Mind the Gapp

Well, 98% done. Just have to touch up the black rails a bit.

Took my wife and I 18 hours over the weekend to apply Rustoleum’s Deck Restore product…that’s 2 coats.

We applied it with 4″ rollers and applied it slowly. That avoided wasting a lot of the material and splattering it all over. Going slow also makes the material ‘spike’ less. That means that the natural ridging of the material is rounded off and you don’t have to follow along with a brush to smooth it out. My advice to you is to read and then follow the instructions and go slow.

If you’re curious why 4″ rollers…the deck was built in the early 1990’s and the decking is 2″ x 4″ boards rather than the 1″ x 6″ boards which became the standard later on. If we had a 1″ x  6″ boards I would have used a 4″ roller, cut down the 6″ rollers to fit and capped the end of the roller.

Hoping that we’ll get about 5 more year of use out of the deck before I have to tear it apart.

All in all pretty happy with the result.

Before

After

Status as of Sunday afternoon. Front trim and doors to complete but that will be later on down the road. 

Spent the weekend building storage shelves…lots and lots of storage.

I have two projects left on the interior of the house:

1. Baseboards
2. Cabinets

In the case of the cabinets it’s more than just cabinets. It will be cabinets plus shelving and other doodads to complete a laundry room, pantry, mud rooms and two walk-in closets.

So below is a picture of the first carcase that I am working on.

Total cost at this point is $40 including the maple face frames (not seen)

Last night I finally got everything put together with the table saw. The output table set up, everything calibrated.

I then built the final thing that I needed to be able to start building cabinets…the cross-cut sled. These things are pretty easy to make. I ordered a couple of guides, cut a piece of wood and screwed them on.

Bingo. The last thing to do is square the fence to the blade. I used the 5-cut method and then the dial-in method.

Dead square.

Now I’m off to Europe for a couple of weeks and when I get back I’ll start putting cabinets together.