Amazing! \u00a0 Another mostly sunny day. \u00a0 That’s practically a record lately, so we took full advantage and spent it all working on the Caravel’s furniture. \u00a0 The “shop” is humming right along, although we lost a lot of time today waiting for glue to set.<\/p>\n
Although yesterday I said we weren’t able to use glue, what I meant was that we can’t use glue on pieces that will need disassembly for shipping purposes. \u00a0 There have been at least a dozen places where glue has been indispensable, especially building the cabinet and closet doors. \u00a0 We managed to finish all the doors we started yesterday, including final trim and sanding. \u00a0 They look great.<\/p>\n
Our technique of stacking all the doors in a pile and then weighting the pile down with paving stones worked very well, so we’ve been doing that all day instead of using clamps. With limited flat clean space to work on, the table in the Airstream had to be pressed into service too. \u00a0 That helped keep up the pace of production at our “furniture factory” (as my father calls it).<\/p>\n
We also finalized the gaucho, then disassembled it and packed it in the Armada with the rest of the rapidly-growing pile of furniture. \u00a0 In between large cuts, I put together some of the many “miscellaneous” pieces, including two interior partitions for the kitchen, one interior partition for the gaucho, some blocks, and a couple of facias. \u00a0 There are still another half dozen or so miscellaneous pieces yet to go.<\/p>\n
Eleanor tested the stain we bought, but it was a disappointment. \u00a0 We don’t have time to keep experimenting with stain, so I called Susanne Brown, the interior design expert and asked her to recommend a stain that would work with the color of Marmoleum floor we have. \u00a0 She’s working on it. \u00a0 Stain may become the bottleneck of this project, since we can’t put polyurethane on anything until we have the stain picked out and applied.<\/p>\n
We aren’t going to build any of the interior shelving at this point. \u00a0 All of the shelving has been replaced by prior owners and no two pieces are the same. \u00a0 Instead, we’ll build shelving after everything else is installed, next summer. \u00a0 That will allow us to customize the interiors of the cabinets and closets to suit our needs.<\/p>\n
A big pleasure of doing this project comes from being able to replace the old parts with new parts that are much better than the originals. \u00a0 I can take a little extra time and re-design a piece to have a nicer curve, fewer screws, smoother edges, tighter joints, or stronger supports. \u00a0 For me, that is a big reward and a motivator. \u00a0 Our trailer will be better than new, when we’re done.<\/p>\n
One of the problems we are facing at the moment are the “mystery” pieces. \u00a0 We have an entire box of oddly-shaped wood parts that we can’t identify. \u00a0 They are so strangely designed and unfamiliar that it is hard to believe that they even came out of our trailer. \u00a0 Some of them are clearly shelves, which means we can ignore them, but others have pieces of finished elm on them, which means that they are visible somewhere in the trailer. \u00a0 We can’t ignore those.<\/p>\n
The problem with those pieces is that in most cases they have obviously been re-worked by someone. \u00a0 That’s generally a bad thing, because re-worked parts tend to be — shall we say — “less than optimal.” \u00a0 They are shabby, riddled with mismatched screws, and have the distinct appearance of having been “fixed” in a big hurry.<\/p>\n
If I knew what those parts were, I would know whether we should re-build them exactly as they appear, or \u00a0 design them more suitably for their function. \u00a0 \u00a0 But we are so far flummoxed by about ten strange parts. \u00a0 If I spend time rebuilding them and they turn out to be messed-up designs, that’s a lot of valuable time and wood wasted. \u00a0 Tomorrow I have to start on them if they are to get done at all, so some rapid decision-making will be done \u00a0 in the morning when I’ve got a fresh mind to consider the problem.<\/p>\n
This is the first woodworking project I’ve taken on since we sold our house three years ago. \u00a0 As Eleanor and I worked on it today, little tricks I’d forgotten kept popping back into my mind. \u00a0 I remembered how to straighten a crooked board on the tablesaw, how to set up a straight line cut with a jigsaw, and a thousand other small tips that sped the work. \u00a0 I also popped the iPod into our new Atlantic Ego sound case<\/a>, so we had tunes all day long too. \u00a0 (The nice thing about the Ego case is that it is dustproof and waterproof. \u00a0 It gets covered in sawdust, but at the end of the day I just rinse it off in the sink!)<\/p>\n Between motivation, memory, and music, the work moved along quickly. \u00a0 Now I’m starting to regret the impending end of this phase of the project. \u00a0 I’d like to keep going, and install all our handiwork in the Caravel right away. \u00a0 But with only a handful of days left, that’s impossible. \u00a0 We’ll put in just another day or two, before we hit the road again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazing! \u00a0 Another mostly sunny day. \u00a0 That’s practically a record lately, so we took full advantage and spent it all working on the Caravel’s furniture. \u00a0 The “shop” is humming right along, although we lost a lot of time today waiting for glue to set. Although yesterday I said we weren’t able to use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}