Almost done the tub surround

The tile is in and the plumbing is done. Grout, silicone and paint touch left.

I have been a very naughty blogger and haven't posted in a long time. I get busy at times and the last thing on my mind is the boring old internet. I have been renovating 2 houses in the past year. One was in preparation for sale and the other was in preparation to move into. Yes, I know, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Sue me.

In any event, the new house had a bathroom upstairs that was a bit of a basketcase. Having already removed all of the knob and tube wiring, installed bamboo flooring throughout and painted the entire place, everything should have been wrapping up. The current budget did not have any contigency for anything in either the kitchen or the bathroom. There was a cracked acrylic tub surround and a tub faucet that dripped even though the shower was running. The tub itself had seen better days...

After hunting around deals here is the cost breakdown.

The 2 boxes of green 6x6  field tiles were found at the Habitat for Humanity restore at a cost of $30
The white field tiles were about $60 full retail at Home Depot.
The new American Standard faucet was about $120 and it might have been on sale.
The 2 part epoxy paint which a tub refinisher would charge $300-500 for was $35.
The best deal was the accent strip which usually sells for about $15 per sq. ft. was had for $0.66 because they only had 10 pieces left, which was just a little more than needed.
Thinset and mortar were another $50.
I had extra solder, flux, gas, sandpaper and leftover plumbing fixtures etc., plus all the tools to complete this little project.

So the entire bathtub surround project was around $300 of materials. Hmmm, how do I figure out what to charge?

Here are a few pics and will post when the final bead of silicone is laid.

André Jacob Roubo

I was surprised to find that the Wiki Article on André Jacob Roubo was so scant, given that he published, in his day, one of the masterworks of the state of woodworking in late 18th century France.

 To quote:
He wrote a highly influential complete treatise on woodworking that covers practically all the associated trades. This multi-volume work, L'Art du Menuisier (The Art of the Joiner), published between 1769 and 1774 by the Académie des Sciences, contains sections and illustrations on: building carpentry, furniture making, and precious woodworking (ébénisterie), carriage making, and garden woodworking.

I watched an online episode of the The Woodwright's Workshop recently, and am inspired to build Roy Underhill's ||Roubo inspired Workbench from the original engraving.

Having spent some time reading 18th century  treatises on lute music of the period, the examples show more and more details after some time seriously considering the proportions, ratio and methods.

I'll need to acquire a top for this stout workbench, and being inspired by a grandmother's "waste not, want not" Depression-era upbringing, I hope to demonstrate that buy builing a workbench such as this, might allow someone interted in the idea that the old techniques and practices, of understanding one of the basic "building blocks" are FAR more sustainable than our current practice of using  our available resources for fast and quick.

An invaluable resource on Japanese Architecture and Art

A great resource for explaining Japenese art and architecture.
Here ...

A couple of useful tools ...

On the left is a 16 inch Makita beam saw and on the right is a regular 7 1/4 inch blade sidewinder, circular saw. Although the pic saw is around 30 lbs or so, it is relatively easy to handle although a healthy fear and respect for it is always in order.

 


This is a Makita Chain mortiser which is basically a little plunging chainsaw used to create mortises in beams. 

The word of the day ...

Axometric Projection:
There is a good Wikipedia article explaining how a 2d planar model can be rotated along an axes to create a 3d representation. It was interesting to me that this is not how photography or our eyes work and it is one of the methods that MC Escher expoited in his drawings.




 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axonometric_projection

Some of the people I've worked with

Here are a  few of the people and companies I've had the pleasure of working with over the last few years

Woodenshoe Timberframes
Davidson Log and Timber Frame Homes
Arman Design
Spearhead Timberworks
College of the Rockies

Allegory of Deduction

http://www.charpentiers.culture.fr/node/545

Cette allégorie de la Déduction (3e quart XVe s.), rarement présente dans les documents, est figurée par un personnage féminin entouré des attributs du charpentier : fil à plomb, hache, planches de bois… et aussi deux livres. On aperçoit un chantier de construction d’une charpente et d’une maison de bois, à l’extérieur.
Texte accompagnant l’enluminure (transcription de Lionel Dumarche) :
"Sans doute j'arrive tard et je suis lente à parler pour avoir droit à une place importante dans cette haute assemblée. Mais je suis pertinente, je fonctionne et suis bien utile pour achever toute belle œuvre. Celle-ci assemblée, il faut lui donner un titre, car plus une œuvre est excellentes de riches matériaux et de bel aspect, plus j'y mets une main prudente pour lui apporter gloire et titre, qui la structure et lui donne ses règles par des moyens si clairs et évidents qu'il n'y reste ni trou ni fente par lesquels elle pourrait être détruite"

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits,
Français 1174, fol. 31v.

A useful glossary of French Scribe techniques

Here is a usefull glossary of terms of the French Scribed timberframed buildings.
http://www.traditionaltimberframe.com/V1_0/index.php?mod=glossary&ac=glossary


The majority of European traditionally timberframed buildings were constructed using a full sized plan lofted on a level surface, whereas in North America, after the 19th century, most buildings were constructed using a square or mill rule technique. Today, in shops using CNC machines, timbers are identically sized and joined because they are for the most part consistent in dimension. This was not the case in earlier times where inconsistently sized timbers were joined together to fit each other individually.

In many instances in a square rule system of layout, individual pieces such as knee braces are interchangeable whereas in the French Scribe system, each component is individually fitted to it's mating piece.

The Building Tree - Building Products

I had the opportunity to drop and meet the foks at The Building Tree which has a wide variety of very cool home  building supplies. Not a Big Orange Retail Giant type of place.

I really liked the solid surface (post form countertop replacement) made out of the garbage left over from sawmilling operations. It is nice to have a supplier for Land Ark finishes too, and one that I can even walk to at that.

The Building Tree in Nelson BC

A great link on traditional timberframing.

 This is a fine site with video examples of tradional timberframing techniques in France and the rest of Europe. There are well written articles and video and picture galleries too.

http://www.en.charpentiers.culture.fr/

Another frame goes up in Cranbrook

Guess Who's coming to dinner, or guess who is about to become dinner.

I did lots of milling today for a timber frame garage project just started. A few tapered posts, some braces and plates were milled just before lunch. Durinig lunch, some pigs stopped by to see what I was having. didn't really know this about pigs, but they LOVE "Smartfood" brand popcorn.

 

Log cabin under construction - Scandanavian Scribe

Here are a few recent snaps of a log cabin under construction using the Scandanavian Scribe.
The footprint is 20' x20'


Peeling logs ....

 The first couple of rows of the 9 foot cabin walls.ma

Another angle with the hardest working non-human machine in the yard.

The corner detail

Here are the scribe lines just before the chainsaw biscuits get knocked out.

Silly little woodworking projects

 

A couple of shots of my instruments - Not timber framing but some nice woodworking

Renaissance Lute - Curly Maple Back

 

Baroque Lute - Rosewood Bowl.

The barn gets full

From the log in the forest

To the mill

To stacked and stickered in the barn

The overseer ...

It's been a while since the last blog post. This summer was taken up with harvesting, milling, storing and stickering some hard maple and cherry logs.

This maple log that Mike is standing beside was 14 and a half feet, 24 inches at the small end and heavy!!! It pretty much maxed out the mill and the one log filled the back of the truck. There was some nice tiger striping on some of the smaller pieces.

Mike tries out his Alaska sawmill for the first time. A crude but usefull tool.

1) Steve Y. on the scaffolding at Gile 's Buckingham.
2) The original stone fireplace at the Mayo house.
3) Porch details at the Mayo house.)
4) More porch railing details
5) Yet another view of the porch at Mayo.

The SawmillI

I found a couple of pictures of one of the tool purchases last fall. This is the sawmill as it sits on the trailer and as soon as the weather warms up a bit, we've got quite a few maple and beech trees to mill. We've also found a couple of rather large cherry trees and at least one smaller walnut tree to mill.