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Image dump time! Stained the Newell post extension and installed it once the dowel screws arrived. I only needed one but bought two because I've learned to never buy only as many bolts as I need and STILL paid more for flat rate shipping than my order.  Not a perfect match, do not care. It is what it is. Now that that was fixed in place I could positively locate the bottom of the balustrade assembly I had already glued together instead of it being theoretically located correctly on the deadwood I set up, so I did. Then set the upstairs Newell post, which is new, in its place and figured out how much to cut off. Unfortunately I think I overdid it by like half an inch from my perfect visual but oh well it works and if that's the worst mistake I am going to make on this project I can live with that.* Time for another $100 cut/drill... Hold your breath and pray.  * gently caress. The astute among you will notice that the Newell post has gained some fancy corner detail fluting since the previous picture. That is because some jackass got overconfident after the 1.5" forstner bit hole went perfectly and had An Incident attempting to drill the vertical hole up the bottom of the post with a loving paddle bit to save 30 bucks by returning the unused augur he got. It backfired hard and he had to use the augur bit to correct it AND find a way to hide the fact that he mangled the corners of the Newell post as it flailed around on the floor stuck to the paddle bit. No names will be mentioned to protect the guilty.  "Just use a box wrench or socket and ratchet to tighten this down" says the manual. Whoever wrote that has never seen a ratchet and never had to flip a 12pt box wrench 24 times to get one rotation out of a nut before.  Test fitting, tape layout lines, and drilling for hanger bolts.   Pull most of the tape, install the hanger bolts and tweak them where needed, test fit again. All joints align within the thickness of one piece of masking tape, dry, no bolts tightened. I'm calling that a victory.  All cut, drilled, dry test fit.   Now to disassemble all of it, sand everything, decide which pieces to prestain (definitely the bottom of the starting easing and the rosette for the upstairs wall connection, to avoid making a mess on nearby surfaces, maybe other parts too) then it's time to let it dry and glue and clamp it all.
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Jul 30, 2022 06:41
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3/4" nut in a 1.5" sideways hole. My ratcheting wrenches are 25 miles away aside from the 1/2" (which I brought home thinking it would fit in the same style hole for the rail bolts... It did not, I had to use needlenose pliers) but I'm going to go get them next time I'm out there in the hopes that you guys are right. An air ratchet absolutely doesn't fit, sadly, I'd love to buy one. Even a shallow 3/4" socket won't fit in there regardless of what I try to drive it with. It has to be some manner of box wrench and I'm guessing the ratcheting ones are too bulky but hold onto hope regardless because I don't want to flip a drat wrench another several hundred times (or what feels like it, I can't recall how many full turns I had to give the nut to tighten it enough but it was too many) to loosen that nut just to tip the post 2 inches for 15 seconds so I can get the horizontal railing into place, then tighten it back down.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:14
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Ta-loving-da Since I'm using urethane glue for this, which foams out of joints like crazy, I needed to cover everything around the joints with masking tape to keep cleanup and sanding to a minimum and maintain stainability. (that's a word now) Then glue, bolt, and clamp it all together.   Wait a few hours till the foaming has stopped and the glue is firm, kind of taffylike consistency, and not tacky anymore but not fully cured, then pull all the tape.   Took out some of the temporary support wood. The ratchet strap and clamps need to stay until I get a few balusters in place in the middle to hold it down because it's got a little arch to it from improper storage over the last year. It'll come back out with time, just annoying.  Next up is sanding, stain, and balusters.
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Jul 31, 2022 20:10
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High efficiency washer dryer hookup. I started putting that in when we still thought we might stay here because my wife likes high efficiency machines more and it saves walking up and down so many stairs, and we were just using the basement machines till they died. Next owner gets the machines and both types of hookups, it's their choice what they use. E: near the end of this post https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3478212&pagenumber=42&perpage=40&userid=0#post494262689 kastein fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 23:41
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I hate this loving project but it's so goddamn close to mortgage worthy Stained the railings and Newell post   Stained the balusters    Started installing them. This is a severe pain in the rear end to get right.   But God loving drat does it look nice when they're aligned perfectly.  I'm almost exactly halfway done with the balusters on the actual stair railing and it's already stronger than it was before. This poo poo was floppy as gently caress when I bought it, probably because it had one screw holding the wall end in, one brad holding the top of every 1/2" pin baluster to the railing with no glue, and ZERO screws holding the top Newell post to the frame, it was literally just sitting between a corner and the ends of two pieces of trim board.
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Aug 7, 2022 08:09
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They have a 3/4" peg on the bottom that slots into a 1/4 hole drilled in the bottom of the baluster. You use wood glue on both ends of the peg. At the other end, you use glue and a finishing nail. I also toenailed the bottom of the first one I did, since it needed to withstand uplift to take the slight warp out of the handrail, but that's no longer necessary now that I've got 14 of them in and glue dried. Due to who I am as a person each baluster requires 6 sizes of drill bits and at least two or three trips to the saw, so I'm getting my exercise in today. The bottom hole in the baluster gets started at 1/8 to make sure it's centered correctly (or slightly off to compensate if my 3/4" hole in the tread is not exactly perfect) and then brought up to 9/32" in 3 steps so it stays accurate. The top diagonal pilot hole for the finishing nail (needed because this is all oak and it's an 8d finishing nail) is 50% drilled at 1/8" and then finished to depth at 3/32". This is because I found out the hard way that the nail will stop moving and start bending 3/8" before it's sunk if you do the whole hole at 3/32", but 1/8" it slides in by hand, so I found a good compromise. And yes, it's a balluster buster. 
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Aug 8, 2022 02:31
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You have me wondering if my buddies CNC mill from 1985 supports G47 and if I've got, say, a 6x8 piece of quarter inch plate handy in the scrap bin, because I still have to put 2 lally columns up and I feel like "milled 1/8in deep into a piece of steel sandwiched over the top of a load bearing column in the middle of the house" meets your specifications on removal difficulty and costs me essentially nothing.
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Aug 8, 2022 04:32
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You made it to at least a few. BTW, if anyone wants bricks, please come take some. As many as you want.
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Aug 8, 2022 17:47
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The first two balusters at the bottom were a severe pain the the dick because they meet the curved part of the handrail. Cut roughly to shape. I had to use my contour gauge which means I'm going to have a bad time. Since I don't have a nice sanding drum table I then used the depth stop on my chop saw many times to rough out the traced profile, then a chisel to hack it down from square tooth approximation to a roughly curved surface. It's getting nailed and glued in and never seen again so at that point I just went heavy on the glue and let it figure its own poo poo out. It'll give the glue more to hold onto.  Perfect.  Then did the rest of the balusters working upward from there.  The last baluster in the middle was a pain because the nail was hard to reach and I couldn't pilot drill fully since my drill wouldn't fit, even at an angle. I chowdered it a little bit and am going to have to grind it down like the first one I did but I doubt anyone else will ever notice. If the handrail hadn't had a warp to it, I could have done this correctly working from the bottom instead of having to start in the middle. Lesson learned, store your materials correctly so they don't warp before you can use them. All the remaining stair work is at the top now and waiting on the hall floor before I can start. So I guess that is next.
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Aug 9, 2022 19:50
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As for the forever home quality in a flip thing - if it's worth doing at all it's worth doing right. I refuse to be the guy who fucks poo poo up for the next person, because I have just spent 12 years learning why that guy loving sucks. I am choosing what I will finish at this point, but I am not choosing how well the things I finish will be done. They will either be done right, or not done. Half assing things is a waste of both my time and the next owners so it is all or nothing. There's only one exception to this, the kitchen cabinets. I know the next owner is going to look at them and rip them out the first time they get a chance so I am putting bare minimum effort and money into that and trying to limit how much I actually attach it to the rest of the house (within reason, don't want the cabinets falling off the wall... But there are only two overhead cabinets) so they have less holes to patch when they redo the kitchen.
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Aug 9, 2022 19:57
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Me before I bought a 45 dollar harbor freight power plane, having only learned about it from watching a boat builder on YouTube: I don't know, this might be a waste of money for this project Me 5 minutes later: where has this tool been my entire life. There were some lumpy areas of the first layer of subflooring plywood in the upstairs hall that simply couldn't be ignored. Like over 1/4" out in 6 to 12 inches of run. One was my fault for not realizing that "23/32 plywood" is neither an indicator of actual thickness nor an indicator of the precision to which it is made. The other was because this loving house is a sagging tilting 1800s horror show and despite me fixing most of the worst issues, the upstairs hall floor framing was nowhere near flat. So the plywood I put down over it wasn't flat either. But half an hour with my new power plane and it sure was. I can put the second layer down now, and it'll actually be flat, or reasonably close to it.
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Aug 12, 2022 07:32
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That's the one. Love that channel. Unfortunately we have exactly the same skills in project time estimation. This house has been 2 years from done since 2011.
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Aug 12, 2022 08:14
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 03:57 |
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The space is like 7 or 8 inches wider than the machines I was seeing so it'll get a little further open than 90, and yeah, that is not my loving problem lol. They can also pay someone to put a dryer vent out the roof there and just run stacked machines if they don't like that. (This is, however, very useful info for sanity checking the design for the next house.)
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Aug 13, 2022 06:05
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