I received an email from an old friend in Texas com­ment­ing on the heat wave Port­land was expe­ri­enc­ing just lately. Hav­ing grown up in the Lone Star State, I can remem­ber heat being a fact of life. But the last cou­ple of weeks here have rivaled Texas on the tem­per­a­ture front. And since I removed all that insu­la­tion last week, it’s been really fun work­ing inside the house.

But we are mov­ing along. We just got the first of four main floor beams up today. It’s the one seen in red run­ning front-to-back inside the house in the ren­der­ing below. It sup­ports the back roof (it’s actu­ally a large dormer) at the inter­sec­tion of the joists and the rafters before the rafters con­tinue on down to the out­side wall. Three of the four beams are exposed below the ceil­ing and so we decided to seek out some nicer Fir mate­r­ial. Since the house is basi­cally built entirely of fir, we are try­ing to keep that theme run­ning. So as a con­se­quence, a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the mate­r­ial com­ing from the walls that we have pulled out of the house is going to the shop to be milled into repur­posed mate­r­ial for var­i­ous projects.

One of those projects will be the “cladding” on the new bath­room walls shown in orange below. The cladding will take a form sim­i­lar to the open rain screen exte­rior sid­ing. Prob­a­bly about 2.5 inch wide hor­i­zon­tal strips with roughly 3/16 inch gaps between attached to ver­ti­cal bat­tens over the drywall.

The com­puter ren­der­ing below shows essen­tially what the inte­rior space lay­out will be like but it also show the addi­tion that we are not presently con­struct­ing. Per­haps that will come next year.

The beam is shown below clamped and braced in place await­ing fab­ri­ca­tion of the posts that sup­port each end. I like the green foot­print across the red field on the end of the beam. Per­haps some significance …

Another project we are using reclaimed fir for is the bath­room cab­i­net. The veneers resawn in an ear­lier post (this stuff only really exists in this blog, right?) are shown being lam­i­nated to the cab­i­net ply­wood drawer fronts in vac­uum bags. I make up these bags in what­ever size is needed and evac­u­ate them with a four port man­i­fold on the shop made vac­uum pump seen in the lower left cor­ner. We had a cou­ple of really great pieces of fir from some base­board trim that deter­mined the visual lay­out we used on the drawer fronts.

After more demo­li­tion of yet another wall we found this card for Hodes Auto Parts neatly tucked into the paper lin­ing behind the fir lap sheath­ing. I liked the vin­tage look of the card and since it too came from an appar­ently orig­i­nal wall, I guessed that it too would date from 1928 when the house was orig­i­nally con­structed. I did a quick search on the inter­net later that evening and found a ref­er­ence to a post­card with an adver­tise­ment for Hodes Auto Parts dat­ing to 1928 — Bingo!

Then it occurred to me why the design looked so famil­iar. The logo I cre­ated for my cam­era design busi­ness was inten­tion­ally cre­ated to have a vin­tage look and it bears a remark­able resem­blance to Hodes’ card.
It must be a sign …

I placed the logo on a sim­i­lar card size here to show the resemblance.

In other news, my wife Lisa is begin­ning her con­tri­bu­tions to the Bun­galoft sec­tion of the Métier blog. Look for the first install­ment com­ing soon.

Kurt

The Bun­galoft demo­li­tion phase is under­way! Eco­nomic con­sid­er­a­tions and hes­i­ta­tion to undergo the seis­mic scrutiny by the build­ing depart­ment for our SIPs addi­tion led us to attack the inside of the house first. So, with per­mit in hand, we are tear­ing out walls and putting in sup­port beams to open up the space in our micro bun­ga­low. 550 square feet divided into four rooms was a bit much. So the plan is to open it up by replac­ing load bear­ing walls with post and beam struc­ture. We’ll attempt a visual tran­si­tion from bun­ga­low appear­ance at the front to a pretty mod­ern kitchen lay­out in the back. We started by buy­ing a fifth-wheel to park in the dri­ve­way to main­tain our san­ity while we work on the house. But that’s another story (and another post).

The draw­ing above is essen­tially what the exist­ing ground floor plan looks like. A liv­ing room, bed­room kitchen and bath­room with stairs to the base­ment and a cov­ered porch oppo­site made for quaint, if a bit cramped, feel.  We decided to con­vert the space into a loft-like envi­ron­ment by remov­ing all the cur­rent walls and rebuild­ing the bath­room to suit our needs. The new arrange­ment is below …

The bath lay­out includes only a shower instead of the orig­i­nal bath­tub. (More on the shower saga later) A niche for the toi­let and a van­ity com­plete the design. The van­ity is a con­tem­po­rary, wall-hung design made with veneers cut from the Fir base­boards pulled from the house. We had one par­tic­u­larly spec­tac­u­lar piece of Fir so we designed a lay­out for the cab­i­net that allowed us to incor­po­rate it. A matte-white, one-piece counter top/sink from IKEA turned out to be per­fect can­di­date for this cab­i­net. A mod­ern faucet design made in Por­tu­gal by Cifial com­pletes the setup.

The bath­room will be cloaked with the reclaimed Fir from the house used in the form of a now-typical ven­ti­lated rain screen design. The hor­i­zon­tal gaps between rails will allow for design­ing some brack­ets to hang shelv­ing or other acces­sory items from the out­side of the bath­room walls.

A penin­sula for range, pantry and refrig­er­a­tor is posi­tioned oppo­site the back wall cab­i­net with sink and dish­washer. A new door out the back occu­pies the spot ded­i­cated to the future breeze­way for our new bed­room. We’ll likely head over to Portland’s pop­u­lar Rebuild­ing Cen­ter to find a used door for that spot. It’s a great asset located in the rapidly up-and-coming Mis­sis­sippi Street neigh­bor­hood. Also located there is the amaz­ing Sun­lan Light­ing store. I wish I had been liv­ing close to that store dur­ing my light­ing design escapades. They have an unbe­liev­able col­lec­tion of lamps (lay peo­ple call them “bulbs”) that encom­pases every­thing I was using. I will no doubt con­sult with them for light­ing in the Bungaloft.

Kurt

Re-sawing fir lumber

We’ve begun remod­el­ling our micro-bungalow. The first order of busi­ness is to col­lect or build com­po­nents that will be needed once demo­li­tion is under way.  Since the inte­rior walls are even­tu­ally going away, we removed some of the fir inte­rior trim and milled it into thick veneer for use in build­ing the bath­room van­ity.
The image illus­trates the re-sawing process using my vin­tage Duro band saw equipped with a cus­tom fence.  The fence has a drift adjust­ment that rotates the fence very nearly at the front edge of the blade to accom­mo­date any ten­dency for the blade to cut right or left. There is a cam actu­ated lock-down lever that oper­ates with a very light action to clamp the fence in posi­tion.
Even the small amount of trim removed thus far yielded an amaz­ing vari­ety of fig­ure rang­ing from some unusual wavy grain to tight VG along with the usual diag­o­nal fir grain and some not-so-tight VG as seen in the image above.

Kurt

Busy.
Not quite too busy but enough to keep me off the blog for a bit.
With the recent arrival of sum­mer weather in Port­land the sched­ule is top-heavy with the Bun­galoft project. A free­stand­ing Struc­tural Insu­lated Panel addi­tion fol­lowed by removal of all but the bath­room walls in our orig­i­nal 1928 bun­ga­low and the con­nec­tion of the two with an angu­lar breeze­way will be the real­iza­tion of the Bun­galoft con­cept (at least as we envi­sion it). It’s a small but inter­est­ing archi­tec­tural project that should make it to the pages of the blog at some point.

In the mean­time work on the 5 inch pan cam­era blue­tooth con­troller project continues.

The 28th Avenue Wood­work­ing Stu­dios (as I have now unof­fi­cially chris­tened this build­ing I work in) has some very inter­est­ing inhab­i­tants includ­ing Jason Andrew Designs. Jason has been work­ing on a beau­ti­ful series of fur­ni­ture pieces since he arrived. Fol­low­ing numer­ous con­ver­sa­tions about our respec­tive work, we embarked upon a bit of col­lab­o­ra­tion on Jason’s most recent design — a twist­ing, black-stained, Ash cof­fee table. Jason asked me to make a set of alu­minum feet for the tapered legs of the table. We’re look­ing at a few other designs for alu­minum feet and pulls.

I’m be look­ing for­ward to the usual bar­rage of sum­mer activ­ity includ­ing one of my favorites — the Adult Soap­box Derby.

Start­ing line at the Adult Soap­box Derby in Port­land, Oregon

The com­pet­i­tive spirit thrives and the water flies.