The Purple Computer Table

For some time, we've been in need of a small table for our second computer. So, when I found this table frame a couple of months ago, I snapped it up (it was sitting beside the dumpster at a moving business). Also, the wife loves anything purple, so I just naturally had to bring it home.


Note the long, green grass in the background- this is almost unheard of for central Texas in June! It's been an unbeliveabley wet year so far- it rained *hard* three times in the last week! Probably not much for the pacific northwest, but it's a big deal here, lemme tellya! It finally dried out enough (barely) for me to start mowing here the last couple of days.

I'm pretty sure that this originally had a glass top, but I wasn't about to mess with that- not with all the materials that I have on hand! To secure the top to the base, I simply drilled two holes in each of the 45 degree crosspieces that used to support the glass top. Flat bottomed pocket hole screws through these will do the trick. Also repainted it with the can of purple spraypaint in the top pic (my only expense for the job).

This old piece of countertop has been keeping the rain out of my carport for years- and now I've finally found a new use for it. Note the odd shape- first order of business was to cut a straight line, then work off of that to cut a square table top.

This was a job for the circular saw! Since I didn't want to damage the laminate, it's a two step process. 1st step is to make a scoring cut, with the blade barely protruding- just enough to cut through the laminate, and barely into the wood underneath. 2nd step was the through cut, with the blade lowered all the way. I used the same guide for both cuts. The pic on the right below shows the through cut being made- note the shallow cut ahead of the saw. This works pretty well.

Once cut sqare, I nipped the corners at 45 degrees- much easier and faster than trying to make rounded corners with the router. As it turned out, it looks pretty good that way, too. Once it was cut to shape, I used Durham's rock hard water putty to fill any cracks and voids in the sides (this is a powder that you mix with water- it's widely available, and really is rock hard when it cures). Then sanding, priming (kilz), and turned upside down to paint the edge of the plywood purple to match the base.

Turned it all upside down, screwed the base to the top, and the result is below.

Note that the purple edge really blends the top and base- I didn't anticipate this, but it was definitely a happy accident. The wife is happy, too, but that was no accident :) I had planned to install a keyboard drawer that I picked up somewhere, but it turned out to be *just* too wide to fit between the legs, and there was no way to shorten it, so we'll just have to make do with this :)

completed bathroom floor

So here we have the floor with the self-adhesive tile installed (made the wife do that part, and she did a good job :). I've since reinstalled the toilet and sink, and the new floor is a huge improvement- much stronger than the old particle board floor.

I've been needing to replace the floor in my daughter's bathroom for some time now, and I finally got around to it. We bought our mobile home as a repo, and agreed to do any needed repairs ourselves, in order to save several thousand dollars. Pretty much the only problem we had was that the bathroom floors had been soaked pretty bad, and, being made of particleboard, were naturally in bad shape.
The seal had gone out under the toilet, as the floor was sinking- you can see where I repaired that. The problem that followed was that the repair was thinner than the particle board, after it had absorbed water. The solution was to pull out all of the old particle board, and replace it with plywood.
Removing the old PB was a big job- it was glued, nailed, and stapled to the joists, and they used plenty of all three! Plus, the walls were built on top of the floor, so I had to cut the floor at the edges, then build up a frame for the new floor to rest on. It was sawzall and chisel work (I used a cheap harbor freight chisel- and I have to say that it held up quite well to being pounded on with a claw hammer).

Above, you can see where I've put in the cross braces- they are mostly cut from an old waterbed side, and screwed into the joists using pocket holes. I've also run some up under the wall, and screwed them into the next joist over ( no *that* was tough to do! laying on my face and doing it blind!). I've also put just under the wall, screwed into the frame I built, to support the edge of the bathroom floor, as well as the floor in the next room over. As you can see, there was a lot of frame building to be done here- the people who built the house didn't include any cross bracing, but simply relied on the particle board to hold everything together. Of course, they were working with full sheets- and I was working with random pieces that I pulled out of dumpsters :)



I have to admit that it was some work to get all of this fitted together- note that I also replaced my earlier repair. Total cost for the job? Maybe five bucks, including screws, and the tube of caulk I used to fill in the cracks. When the caulk dries, we'll cover the floor with some self-adhesive tiles that a friend gave my wife last week, and it should all look pretty decent, for now. When I've got time, I'll probably come back and pour a thin layer of thinset concrete to level everything out perfectly, then tile it with squares of Corian (that I'll be cutting from my scrap). In the meantime, though, my little girls's going to be happy to have her bathroom back, and that's the best part of the job.

The Shop Itself

I've noticed that I mention my shop a lot in this blog, so I thought I would put up a post about it. The shop itself is recycled- I picked up a badly damaged 12'x24' portable building cheap at an auction a couple of years ago, then had it moved in behind my house. It almost didnt' make it- one of the skids (what it sits on) broke in half under it when the movers picked it up. They ended up charging me a bit extra for all the trouble of gettinng it here and into a tight spot.


Here it is, in all it's glory, before I leveled it. As I found out later, the decorative surround on the roof concealed finger-sized holes in all four corners (left there by the builders!), which let in water, and I had a lot of water damage to repair.

An example of the water damage- lots of rot in the sills (the supports for the walls). The first owner had put a faucet inside it, and a drain- and simply had the drain running out under the building-which was tightly skirted! The floor was in bad shape- the first thing I did was tear out the old floor (with my wife's help).

I build new skids out of scrap material (nailed and glued shorter pieces into 24' long skids), then slid them under and secured them to the joists with screws, using pocket holes for a stronger joint. I tried to get around it, but eventually decided to replace the sill all around with new, pressure treated lumber. Here I've got the wall propped up for this purpose. This was pretty easy- I simply screwed a 2'x board to the wall, jacked the wall up with a couple of small floor jacks, then placed my propping boards (they are bearing on the new skid- if you look closely, you can see that I also put 2'x4' reinforcements above the skid and between the joists- again using pocket holes. This took some time, but is very, very strong).

Instead of nailing into end grain from the outside, which is a weak joint, I drilled four pocket holes in each end of every joist (that's what's going on in the above pic), and attached them to the new sill with four 2 1/2" pocket hole screws. This is orders of magnitude stronger than nailing, plus it leaves no outside holes for water to get in.

To illustrate the holding strength of these screws- one of the end sills was badly bowed along it's length- about three inches out. My wife was helping me- I had attached one end with four screws, and she was holding the bowed board up for me. When I ran the first screw in on the loose end, it pulled the entire 12 foot board straight so fast, that it pulled it right out of her hands!

Here's the new sills- a big improvement! Later, I inserted aluminum flashing (that I got cheap at an auction :) I've still got a lot of the stuff, and it's pretty useful for a variety of things.

So, next I needed to replace the floor with new plywood. This would require 12 sheets of plywood, which could get expensive at retail. As it happened, there was another auction about this time for the items left behind when a church moved into a bigger building. Among these items was a large stage, built of 2x4's and 3/4" plywood. I got it for fifteen dollars, and it took me two trips to get it all home, as I was unable to dissasemble it at the church. Above is my trailer, full of this material.

All of the plywood was covered in carpet, which had been thouroughly glued down. This was a huge pain to get off! The most effective method I found was to stand it on end, attached an old weight bar to the carpet with clamps, then hang the heaviest stuff I could find off it. It took most of a week, but I finally managed to get it all apart. This still left the glue residue, which was easy to deal with- I simply turned the sheets over and used the virgin bottom surface.

The 2x4 material also came in handy- I used quite a bit of it in building the new skids, and more of it in repairing and replacing rotted wall material.

More to come on the shop later!

Preparing an old counter top for making into a workbench

So, today I log onto blogger, and what do they announce? Auto-save! After I already lost this post once to a storm, of course! Anyhow, I'm glad to see it.


So, here we have an old plywood counter top sitting upside down on the sawhorses (with a bunch of the wood I salvaged from that old shop stacked in the background). I'm planning to use the top layer of this, with the laminate still on it for a workbench. My normal procedure here is simply to clip off the nails on the bottom, and file them flat. On this one, however, there's a good possibility that I'll want to be drilling some special-purpose holes in it, and, since I don't want to ruin any good wood drill bits, the nails have to come out.

In the pic above, we see the tools for this job- a good, sturdy hammer, a pair of vise-grips, and a bucket for nails. Note the piece of plywood poking out under the left end- this is another piece of old countertop (with pink laminate, of all things!) that I've already made into a workbench. When I'm done, I'll have three built-in benches in my shop, and one portable, all made from recycled materials, and all sporting vintage vises.

Here's the procedure- grab the pointy end in the vise-grips, and use the hammer to pull it out.

I'm lucky her, in that when it was build, they used finishing nails, so they come out easy. An added advantage of using the vice-grips is that when a nail goes flying into the grass, it's easy to find with the pliers attached to it :).

Older countertops often have a strip of wood glued to the side, and laminate applied over it and the top at once- to remove that strip, it's necessary to cut the laminate where the two meet, to avoid tearing it up. I usually do this with the circular saw set for a 1/16 or so cut, then just knock the side strip off with a hammer. This was a cheaper, and/or less professional installation, and they simply put a strip of laminate on the edges of the stacked plywood. This came off pretty easily with a stiff scraper blade (and a tiny bit of persuasion with the hammer). I tossed the laminate scraps- then dug a couple of them out a couple of days later to use for spreading paint remover on another project (instead of using a brush and discarding it).

The bottom layer is almost never applied very well, since it's just a filler. Usually just some nails and a bit of construction adhesive. Just slam the claws under the edge and start prying- they usually come off pretty easily.

Here are the filler strips turned upside down. Note the globs of adhesive. When I remake the top layer into a workbench, it will get glued to another full layer of plywood, with wood glue, clamps, and screws all around, and will be very stout (and heavy! Oh, my back!).

Also, I removed the nails from the filler strips, and made them into shelves in my shop, so pretty much this whole item is going to get used.

The finished coat rack

So, here it is, in all it's glory. Besides a couple of coats of varnish, the only addition is the coathooks (which I had picked up on sale quite some time ago).
Wife and child are both happy- now I just have to get them into the habit of using the thing!
I'll add some hooks on the side for umbrellas and such later- and if it turns out to be "tippy", even with the extended feet, I'll simply screw it to a stud with a 3" screw. Not high art, but a satisfying little project- useful and cheap, just how I like it :)


I was on vacation last week, and spent as much time as possible working on my shop. When I get some time later, I'll do a post on how I prepared an old laminated countertop and made it into a built in workbench.

Finished Packing Crates

Here's a finished packing crate, with the components packed into it. It works well- these are not tubes, but machined from solid stainless steel, and quite heavy. The crate holds them perfectly.


The bottom pic is of the other four crates,with the tops screwed on. Note the different colored woods- these are one-use items, so they didn't have to be pretty- just strong. I didn't purchase any of the wood for this project, and the customer (my brother :) was quite happy.