Remodeling & Writing in Southern California: Garage

Forgive me, it's been two months since my last post.

My time was diverted to yard work after an unfortunate fire abatement order, and then there was that COVID-19 thing which limited trips to buy hardwood for drawers.

But none of that prevented me from posting about the SwissTrax plastic garage floor tiles, which I installed more than a month ago. So first, the tile install, and then progress on the drawer-building front.

The SwissTrax tiles are substantially thicker and larger than the Weather Tech tiles I installed in my music workshop, but the installation method was substantially the same. Two edges of the tile have loops and two have prongs that go into the loops on the next tile, locking them together. Here are photos of the top and bottom of one tile (cut in half).

As with the Weather Tech tiles, I cut them to fit (at the edges of the garage) with my band saw, and fit them together with the aid of a hefty rubber mallet. Knee pads are advisable for old knees. I started at the front and worked my way to the back, moving large tools from the concrete on to the finished tiled surface as I made my way toward the back.

I inserted a stripe of darker color tile to aid in aligning the car as I back into the garage. There are special beveled (black) tile pieces that can be installed at the front edge to ease the car up onto the thick tile.

Here's what the finished floor looks like (toward the west), and another shot looking toward the east:

And of course these tiles are designed to have cars rolling on them. The tiles are an incentive to keep the floor clean. :-)

The Drawer Factory

I build drawers in batches, because a lot of the time required is for setting up the table saw for the tongue and groove cuts, and for the dovetail jig for the solid wood drawers. I use plywood for drawers that are too deep (vertical) to practically use very wide boards (which tend to cup). Making nice plywood drawers is actually more time consuming than making solid wood dovetail-joint drawers, so plywood drawers are not inferior (although dovetail joints look more impressive.

Either way, it pays to cut as many drawer pieces as practicable, once the tools have been set up.

For the current drawer effort, I planned to build ten plywood drawers and sixteen dovetail joint drawers. I started making the plywood drawers first, and cut out all the sides, fronts and backs, but ran out of half-inch plywood before cutting out the last two drawer bottoms. I had enough maple for most of the edging (to cover and reinforce the plywood edges). Here is the stack of fronts, backs, and sides (before cutting tongues and grooves):

Here is one of the drawer carcasses (for kitchen), clear-coated and installed:

This drawer (above) will get a maple front. I installed another drawer to the right, and had enough materials to make the maple and laminate drawer front (although it's not yet finished or installed, and no drawer pull either). Here's the front just sitting in place:

The garage workbench gets fourteen drawers, six of which are plywood. Four carcasses were completed with two coats of clear finish, but the other two are still waiting for drawer bottoms. I went to Home Depot to get another sheet of plywood for that, but their panel saw was out of order, and because of COVID, they didn't know when they could get someone to come in to fix it. Whole four-by-eight sheets of plywood will of course not fit in my car.

These workbench drawers also need hardwood fronts, which will require a two-plus hour round-trip drive to the wood store. I've been limiting trips to stores because of COVID, so it will be a while longer before these are done. The eight drawers above these plywood drawers will be made of hardwood (poplar) with some variety of hardwood fronts (and half-blind dovetail joints). Altogether, sixteen dovetail drawers waiting for wood. Sigh.

In my last post, I showed the installation of drawer slides in the workbench before that was assembled. I was not so prescient during the construction of the kitchen cabinets, so I now have to install those drawer slides after the fact. The challenge looks like this:

The only drawers I completely finished in this batch were those for the master bathroom vanity, and actually this was just one drawer and the door for the open space under the sink. These two pieces completed the bathroom, and have been missing for years, so I'm very happy to have finished them. And they're fancy!

I built the vanity from scratch. It's 40" high (compared to s stock 26" vanity) — nice since I'm about 6'3" (189 cm). The front is mahogany, mostly an impressive striped mahogany that I found at my hardwood supply store. They only had a small quantity, and the other drawer fronts used almost all of my supply. I only had a few pieces left.

This would not be enough to for the door and the front for the large towel drawer, but it would be enough to frame the fronts. I had a another piece of nice mahogany that I had bought many years ago for guitar construction, so I decided to use some of this for the field. Given the size of the fronts, I decided to glue strips of this mahogany onto pieces of half-inch plywood. The mahogany would end up being a quarter-inch thick.

So I first sliced the mahogany thicker than the end quarter-inch, using my band saw fitted with a carbide resaw blade.

Then I ran the edges through the jointer so they would butt up against each other perfectly. The plywood and mahogany pieces were all cut larger than the desired end dimension.

Test fit, then wood glue was applied on the bottoms and edges of the mahogany, then weights and clamps held it all in place while the glue dried.

The glued-up front blanks were then cut to their finished dimensions, and run through the thickness planer to the final 3/4" thickness, which also made the front perfectly flat.

The striped mahogany edges were then cut out and trued in the jointer, and glued to the center panel using biscuits for alignment.

The door got European-style inset hinges.