Customizing Your House

Among the things I would like to incorporate into the woodworking milieu here at Popular Woodworking Magazine are woodworking projects that one could do on their home other than furniture or built-in cabinetry. I was struck by how important that has been to me when I started packing up my home in Providence, R.I., for a move back to Cincinnati. My wife and I had purchased the house in 1999, just a couple months after my daughter was born. It was a two-family house that we converted to a one-family house. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best idea, as we got spoiled with having so much space.

When we first moved in, we took over the first floor apartment, and I proceeded to completely remodel the second floor three-bedroom apartment. This included everything from tearing down non load-bearing walls in the kitchen to expose the brick chimney, fixing any cracks in the ceilings and walls, to painting, to refinishing the oak floors.

After I tore down the walls in the kitchen, I had a blank canvas, so I custom-built some shelving units next to the chimney, over the refrigerator and in the pantry. At the time, I only owned a portable Delta table saw that my father-in-law had given me, a router, a jigsaw and a drill. I didn’t even own a cordless drill, something I now use constantly. I remember asking my wife to help me with some of the awkward rips of the plywood, as they were 8′ lengths, and the saw didn’t have a stand. The blade was about a foot off the ground in the middle of our driveway.

The worst part of that build was the finishing. The largest shelving unit was 8′ tall, 12″ deep and 12″ wide, with eight shelves. I stained it first then topped it with a couple of coats of polyurethane. Sanding that first layer of poly was a job. I would do things differently now, but after 12 years, it still looks good, and the realtors raved over the cabinets when we started thinking about selling our house.

Aside from cabinets, I also built some large brackets for a small portico at the back of our house. When we purchased the house, there was nothing supporting the roof. It was sagging a bit, but it had been holding there for 80 some odd years. It didn’t help that it now had four layers of shingles nailed to it. So I bought some 4″x4″ douglas fir in 10′ sections. By this time, I had the use of a band saw, so it was short work to cut some nice curves and notches into the material and construct some really heavy-duty brackets. After putting them together, I took a die grinder with a round bit to it and added a some decoration to the cross members. It was a small detail, but it stood out when you approached the door and it let everyone know that it was a handmade piece.

The thing is, I could have built that piece with a jigsaw with a large blade or a coping saw. The joints were not difficult – just straight cuts and 45° miters. The stock was purchased from the local home-improvement store already milled and true, so all I had to do was concentrate on the joints and dimensions. With a little effort, I added a piece to my house that will last as long as the house does and will always have people touching it and wondering where it came from.

The largest labor of love on the house was when I tore the roof off and installed full-length dormers down the sides, and a dormer in the back to mirror the one that graced the front of the house. I had worked as a carpenter for years when I was in school, so the job didn’t intimidate me. A friend of mine had some free time between jobs. With two 30′ LVL’s running the length of the house, it was definitely not a one-man job.

The worst part of the job, of course, was stripping the four layers of asphalt shingles. It was messy and dangerous, being three floors up. If you are considering doing a similar job yourself, I highly recommend using a safety harnesses and ropes to tether yourself. I owned them because they were required on OSHA jobs, but I was being a cowboy. I was lucky to get a hand on some tarp after sliding down a good 15′ on the dust from the old shingles. Otherwise, because of the speed I was traveling down that roof, the gutter would not have stopped me and I would have landed on a fence. That would not have been good.

My friend was an expert framer, so the two of us had no trouble building the walls and raising the rafters for the roof. I reclaimed the old rafters, and used them for my wall studs. They knew how to make houses back in the day. The 2×6 rafters were a full 2″ thick. That extra half-inch of douglas fir makes an incredible difference in the strength of the board. I learned all about the strength of the boards because it was required for my permit. I had to prove that sistering the floor joists would provide enough strength for the floor. While my walls didn’t need to have that kind of girth, I was glad to save on buying the extra lumber, and the extra thick walls enabled me to add the thicker 2×6 insulation.

With the roof framed, sheathed, and shingled, the fun part began as a woodworker. On the exterior walls, I decided to use a natural stain on white cedar shingles. For the most part, I used the standard practice for shingling walls. But when I had a larger span of wall between the windows, I incorporated a wave pattern into the design, as a tribute to the Ocean State. This took a lot of extra work in that I was sitting out on a plank supported by a wall jack while using the jigsaw, but it was worth the effort.

While I was in school, I scored four beams that were 8″ in diameter and at least 8′ tall. I had to remove some nails and plane them down a bit, but they cleaned up well with a couple of coats of tung oil. When I started the project I immediately thought of those beams. I quickly made a pair of bases for the columns, but the top would be more visible, so I needed to do something more special. Nothing in the order of of Corinthian column, mind you, but a plain column as a transition into the beam didn’t look right.

So I cut up a couple of 3″ x 12″-diameter cylinders, and went to town on the router table. As you can see from the images, I used a very large router bit to cut the design into the stock, and a die grinder with a round carbide bit to give me the wave design. I can’t say I recommend the method I used to get this design as it was a bit precarious on the router table. I really had to hold onto the stock lest it take off at 10,000 rpms.