Build Thread

[Misterperfect]

Hey Catz,

Clearly explained as usual and thank you for your courtesy.
The prize money thing is why i asked.

Pine planked interiors, huh?
I respected you before but now im starting to like your style.
(Respectfully of course)

I love interior wood work but i hate working with wood myself. Always been a block-head so most of my projects end up covered in concrete but i might just have to make an Alaskan Sawmill and get familiar with these Hawaiian hardwoods.
Some of these trees are ginormous!!!

Thanks again for the reply,

[hotzcatz]

There's a place up in Waimea - Kamuela Hardwoods - it's across from the Parker Rodeo Arena and down that farm road. About a mile on the right and right next to the ice cream place. They slab up found hardwoods. When folks are clearing and there's a big tree, they call these folks who go get the tree and make it into rough lumber. Much easier to pick out the lumber for your next project from them than to build a mill, find a tree, move the tree, slab it up, etc. etc.

For code purposes, you have to have graded and stamped lumber for the structural parts of the building. With the exception of ohia posts which have had all the engineering numbers already done on them. Although now with the ohia death virus, folks don't want to use those and move them around anymore, which - for structural purposes - pretty much leaves folks with commercial lumber. But, that's just the posts, beams and joists, you can still use local hardwoods for the flooring and walls as long as they're non-structural.

The next house may have a huge slab of some pretty wood as the eat in counter at the kitchen. Maybe with a matching kitchen table. Tables are easy to build, it's those pesky matching chairs that are hard. Maybe also have matching cabinet faces. Probably build in the plywood cabinet bases and then hang the solid wood doors on them. It actually probably wouldn't cost much more than stock cabinets from some big box store. Spackle and paint the cabinet boxes, only have the hardwood doors. Not sure about the knobs yet, maybe none, just finger indents. Should be a nice warm kitchen with clean lines. Possibly paint the cabinets charcoal gray or russet red. Hmm, gray would be better than red. Well, the color depends on the wood selected and the wood can't be selected until we see what they've slabbed up when it comes time to build cabinets.

A lot of times, with projects on islands, it's not so much what you want to build as it is what's available to build with.

[Misterperfect]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

The next house may have a huge slab of some pretty wood as the eat in counter at the kitchen. Maybe with a matching kitchen table. Tables are easy to build, it's those pesky matching chairs that are hard. Maybe also have matching cabinet faces. Probably build in the plywood cabinet bases and then hang the solid wood doors.

Please feel free to post your build thread here or start a sticky dedicated to build threads with lots of pics.

Not sure if you ever worked in a cabinet shop or not but almost all cabinet carcasses are constructed with the same / similar formula so they are super easy to build once you get the process down pat.

If you don't like wood work a cool trick is to source used / buy new 'el cheapo' generic cabinets (we found 100' of 1970's cabinets for free on CL) and swap out the doors and hardware for whatever custom wood you've chosen for your hearth, bar, island, table, etc., etc.

I built some pretty nice looking cabinets using scratched HD returns and swapping out the doors for, in this specific example, mesquite from the back forty.

Kinda cool to be able to say, "those trees took so long to dry i thought id never get to make cabinets out of them."

If you cant match the generic carcass to the custom fronts another trick is to buy door skins of similar or complimentary species and laminate it to the inexpensive carcass.
Expensive cabinets are usually built on inexpensive carcasses. lol

Im frugal but im also poor so that kinda helps me be more frugal.

[hotzcatz]

We're not working on any new build just yet, we're still rehabbing an old 1952 house so there's not any good pictures since it's just replacing the ceiling at the moment. It had been thin plywood which the termited loved and had turned into piles of termite droppings on the floor so we had to sign a waiver before the Realtor would even let us look inside the house. Fortunately, most of the termite damage was to that plywood ceiling. Wish they would have used canec. The house was bought as a rental, but it wasn't anywhere near nice enough to rent so we had to rent the nice house we'd been living in and move into the 'rental' and repair it. It does have a larger lot, nicer view and is in a better location so more than likely we will now stay here instead of renting it once it's fixed up. Although, once it's fixed up, we're planning on building a new house in the back since the lot is large enough for it and the zoning allows for it. Then we will move in there and finally rent this one out as we'd originally planned.

Don't really like most commercially made cabinets. The prebuilt boxes have too many crawl spaces for bugs. Also too much wasted space. Although, kitchens from 1952 had a whole empty valence across the top of them which is pretty strange. Just empty boxed in space. It's hard to reach and all, but boxing it in just gives a place for bugs and mice to live.

Actually, I kinda like wood work. Especially with a chop saw and a nail gun. It's easy enough to work in wood when the tools are good. Metal is much harder, you can't whack it to fit very well although it is fun making sparks when cutting metal.

The next non-house project may be a big rabbit hutch. Rabbit manure is good fertilizer for gardens and fertilizer is too expensive to buy when it's shipped in. So, a few bunnies turning guinea grass into fertilzer are a good thing when you have gardens. That will probably be a January project, what with the holidays and this ceiling project.