Things happen slower when you do them yourself. Over a year ago I posted about our bathroom vanity that I had just built. I did a walnut base and a concrete countertop. The only thing that was left to do was the drawers. It sat that way for over a year, but it’s finally finished. I was able to do all the drawer fronts out of one continuous piece of wood so that the grain pattern follows all the way across. It’s those little details that make me really like it the most. I opted to use no handles, but instead beveled the bottom edge of the drawer for a comfortable grip. I think it turned out pretty nice. It’s funny because I really love all the walnut in the bathroom, and very little of it was planned. The walnut behind the toilet was because we didn’t have enough wall space for the wall hung tank in the wall, and the walnut above the mirror is because they had to cut the mirror short to get it past the sink when installing it. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have done it any different.

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I have had a couple questions about some of the detail in our addition, and I though I would take a minute to answer some of them. First off, the wood paneling in the hall.
All the panels are made of 3/8″ baltic birch plywood. Baltic has a much lighter appearance compared to normal birch, but in my opinion it’s worth the extra money. I had a great theory on how to hang it (courtesy of Chris from Gleason Woodworking Studio) and it kind of worked. The idea was to use a keyhole shaped router bit to route out a channel on the back side of all the panels. Then you screw a normal drywall screw into the studs on the wall at the same height. The head of the screw fits just perfect into the fat part of the keyhole and the shaft fits in the skinny part. That allows you to just slip the panels on and they are securely fastened with no exposed nails anywhere.

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I took two days off earlier this week to work on some of the finish carpentry. There is a lot of it in our house, which will be nice in the end, but right now it is very time consuming. I managed to get all the birch paneling done in the hall, as well as all the casing on the bedroom doors. The louvered windows are what took the most time. They really complete the rooms though, and will be great to have when we get the skylights installed. The idea is that when the skylights in the hall are open it will draw air from the courtyard windows, through the room and out the skylights. It should provide for some great passive cooling. So far the temperature in our house has been great as long as we open all the windows at night, and close them in the morning.
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I’ve been slow getting my friends cabinetry done. The last week or so I have been slowly chipping away at some of the last things I have to do. Just to prove that every once in a great while I actually do get something done I am posting some pics today of a floating shelf I finished for him a while ago. It is made of 4 layers of birch plywood from home depot. The veneer layers aren’t quite as nice on the home depot stuff as it would have been with a nice baltic birch, but the home depot stuff is almost $20 cheaper a sheet. To make a floating shelf you make a “box” with a hollow inside. You then make a bar of sorts that fits perfectly into the cavity of your “box” and bolts to the wall. Bolt the bar on nice and level, then slide the shelf over the top.

Total cost of materials, about $20.

Comments? Post them here in the forums.

More pics after the jump.

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I posted about the affordable modern platform bed I made for our good friends a while ago. Some of you wanted a little more information about how I built it. I finally got around to giving a somewhat better description of the process today, complete with some sketch-up renderings that are not even close to scale. I posted it over at Curbly in the how to section.
Check it out.

Our bathroom is long overdue for a little handy work. Last week I finally got a chance work on it a little. I mentioned previously that we had our mirror put in, but failed to mention it didn’t quite go as planned. The mirror was supposed to go all the way to the ceiling, but because of the walnut surround on the toilet, and the sink being mounted, it didn’t happen. They ended up having to make a field cut (and a crooked one at that) to get it maneuvered into place. This left us with a 12″ gap above the mirror that we had to fill. I ended up making a nice walnut detail that protrudes out similar to the toilet surround. It also gave us a nice place to mount our vanity light. Overall I think it turned out pretty nice.
Comments? Post them here in the forums.

My good friends mentioned to me some time ago that they were looking for a platform bed. They are West Elm junkies and have an nice modern style going on in their house, so I quickly offered to build one for them. Just a couple of weeks ago, they had an anniversary coming up, and I had an opportunity to build one as a surprise. They wanted something similar to the West Elm Low Platform Bed but slightly different dimensions. We ended up making it out of walnut (my new favorite wood) and it turned out really nice. We made it a little chunkier than the Low Platform. It sits at 10″ high overall instead of 5″, and it is a couple inches shorter too.

Price of materials $280.

Detail pics after the jump.

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A while ago I posted some pics of some cabinetry I had done for a friend. I am still not finished (need to do some drawers) but he did finally get the top on, and it really tied it all together nicely. The countertop is a honed absolute-black granite. Its a beautiful slab, and looks great on top of the cabinets I built. His whole house is turning out really nice. One of these days I need to get over there and take a bunch more pictures. It truly is a great model of an affordable modern home. It’s in a transitional neighborhood, and the lot is a little small, but he paid well under $100 k for the home. I think his goal is to have it all done for around $120 k, which he should do pretty easy.

Well after several weeks of waiting, we finally started to make some more progress in the bathroom. For a little background, check out this post about our ofuro tub plans. I’ll give more details about the tub later.
We finally decided on a tub filler for our ofuro. We ended up going with the Danze Parma, mostly because it fit our style, and more importantly, our budget. That doesn’t mean of course that it was really affordable. It ended up being right around $300, which seems like a lot of money until you see what the other options are.
Before we could put our ofuro tub in, we had to rip out the old shower and tub. It turned out to be a pretty easy job with only one big surprise. The wall below the window was mostly rotted out from water damage. Luckily we plan on replacing that whole window, and so we will need to frame out that section of the wall again anyway.
Getting the ofuro in place was fairly straight forward. It was a lot lighter than the other tub. I lined the two side walls with dura rock, so we will be ready to tile them soon. We were kind of nervous that our boiler and water heater would have a hard time filling the huge tub. I think we figured it was over 100 gallons pretty easy. To our pleasant surprise, our boiler did just fine. The tub accommodates two people quite comfortably. My wife and I spent about an hour soaking in it the first night it was done.
We also had our mirror delivered finally, which makes the bathroom feel a lot bigger. Check out the pics after the jump to see what I mean.

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Well, I finally wrapped up another small project. I have had our Caroma Walvit toilet hooked up and functional for about a week now, but I was waiting until I had the walnut section done to post about it. So far we are liking the toilet, although I am still not sure if it was worth the money. The whole dual flush thing does make me feel good about myself though. Who knows, another 50 years and it will pay itself of in the water we are saving.
Today I finally had time to build the walnut column that the toilet hangs from. It is made out of the exact same material as our vanity I did a while ago, so it is a nice match. We are planning on doing white tiles on all the walls, so I think that the walnut will break things up nicely. Plus it lines up with the doorway exactly, so it makes for a pretty dramatic first view into the bathroom. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I can start working on getting our ofuro tub installed.

As always, more pics after the jump.

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