Cover Those Skinny Legs

Today's project was this cover for the leg. I suppose I could have just made a wooden leg to support the counter, but I wanted precise adjustability so I could align the edges where it meets the adjacent slab. It is made from four, tapered sides, mitered and glued together at the edges. One side was left loose so it could be installed around the pipe leg. The loose side is held on with wood screws.

Undercover Work

I made up this cover for the steel supports for the dining slab. It finishes the underside nicely. I ran the power from the wall to the end of the cover. I made this end piece to accept the duplex plug. It looks difficult, but it was just a matter of screwing a metal faceplate to a piece of oak, drilling holes through the openings for the individual plugs with a Forstner bit then cleaning them up with a flush trim bit, using the metal faceplate as a guide for the bearing. I also made up a leg to support the end of the counter. I took a piece of black pipe, a coupling nut that you use to connect two pieces of threaded rod together, an a long bolt. I machined half of the nut to the inside diameter of the pipe and pressed it into the pipe. I then machined the head of the bolt so it had a short, 3/8 diameter pin on the end. I cut the pipe to length and stuck it under the counter. Once it was plumb, I drilled a shallow dimple in the floor. The little pin that I made on the bolt sits in the dimple. The it was just a matter of adjusting the bolt until the counter was level. In spite of the massive, steel support, it did saga tiny bit. Enough to mess up the grout, so adding the leg, which is what I wanted to avoid from the start, was a good idea.

Lighten Up

Well, as I suspected, the extra lamps that I installed, while they did make a significant difference, still did not give us the light that we wanted. So, off came the diffuser and down to the shop. I made a jig to cut the holes in the side with a router and thirty minutes later, I had opened three sides of the box. I left the end, near the refrigerator, closed. There is plenty of light there. I reinstalled it and waited for night to fall. Once it got dark, it made all the difference. There is plenty of light now. So, back down it comes to finish the openings and make some clips to hold the plastic in place. In the meantime, I patched the wall where the last piece of counter went. I had it done a while back, but I cut it open again to run power to a plug that will go under the table. It's, probably, redundant and unnecessary but I figured it can't hurt and might come in handy for plugging in the vacuum or tabletop appliances.

Dim Bulb

After the installation of the pendant lamps, the dining area is lit pretty well. However, the remainder of the kitchen is still underlit. The main lamp is a six tube T-8 fixture. I went to Home Depot today and picked up two, two tube fixtures and tek screwed them to the sides of the existing lamp. So, we now have a total of ten, four foot, T-8 tubes to illuminate the area. The main culprit in this problem is the latticed diffuser that I built a while back. It blocks quite a bit of the light coming from the lamps. As I type this, it is still daytime. Later, this evening, I will be able to tell if the additional tubes had enough of an effect. The other thing that I may do is to open up the sides of the diffuser so the light can escape. I can just cut some windows in with a router and cover them with pieces of plastic diffuser panels. We'll see

How's It Hangin'?

We have found that there is not enough light in the kitchen. To partially address the problem, I installed two of these pendant lamps yesterday. It was pretty simple. I opened the ceiling, at the points where I wanted the lamps, and screwed in two boxes with a length of flex connecting them. I then cut out the holes, in the pieces that had removed when I opened the ceiling, for the mud rings and taped and compounded them back into place. The hard part, for me, was crawling back into the attic to connect the two boxes to the feed for the main ceiling fixture. I'm 30 pounds lighter than I was last time I was up there, but it still was painful. Still, the entire job only took, maybe, three hours of actual work. They look nice and light up the dining area nicely. Just a bit of work to do on the drywall finish around the fixtures, but I'll do that when I tackle the rest of the drywall.

Weighty Issues

Just an update on the weight loss campaign. At this point, I have lost 25 pounds. Still no six pack, but the pony keg is just a party keg now. My goal was to be 210 pounds by my 50 year reunion. Today, I am one pound from that goal. The reunion was not the focus of the program, just something that I used as a point to focus on. I guess I need another goal. Maybe 200 by Thanksgiving. We'll see.

It's The Pits, Man.

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. I haven't done much that's noteworthy lately. Each night, at dinner, I sat at the new dining extension and stared at my mac and cheese and all of the pits and divots in the counter top. I tried to convince myself that they added character to the slab. I realized that I was trying to delude myself. I'm too smart to listen to an idiot like me. It looked like Edward James Olmos' face and no amount of squinting or misplaced rationale could convince me otherwise. So, reluctantly, I yanked it out. This went rather well. I just rolled in the cart, that I built for moving the pieces, and scootched it over a little at a time. After getting it out onto the patio, I began to re grind and polish it. Many of the pits were eliminated, but some new bubbles and the deeper defects remained. I tried to apply a slurry of various patching materials, but none of them worked particularly well. I finally got a sack of Portland cement and a bottle of concrete bonding agent. Mixed them together, with a bit of water. It came out nice and smooth, like the consistency of sour cream. I applied it to the slab, waited half a day and hit it with the polisher. It leveled off very nicely. A few pits remained, so I re applied some more slurry. After three applications, I'm pleased with the results. This all went with some degree of drama. As I was helping Wifey with the dishes, (yes, even geniuses occasionally perform domestic chores) we heard a crash. It seems that a few months in the weather and the stresses of moving heavy slabs in and out of the house wasn't kind to the cart and it collapsed. Fortunately, the slab went unscathed. Using my tractor, I lifted it up and put it on some saw horses. A few hours in the shop and the cart was resurrected. I should need it just one more time after which time it will become firewood. I hope to have the counter re installed in three or four days. I still have to do the final finish polishing and the sealer coat. Tomorrow is my high school reunion, (50 years!!! Wow!!!)so I won't be doing much until Monday.