruction COMPLETE

 

So now its time to assemble the nested tables together. The embedded debris in the resin is a pain in the ass, but unless your right up close, you can't really notice it. It's more of a texture issue; the surface isn't smooth and glassy and a bit of a disappointment.

So I got the table tops inside and attached the flange plates to the undersides. There was a moment where I was paranoid that I somehow didn't place the leg blocks correctly on the larger table, but all the screws held tight as I drove them in.


Next the legs went on. The adjustable legs for the smaller table was a great idea, as I realized that the design I wanted set the smaller table juust low enough to barely fit under the larger with the keyboard and mouse in place. 

And here it is. Assembled, work iMacs up and running. I moved my workstation from the darkest corner to the little reading nook the Conservatory has. It's made a huge difference in my mindset while i'm working. Its much sunnier, I can see into the livingroom a bit, so I don't feel too cut off from the rest of the house, and I dont have to get up to throw things at the cats when they decide to sit in the foyer and scream and cry for no apparent reason while I'm on the phone.


A drawback I didn't anticipate as I put my office back together has to do with my chair. I specifically spent weeks searching all over for this particular chair because it folds own when not in use, allowing me to wheel it under the desk. With the new desk, of course, it doesn't fit. Awesome.


All in all, I learned a lot about woodworking, Resincraft (yeh I just made that word up), and the proper use of some power tools. This Project is completed, successfully.


Woot!

Update : Desk Reconstruction

So the painting portion of this project was an...educational experience.

Once the tabletops were assembled and glued together, they were terribly messy. The cuts on the sides of the smaller table looked like torn paper more than wood.A quick trip to Home Depot and a pint of wood filler took care of that. I just slapped it on and mashed the filler into the huge gaps between the edge of the table and the veneer.

Once it had cured, however, it looked just as bad. Like a 4 year old was playing with orange playdoh and left it smeared all over the table. Oh well; this is a great excuse to repaint (which I really wasn't planning to do, originally).

Another trip to H to the Dizzo, and I had 3 cans of high gloss red spraypaint. It was fairly easy to spray the tables; just plant them on top of the paint cans left over from the dresser repaintings, and go to town.  The paint was pretty, and exactly the right color of red I love. The surface I was painting on, however, didn't share my love for it, and chipped it off with a stiff breeze or  long hard look. I sanded and prepped the surface, but 5 coats of spraypaint with adequate drying times wasn't enough to overcome the hatred the veneer had for the paint oppressors. There was no way that I could use this a a usable desk and not watch bits of paint fly off constantly.

Fortunately, Jenn had a great idea. While looking in the paint and stain aisle (on our Nth trip to H Dizzle), she suggested trying the Bartop Resin kit that they had.  The resin was something I was thinking of using for the coffee table project (in a much larger scale) and figured this was a great opportunity to try it out. We bought the kit, and appropriate accessories, and headed home.

NOTE: Resin is not easy to use!!

The components must be measured EXACTLY, and mixed with very specific timings, and poured a specific way and, best of all, left to cure for 3 days in a perfectly dust, hair, bug, seed, pollen, (everything, really) free room to cure. ANYTHING that touches the resin while it cures is forever embedded in it.

The first round went alright, considering. We measured, mixed and poured just the right way. The smaller table didn't get poured quite right, so it wasn't level, and needed a second layer. The curing, though, went terribly. Despite trying to make a clean room outside (inside we were worried about cats + fur+ chemical vapors), a massive drift of pollen and bugs hit the resin and stuck fast. The smaller table was hit the worst, for some reason. Once embedded, there is NO way to get it out short of scraping all of the resin off the tabletop and starting from scratch, which frankly I'm not about to do.

On the second pour on the small table, I rushed it. I assumed that;

1.) if both bottle A and bottle B start with identical measurements of liquid,
2.) and the first pour used equal amounts of liquid A and B, then
3.) both bottle A and B must have equal amounts left.

and thus measuring was unnecessary. Nope. as I started the mixing process, I noticed that I had more than 20% more liquid B than A. I assumed that this wasn't as big of an issue as the reverse being true, since Liquid B was a catalyst, accelerating the cure of liquid A. This was not the case. Once cued, I noticed that the smaller table seemed a bit...softer than the large table. Not a lot, but there was a noticible difference in the hardness of the two. The large table is acrylic hard. The smaller one, less so. It's not super apparent, but it does soften if you put something really hot on it, like a bowl of soup.

Oh, well, now I know. and the small table is really only for my Keyboard and mouse, so it's not much of an issue.

Next time, on This Nerd House: assembly!

Update : Desk Reconstruction

So My idea for my desk reconstruction is to turn one big desk into a set of nested desks. This would create some extra room and make the  keyboard and mouse position lower and much more comfortable.

I removed the table legs from the desk and measured how deep I wanted it. I'm going to cut it down from 28 inches to 15.  I think two desks that are 15" deep should be fine for me.

So I got a board from Ikea that I think will do well for my lower desktop. I measured it against the current desk and realized it was far too wide, butting up against the legs of the larger table.  If it was to nest under the main table, i would either need to somehow make the main table wider, or the smaller table narrower. In this case I did a little of both.

After removing the veneer on the back and sides of the smaller table's edges, sawing it to size wasn't much of a problem, though as it was really my first go with my new reciprocating saw and I was alone, holding the board with one hand and guiding the saw with the other left some sloppy results with the cut. I later went back and cleaned it up, but it took considerably longer than had I simply waited for Jenn or rich to come home and help hold it down. Sometimes my impatience has a price to pay.

The larger table was a big problem. I should have realized that a wooden object as big as it was should have been much heavier. This third picture is what I found when I cut the back off. 90% of the table is hollow, filled with honeycomb cardboard. This created 2 problems;

1. The places where the legs attach are solid(ish) plywood blocks, and the cut removed the back two. Without them, the back legs have nothing to anchor to.

2. The back edge has no plywood to attach the veneer back onto. Without it you can simply see the cardboard. Additionally, since I removed the plywood edge from the back, what is now the back edge is very flimsy. I don't think it will hold up the weight of my work iMacs.


So here's the plan I came up with; I need the leg blocks, and I need the back spline, but I don't need the top or bottom layers of plywood. If I can manage to remove those I can insert the wood back into the rear edge of the table and all will be right with the world.

So here's the rear section with all the non-essential crap removed. You can see the two leg blocks and the rear spline. I needed at this point to remove the top and bottom layers of plywood, which I quickly found out were wood-glued to the assembly, making them nearly impossible to separate.

Here you can see I managed to chisel off the plywood from the rear spline and saw away the side splines. all that wss left was the plywood above and below the leg blocks. This was the single most difficult thing in the project. After about 6 hours of chipping, chiseling (with a paint scraper, mind you. I don't have a chisel) bleeding, cursing and flailing about in a chubby hulk rage. I managed to remove the plywood. The last and most effective 2 hours were spent "whittling" the wood away with a boxcutter. seriously, I needed to bust out some whitt'lin skills on this'n.

I dont have any pics of the aftermath, sorry. once I inserted the leg blocks and spline into the back of the table, It really just looked like the edge of a table without a veneer.

With a little Gorilla glue I reattached the original veneer strips to the back and sides of both tables. Now they pretty much look like smaller versions of themselves. Yay me.


Next: Painting!

New Project : Workstation Reconstruction

I set up my home office in the house quickly when we moved in a year ago, promising myself that this setup was only temporary, that a better configuration will be forthcoming.

A year later, and my home office is no different than it was. Worse even, as I had disassembled my art table to make more room (and it was broken and terrible to use).

Here's a couple pics of what it's like. transformation pics to follow as I complete them. They will consist mostly of building an additional bookshelf, the repositioning of the furniture and reconstructing the desk.

Platform Bed COMPLETE

Shelf cubbies; Fabric backed, lit, assembled, and awesome. 

 

Final assembly time. some things worked really well; some did not. Jenn and I did a test run of the outer frame, and a few problems showed up immediately.


To start with, the hinges were a great idea, but the ones I bought didn't work at all. as soon as any force was applied to them, they tore away from the wood of the shelves. I'm not sure if it was the screws, or the location on the shelf, or what. I currently have the hinges replaced with traditional L-braces, but I will soon be replacing those with hinges again, as right now the bed is much too large to move around the room much less out of it for any reason.

The rope lighting is great, but running the lights along the bottom of the shelf cubbies limited their ability to illuminate the contents, so I took Jenn's advice and switched it to run along the tops of the cubbies. Since I wanted to avoid drilling new holes, I needed to flip the shelves and reconnect them. This turned out to be a huge undertaking, eating up nearly an entire weekend. If you remember, two of the shelves have a different color on the bottom than the top, and so the dividing shelves in them need to be disassembled and flipped, rather than the whole unit.


Unfortunately doing this to 2 units and not the whole outer frame meant that half of the shelves ran in a clockwise spiral and the other half ran anti-clockwise.  In the end I had to disassemble nearly the entire outer frame into its fundamental components and reassemble it. All to get the rope lighting to run along the top without drilling new holes.

Adding to the mess was the fact that I flat out forgot during most of this that we had purchased a pair of shelf add-ons do put a door on a couple of the cubby holes. this required assembling each add-on, finding a place for them to go, and drilling the appropriate holes.

Jenn came home from work and helped in the final few steps. We finished the outer frame, attached the braces, added the inner frame, laid down the MDF slats, and threw on the new mattress. Its MUCH bigger than the original plan for a platform bed, but its a sweet bed and it has tons of storage. And I built it by hand, so there's that. It fills up the room, but it's totally worth it.

Now there are a few things I'd like to add to it, such as wrapping canvas around the slats under the mattress to make them easier to remove all at once when accessing the storage underneath, and of course adding heavier duty hinges, but this bed is fully functioning and I call this project COMPLETE!

Update : Summer Sarong COMPLETE

So the sarongs are completely finished. They were a lot of fun to do, and super easy. I made it more of a challenge by trying to make 4 different sarongs. Since each of the four fabrics were identical in height and length, That meant getting more creative.

As I did research on the types of sarongs, I noticed that they came primarily in two styles; square and tube. Both were ice and both had their own multitude of tying styles.

As I measured the fabric, I worried that I wouldn't like the length. They were just long enough to come down to my ankles before tying, and many tying styles required rolling the fabric up, which would ride the bottom hem up to my mid-calf. The fabric was long enough to cut in half cross-wise and sew the long ends together. This would make a much taller sarong, but narrower.

Considering this I decided to make a Mendel matrix.

Along the top ; long and short cut.
Along the side ; Tube and square.

Each cell would represent a fabric pattern.

Tall / Square : Geisha

This one is nice, but the narrowness of it makes me kind of nervous about it opening up. I'm probably being paranoid about it. Jenn loves this geisha pattern.

Tall / Tube : Koi scales

This one is my favorite pattern. The scales are an awesome color and its not as busy as the dragon print. The length is great for roll-up tying styles. This is the one sarong I have least needed to adjust / retie.

Short / Square : Herons
I like this pattern. It reminds me of the Wheel of Time when I wear it. But most things with herons do that, because I'm an unrepentant nerd. This sarong tends to ride up the most, and its almost like wearing unbifurcated shorts. It's also the one I have to adjust / retie the most often.

Short / Tube : Dragons
This pattern was so insane I had to make something out of it. It's pure awesome, like a shark and he-man high-fiving during a skydive. The tube style allows more varied tying styles, and it lets me do the balinese knot, which I'm learning is often my favorite.

So with the final stitch and this post, this project is successfully COMPLETED!

Update : Platform Bed

So we have assembled the outer frame. Jenn and I had already assembled the 4 Effektiv brand Ikea shelves, but they had no backing, no way of connecting to each other, and I wanted to add lighting to them. 

The backing was a simple idea that took quite a few revisions and backtracking to get together. We saved the long tops from the Ikea boxes and upcycled them into the backings of the shelves.  We took a trip to Joanne's fabrics and hit the remnants bin for 13 inch squares of cast-offs. We found quite a few, and purchased some cute ones in the clearance aisle that we couldn't pass up.

After marking the panels and cutting them out with pinking shears to resist fraying. I taped the cardboard to the shelf and traced the openings with a pen to verify the placement. Then it was just a matter of hot gluing the fabric to the cardboard. We tried to mix up the colors, patterns, and contrast as much as possible to create a patchwork feel. 

Once all four cardboard panels were traced, glued and cooled, we proceeded with attaching them to the shelving. Jenn did the bulk of the stapling with her new staple gun. I came in behind and cut a hole into the far corner of each shelf's backing to pass through the lighting cables.

Attaching the shelves to each other was tricky. The outer frame was far too big to assemble and then move into the bedroom, which means it would be too big to move OUT when we move. So we needed an idea that held the shelves in place and still allowed them to detach easily. I thought of door hinges. I screwed in the hinges at the corners where the shelves met, and then simply removed the pin. 4 hinges for 4 corners. Assembling the hinges was an easy matter of lining up the hinges and lightly hammering the pin back in.


Next was the lighting. I wanted the shelves to be lit. I dunno why, I just thought it would be kind of cool. And if we need something from the shelves after they're filled with...whatever, having installed lighting would be a good thing to have. So I took a trip to the hardware store and bought some round wood boring augers and went to work. I measured the width of the rope lights, grabbed the next largest bit, and drilled through the shelves, one at a time. This produced mixed results. The particle board the shelves are made of had unpredictible responses to the drill bit. Sometimes the drill cut cleanly through. Other times it  raggedly tore the hole open. As you can see in the picture here; clean... clean...ragged as all hell...clean. One of the ends needed to be drilled through as it butted up against the back of the following shelf. The hole was easy to drill here. Too easy. apparently Effektiv shelf ends are hollow.

Here's the rope lighting prior to installation. I think its really cool. Much brighter here than it looks when in the darker shelves, but that's okay.

Next time, we put the whole bed together and see how it goes..