Category Archives: Woodwork

An untidy yard and another wood store extension

My yard has become untidy. I’ve been tidying for a few days and it’s better than it was. There are some building materials on there that will come in handy later on and the skip is for everything else.

Most of the building materials are on pallets so I’ve bought a pallet truck. My plan is to extend the wood store another 8m, call it a brick store, then tuck all the pallets underneath.

As usual I’ll update when something happens, but it’s been such a long time since the last post I feel I should bung something up here to show I’m still alive.

Here we go. I’ve started making the uprights and have come to the conclusion I don’t always plan things very well. It would only be another £150 of wood to go all the way to the gate and not have an odd empty space at the end.

The additional wood has been delivered and I’ve made two more uprights. With the uprights levelled and roughly positioned I can check levels with a string line to make sure it’s not going to look too wobbly. The driveway does curve but surprisingly by less than an inch.

I thought about posting plans but all the dimensions are set to the space I have. The roof slope is 22.5 degrees. The height is set so once the rafters are added the feather edge boards will sit just above the top arris rail of the fence. The length of the extension is 9.77m which gives me a bay width of 1.29m. Just enough for a euro pallet.

The depth is 1m (same as a euro pallet) and that’s going to be tight as the fence posts stick out and I need 50mm for the doors so I might need to shuffle it slightly away from the fence.

The next day the rafters went on. They sit slightly higher on the fence than expected because I shuffled the brick store away from the fence without thinking about the angle of the roof, but fortunately the roof will still be lower than the fence.

And finished (apart from 4 bits of feather edge).

The bricks look a lot more tidy than they did in the first photo. I had been considering adding doors but the posts aren’t fixed at the bottom and are sitting on slippery bits of slate so they won’t be able to support doors. That’s going to be something to think about later.

Extending the wood store

I was given a whole load of wood and I don’t have enough room for all of it in the wood store. Fortunately when I built the wood store I designed it to be easily extendable because I wasn’t sure if it would be big enough for the wood I had at the time.

I’m adding a couple more bays. If I attach doors later the extra bays could become a little shed for storing things like the cement mixer once the wood has gone.

I’ll get a skip shortly. I’ll store rubbish until there is enough for a skip and moving it to make room for the extension was exhausting.

Modifying a wardrobe

I bought a new wardrobe to stand on the wall adjacent to the existing wardrobe but that left a dead space in the corner behind and I don’t like dead spaces that will gather dust.

I hit upon the idea of buying a further single wardrobe and grafting it onto the end of one of the wardrobes to make the space more useable.

The single wardrobe is from the same range as the others but wasn’t quite the same size. It was too wide and too short. This is my first woodworking project this year. I’m out of practice and made a lot of mistakes. The fun with mistakes is figuring how to work around them so they don’t matter.

I did a few things I’ve not done before. The dowel holes turned out accurate enough but I didn’t get the cam lock fixing holes quite right so used angle brackets instead.

Of course it took longer than planned and it was getting late by the time I finally got everything sound enough structurally to stand it up so I could access the bedroom again for the night.

The new inaccessible extension to the wardrobe turned out handy for a couple of formal outfits that I don’t wear very often. I can slide the every day stuff to one side to access them.

A little bit of me regrets not just buying the larger wardrobe and doing an overlap.

Arts and Crafts Secondary Glazing

I’m retraining to do building conservation work, so if you fancy some Arts and Crafts secondary glazing my email is at the bottom of the page. Or if you prefer making your own here is a somewhat dimensioned pdf of the profiles together with a cutting plan that didn’t account for the saw blade width.

I’ve been messing around with ideas for secondary glazing for the last couple of years. The mainstream secondary glazing seems really ugly and very expensive. My bay windows don’t have any openers so I’m planning to make a fixed wooden frame with a similar profile to the existing frame. Here is my prototype. It doesn’t quite fit together because of the curve in the bay, but it’s close enough for me.

secondary-glazing-proof-of-concept

Last year I bought a table saw and router table for the work, and enough wood for both bays. Today I have made a start and have been creating sawdust. As usual I’ll update this post as I go along.

If you ever buy a table saw make sure it has a cast base with some chance of staying flat. I’ll be buying another one before doing the big bay window.

20200330_155535

The profiles worked out well. My dimensions are a little inconsistant, but there should be some adjustment possible during fitting. The edge mouldings went through a redesign as I realised it would be better to attach them to the window frame rather than the cill and ceiling.

Annoyingly I can’t figure out how I did some of the radiuses on the protype. I remember putting a lot of thought into it at the time but have forgotten all that now.

glazing-profiles

Fitting the glazing frame was time consuming. The window isn’t a very consistant shape so it took a little imagination to fit the glazing frame in a way that would accept rectangular glass. The bay is curved and a 7 degree angle kept cropping up, and not always where I was expecting it.

glazing-fixed-part

Adjusting things to fit and then fixing the glazing frame took 2.5 days in total, more than it took to make the profiles in the first place. After getting everything perfect I added 1mm gaps between the bits of wood to allow for some expansion. I’ll fill those with linseed putty.

Then after all that obvious progress in just half a day. I finished off the prep and painted the inside of the window. In the photos it looks nice in natural finish, but in the flesh it looks a whole lot nicer in black. It’ll go more matt once the linseed oil paint soaks into the wood and dries.

The glazing at each end is not original. I think someone skipped some rare curved Crittall openers and replaced them with flat glass with some lead stuck on. The middle three panels are curved.

painted-window

I maged to paint over the numbers on the secondary glazing frame pieces that told me where they fitted and was left with a jigsaw puzzle.

With the frame in place I started cutting the mouldings to size and now my brain hurts. The parts are cut at either 45 degrees, 41 degrees or 49 degrees depending on the moulding width. The 41 degree cuts also have a 7 degree compound angle to account for the curve of the window. Gave up and had beer instead.

secondary-glazing-mouldings

I found cutting the profiles to shape was much easier when I used an off-cut and cut the ends to fit the angle of the uprights then marked the saw settings on the cut end. Once I had the angles it was easy to cut mouldings to the right length and angle. The angles were different for every piece, largely because I set the glazing to fit the window and the window isn’t quite straight.

I’m very pleased with the finished secondary glazing. It blends in and looks like it could be a part of the original window, and will likely disappear completely once it’s black. I think the glass will stand out much more than the frame being faceted rather than curved, but I’ll wait until I’ve finished the big window in the next room before ordering the glass. This job has taken 7 days so far, and it’ll be interesting to see how much quicker I get on the big bay.

finished-secondary-glazing

Snug Window Repairs

Slow updates – I’ve been in Sweden again. I painted the front windows when I moved in 5 years ago, but it turns out modern oil based gloss paint is not UV resistant and the paint cracked after only a couple of years. Problem is when you have cracked paint you need to remove it (and everything underneath) before repainting.

The front windows have very fiddly profiles and it took about 3 days to remove the modern paint with a heat gun. Linseed paint is UV resistant and tends to dust rather than crack and just needs another splash of paint rather than stripping off, so I’ll be repainting in linseed so I can avoid doing any stripping ever again!

snug-window-stripped

When I first moved in I thought the windows were beyond repair, but looking at them now I see window frames in really good condition.

I guess the difference after 5 years is just confidence and knowing what can be done to repair them. There is just one sill that needs to be replaced and a couple of mullions that will need some new wood letting in. I’ve got a bunch of photos of the rotten sill and they are all in focus but appear out of focus. The camera has seen much worse and I’m not sure why it is objecting now.

rotten-sill

Maybe the camera was right. The sill was quite rotten and I ended up removing it right back to the inner face of the window. The rot in the mullions has been cut out at an angle to allow water to drain when the finish cracks.

That committed me to the scary bit – it would be my first time replacing a window sill, and this one is in a curved bay which complicates things. I practiced on modern wood before attempting the repair.

sill-removed

The new sill was made from the sill of the original sash removed from the back bedroom – 100 year old wood is much more durable than the stuff available today and also much harder to cut.

The curve was cut with a bandsaw and the taper added with a planer. Repairs to the profiled mullions were cut with the bandsaw. A new box of chisels was involved too. I’m quite pleased with myself – some tidying still needed but it looks the part.

new-sill

The gaps and cracks were filled with linseed putty and the first coat of linseed oil paint is looking fabulous. I went for black to match the rest of the woodwork on the facade and to balance the top-heavy look of the half timber upper floor. I prefer it to the before photo of the facade here, but it doesn’t seem quite right yet.

window-painted

I still need to fill around the window with lime mortar, then paint another coat or two. Also the lead roof still needs to be fitted. I’ve been stripping the inside of the window on and off as the profiles look prettier without 1mm of paint, but that will be a fill in job as I’m determined to work outside while the weather allows.

Wood Store

We have about 10m3 of wood from the Willow trimming and Cypress felling last year. It has been knocking about in log form to allow it to dry sufficiently for splitting. The Willow (trimmed outside growing season) is already dry enough to burn but the Cypress will need to season for another year.

I bought an electric log splitter (Forest Master FM10) and it is brilliant. It got through all the logs in a day and a half over the weekend.

The log store will need to be enormous to hold all of the wood. This one is going to be 7m long. The ends borrow some features from the house timber framed gable, and I’m aiming for exposed rafter ends. The wood is the same price no matter how nutty you get with the design, the dimension are intended to result in near zero wastage.

It has been raining all day, otherwise the log store would have been up by now. It was only supposed to be a weekend project.

It only rained for half the next day but I decided I like rain and got on with putting up the frame. It didn’t end up quite zero wastage as I cut some of the rafters the wrong way around. Later on the middle parts of the frame got uprights to match the ends as they make it easier to stack the wood.

It took another day to nail the roof on and cut some pallets down to stand the wood on. It rained heavily before I finished the roof and the timber frame stayed dry with all of the overhangs and drip edges working as they should apart from a cock up where the feather edge board is joined which ought to have had a little gutter rather than a frame underneath.

Now I just need to finish off the trim at the bottom to prevent willow leaves from blowing in, then fill the store with wood. It occurred to me it wouldn’t take much longer to make a car port when the tent needs to be replaced.

It took a further couple of days (between rain storms) to stack the wood store with wood and tidy up. The size turned out to be quite a good guess with space remaining for only a few more logs. It is a much more efficient use of space than the pile of wood that originally sat there.

I made a mistake and put some wood stain on the lighter wood to help it match the darker wood. Turned out to be a varnish of some sort which is orange and flakes off in an untidy manner. I would have been better waiting a few years for all of the wood to go to grey.

The Salutation – Restoration

The Salutation, Blunham – Restoring a former pub