Descending Ashtray

Whew, it’s been a LONG time since I’ve last posted, and to you, dear reader, I apologize. I’ve embarked on adventure that has been taking up a lot of my time, and I’m not talking about my homebrewing hobby …

Sarah and I have begun remodeling our attic. It all began with some plans (with some help from my friend and contractor Andrew Young), which led to a building permit, which led to the purchase of a sawzall, which led to … me neglecting this blog. But let’s move on, shall we?

The Plans

We are fortunate enough to have a full-size attic - the plumbing permit for our house in 1927 listed it as 1 1/2 stories (saving us about $10,000, a story which I’ll tell another day) and we’re planning on converting the existing space (right) to a master bedroom and bath, which will up our home’s totals to 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, and about 1500 square feet of living space. Here are the plans for what the new space should look like:

The Demo

I have always heard that demolition is the best part of a project, and I have to say, it has been fun, if a bit sweaty and dusty. But … we’re almost done. Most of the attic’s walls and ceiling were covered in some vintage wood paneling whose surface concealed some very old insulation. When you pulled down the paneling, the insulation and miscellaneous roof debris came with it, coating my head with asphalt, roofing nails and the occasional abandoned wasp nest. Good times. Next, I’ll regale you with stories of chimney removal. Really good times!

When Sarah and I first moved to Portland, we had an apartment on SE Belmont. It was a great location, and had a great backyard for parties, with a raspberry bush within arm’s length of the picnic table I built (my first real woodworking project, and one that is still doing good service today).

One year, it occurred to us to have an outdoor party right around horse-racing season, and with the Belmont Stakes coming up, it seemed a natural fit to call our BBQ the “Belmont Steaks.”

A few days before that first party, I was at Music Millenium on Burnside, and saw some little toys on the counter near the register, a bucket full of “ramp walkers” for a couple bucks apiece. There were horses, cows and pigs that would all “walk” down an incline … it seemed only natural to race them, and with the party coming up … Racing Cows were born. I built a simple ramp with a starting gate, and much fun was had (the pitchers of mint juleps didn’t hurt, either).

The cows, however, were lost to history, but the horse racing party lived on in our new place, modified to a Kentucky Derby celebration since we were no longer on Belmont Street.

Earlier this week, I found the cows again with some slick Google sleuthing. They’re made by a company called Rocket USA, and 12 new racing cows arrived yesterday morning. They were all the same color, so I ended up re-painting most of them.

To re-start the tradition, I also felt the cows needed a little more than just a piece of plywood and a starting gate, so yesterday I souped up the old track. I give you … “Plywood Downs.” Place your bets.

Last weekend Sarah and I joined friends Thom and Amanda on a tour of Portland’s modern homes. In the home I was most enamored of, I spotted this interesting coffee table. How do you think it’s held together? I didn’t feel it was appropriate to try pulling pieces off, but I did lift it with Thom’s help, and it seemed to be hollow.

In one of my many experiments on the now-all-but-abandoned DaveSelden.com, I had a somewhat regularly occurring feature I called “Studio Visits,” where I documented visits I made to other artists’ studios, with lots of photos and minimal text. Other artists’ workspaces are usually so private, and it’s interesting to see how the setup differs based on personality and end product.

On my recent European vacation, I had the opportunity to re-visit the studio of Constantin Brancusi, a favorite sculptor. In 1956, rather than see his beloved space demolished in the name of a construction project, he donated its contents to the city of Paris to be recreated elsewhere. In his later years, Brancusi believed the perfect venue for experiencing his works was his studio, where each object was carefully positioned with respect to other objects, optimal lighting conditions and physical needs of the viewer.

In the ensuing years, the studio was recreated in various forms, all to some degree temporary, but in 1977 the studio received a final resting place at the Centre Pompidou in front of Paris’ Museum of Modern Art. A building designed by architect Renzo Piano references the original studio heavily, respecting the artist’s wishes as to placement of works and lighting conditions, but maintaining a safe distance between the visitor and the valuable original artworks it now contains.

Something I have been thinking about lately, and something that I noticed in Brancusi’s work (as well as in the Louise Bourgeouis retrospective inside) was the care and attention Brancusi gave to the pedestals for his pieces. In many ways the pedestal was so integrated with the sculpture, it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

And of course, there were the tools, laid out in neat order as he left them. They were the only evidence that this was a studio, really, so clean was the floor and so white the walls, you’d think you were simply in a strange museum. Artifacts of his life were there if you looked, though, including a violin on a bench at the rear of this photo, apparently for the impromptu parties that were often thrown here (Max Ernst and Jean Tinguely had adjacent studios). His sleeping quarters were in the raised area above.

This is a site specific table that I am making for our neighbor, hence the unusual shape. The spindle legs are perhaps a little more traditional of a style then what I would normally make but it was a fun project to work on and figure out. The spindles themselves are not square stock at the top and bottom. They are more of an arrowhead like diamond shape which made it tricky finding the center point for turning them. I also learned early on not to use a wide gouge on the transition between the square and the round part of the spindle. The first attempt splintered out really bad and made it unusable. The second attempt went much smoother. I wrapped masking tape around the part I wanted to stay square and used my narrowest scraper to cut into the spindle at angle that moved the knife away from the grain instead of into it. Anyway the rest of the legs turned out pretty good. Then I Kreg jigged everything together from the bottom.

I probably should have taken more pictures to illustrate the process, oh well, maybe next time.

(I realized after posting the picture that it is kind of hard to see that the top is a trapezoid shape. In the picture it looks like a long table that is foreshortened. It is kind of an optical illusion.)

End-grain cutting boards are a step up from the simpler long-grain versions, because the end grain provides a milder cutting surface for the knife. They are also a bit more work to make, but not too hard, as you can see from the photos below.

I keep a special pile of scrap that’s about the right size for cutting boards, and selected some mystery wood, fir, birch, walnut, cherry and bubinga for this piece. Bubinga isn’t something I normally have around, but since this cutting board is a wedding present, I bought some at Woodcrafters to give the board some added color. Here are all the cutting board pieces laid out for gluing. They are all of different thicknesses, but I will glue them up and then plane them down to uniform thickness later.

You can really never have too many clamps!

Once the glue had cured overnight, I de-clamped the cutting board and ran it through the planer until the board was perfectly flat on both sides. It looks pretty good at this point (in fact, Sarah wanted me to stop here), but I wasn’t done yet. I set up the table saw with a stop block to crosscut the board into pieces of equal width. This width is the basic thickness of the finished cutting board, as we’ll be rotating the pieces 90 degrees in the next step.

Once the board was diced up, it was time for re-assembly. The first step was to flip the pieces the long way (the north-south axis) to alternate the grain patterns of the pieces, creating a sort of checkerboard effect in the finished piece.

Next was the second and final glue up, making sure that I rotated the pieces 90 degrees along their east-west axis to have the end grain face-up. Glue went on the long grain side of the wood.

Once the second glue up was complete, again waiting overnight, I prepared for a long winter’s sanding. I used a belt sander for about an hour to level both sides of the board, cleaning up glue squeeze-out and the inevitable irregularities caused in gluing up a project like this. A planer won’t work on end grain (it will beat the knives to kingdom come and tear out big chunks around the edges), although a hand plane might have done the trick had I thought of it. Once the board was level, a little bit of food-safe oil really brought out the deep color of the woods. It’s a pretty substantial board that I’m sure will last a long time.

I also want to go on record as having completed this wedding present before the wedding, which is a first for me!