Today was again a day full of galley cabinet. After my lone shopping stop to get another couple sheets of plywood we kept working away at the cabinet. Plenty more measuring, cutting, re-measuring, re-cutting, sanding, gluing, nailing, etc. Can you get the black lung from sawdust, because Sara and I are going to get it!
My one major misstep of the day was on the north (front) end of our cabinet. We already had the end cut perfectly to size. Then I realized that we had to cut a drawer face out of that end with the table saw. NBD, right? Wrong. The single blade cut will now make the height of the end wrong because the blade removes ~1/8″ in each pass. Arghhh! This would not be a problem if I weren’t so … particular, but who are we kidding of course I am, so I cut a new one.
After working for a little while with the new one I decided it needed a tiny little trim with the circular saw. Tiny. Just to make me feel better about how it fit to another piece. Tiny. I fashioned a guide with another piece of wood so I could not go off line as I trimmed just a tiny bit, ~1/16″, off one end. NBD, right? Wrong. The guide slipped and I ended up taking off too much wood. Arghhh!
Fortunately, during this time I had a realization. The blade width of the circular saw is much narrower than the table saw. If I make the cut with the circular saw the gap will be only about 1/16″ or less. I can account for that little bit in how I fit the drawer face. So, I went back to the original end piece we had already cut. NBD, I just wasted a bunch of time. For those of you who know me, you might be surprised to learn that I am becoming rather good at accepting these little mistakes and just moving on. Of course, when you are living in your parents’ house and your half-built van is sitting in their driveway and there isn’t much good snow out there, time is all you have.
By then end of our day (10:00 p.m. for those of you keeping track, which nicely offsets the fact that I sleep until 9:00 a.m.) we had made excellent progress on the cabinet. The frame is entirely done and stained.
Three drawers are fully built. The pieces for the other four are almost all cut. Tomorrow we will likely be able to finish up the major aspects of the construction, though we will still have plenty of trim work to do. We also have to fit this thing into the van, which is going to present a couple challenges because there is a rib that sticks into back of one end of the cabinet, which is why the cabinet currently has no back.
Van building aside, the most important event of the day, and the reason I need to sign off and go to bed, is that my copy of Paul Durham’s new book, The Last Gargoyle, arrived today.
Paul was an attorney at Sheehan, Phinney, Bass + Green who came shortly after I left for the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office. Paul did and has continued to do what every lawyer actually wants to do. He wrote a book…and quit being a lawyer! In fact, he wrote a series of three awesome books, The Luck Uglies, Fork-Tongue Charmers, and Rise of the Ragged Clover. If you like fun, fast-paced, young-adult/fantasy, you should definitely pick them up! The Last Gargoyle is his fourth and I can only hope it is as fun as his first three.