So! As I may have mentioned before, sometimes I do woodworking. I work with hand tools and no power tools (except for Cordless Drill My Beloved). I do this because, to wit:

1. I don’t have room for power tools, as I actually want to park in my half of my garage
2. I don’t want to set up a whole dust collection system even if I did have room
3. I hate the fucking noise
4. I hate the fucking dust (see point 3)
5. I am deeply clumsy and don’t want to lop off a finger, which I absolutely would do if allowed to get anywhere near a table saw
6. I’m a pretentious broad

This post is about a kitchen cupboard I just finished building from construction-grade pine I got at my local Homo Depot.

We keep a kosher kitchen in my house, which is great! But also it sucks because we don’t have enough cabinet space just like. In general. Because despite this house being in the shtetl (affectionate) it somehow is poorly laid out and lacks sufficient cabinet space for our Jewish Ways. So I started working on a cupboard a couple of months ago that would allow us to actually get some of our lesser-used-but-still-vital cooking dishes out of the Ikea cabinet thing that is allegedly “the baking cabinet” but in actuality is the “baking, plus the overflow of cooking utensils we don’t have room for elsewhere” cabinet.



This cupboard plan is from Rex Krueger (web site, yootoobs), whose YT channel has been a big help to me in dialing back my Hobby Hipster Snob tendencies that always end up costing me a lot of fucking money that I didn’t need to spend. His original plan (on his web site, it’s like 5 bucks I think) has this cupboard at roughly 2 feet high by 4 feet wide by a foot deep. I wanted to build this specifically to put under the edge of my kitchen island, so I scaled up and added an extra shelf, measuring specifically to fit a couple of my larger kitchen appliances. Mine ended up around 34" high by 54" wide by just over 13" deep.

Scaling up necessitated a couple of changes, most notably making double doors on each side instead of a single door. The original plan calls for one door on each side, but these doors would have been wayyyy too big and would have probably ended up sagging. Also hitting me in the face when I went to get the fuckin dutch oven out of the thing because I am, as noted, clumsy (see point 5, above).

I ended up making the doors out of ¾" plywood instead of gluing up boards to make panels because the idea of doing that much gluing up with bullshit big box store pine made me want to fling myself and the cupboard out a window. To prevent defenestration (a word I learned from my children when they were young) I used the plywood. It’s better this way.

I also made my own molding, as per Rex’s video. He suggests you come up with your own profiles and whatnot, but I was Tired and went with his instead. I don’t own molding planes and I don’t currently plan to buy any, but he shows you how to make some basic molding profiles using a rabbet plane and a regular hand plane, both of which I own, so I used those. It was fun! I like using the rabbet plane, even if it is a Stanley 78 that clogs after two passes. It’s an American tradition to use a Stanley 78 and swear creatively at the inevitable clogs. Your grandpa probably did it too. It’s fine.





It took a while to get the doors correctly fitted to the cabinet openings and vice versa, because no matter what anyone says, inevitably your case will be just a little bit out of square, especially if you’re me and have been doing woodworking for roughly a year on nights and weekends. Frankly I was relieved the case was square enough to slap on the plywood back and have it line up enough to glue/nail it down. Once I had the face frame on, the molding nailed down and the doors figured out it was paint time!







I used milk paint from milkpaint.com - this is an “early American” style cupboard and milk paint seemed like it would work well, plus it’s what Rex uses in the video and I don’t see any reason to make decisions about this kind of thing when the plan guy has already made them for me. So milk paint it is. I did two coats.

Milk paint dries very matte - it is extremely flat, does not reflect anything at all, and furthermore is quite fragile without something over the top to protect it. To topcoat it I used a couple of coats of shellac (the stuff in the can from the hardware store, I don’t have time to be a shellac snob). Once that was dry I put a coat of paste wax over the top and buffed it to a sheen with an old cloth diaper. (thank you to my dead, hippie wife for having that just lying around the house. Love you, babe! <3)

Once I was done with painting the case and the doors, I moved the goddamn thing into the actual house, both to prevent it from getting dusty and to be able to park my car in the garage now that it’s winter so I wouldn’t have to scrape snow off my windshield.

It may or may not have taken me a month after that to get the doors attached and the handles on. Don’t worry about it.

It wouldn’t have taken so long except that apparently I, in my infinite genius and because I am extremely handsome, mixed up the doors and painted them upside down, consequently causing me to install them upside down. I think that’s what happened, anyway. Either way, it meant the damn doors didn’t fit, so I spent a productive, if stultifying, afternoon chiseling and planing and scraping the door panels, shelves, and case to get the fucking doors to hang and fit correctly. This also meant I had to re-paint and re-shellac in various places, which was annoying, made more so by the existence of my cats.

(I also installed magnetic latches so the doors would stay shut. Modern technology is wonderful. And by “modern technology” I mean “$2 off-brand latch thingies from the hardware store”.)

However! I triumphed!

The goddamn cupboard is finished! And in my kitchen! And the damn doors close! Mostly! And there’s stuff in it and out of my baking cabinet! And I didn’t cut off a finger! Hooray!

Partner and I took Thursday and Friday off for the specific purpose of hanging out and being gay together, which was very nice, as we haven't  really had the chance to do that before. Next time I think we need a week.

Thursday we did what my partner calls "parallel play", where they worked on some electronics projects they have going on and I spent a lot of time in my garage woodworking shop braving my third ever attempt at dovetails. (I'm making a box for the Shabbat candles that's big enough to hold a full 72 candle box and will look prettier than the cardboard box currently sitting in the hutch.) It took me until the very last set to realize I had cut all the other sets backwards. sigh. I nearly ragequit the whole thing -- I had already sweated over sizing all the pieces correctly and good workholding is still very much in progress on my bench -- but then kind of shrugged, said "fuck it, I might as well finish" and carried on. I was very brave about it. (I was not brave at all and whined a lot, but I did keep at it.) Shockingly, the correctly-cut dovetails had a decent friction fit and the other three sets...very did not. Alas. I glued it up anyway and called it progress.

Friday we went to the art museum (yay!). I haven't been to the art museum maybe since I moved back here in 2015 because at first I 
just didn't have time due to caregiving, and then because going to the art museum by myself was the world's most depressing thought. We did two exhibits and then left for less overstimulating climes, and also to hit a late afternoon farmer's market in hopes of finding good things for dinner, something I also have not done since well before Plague Times. The farmer's market turned out to be one of those that has very little in the way of actual farmers or produce -- there was one produce stand out of the dozen or so in attendance -- so we revised plans and went to a nearby little gourmet market where they make their own pasta from scratch. We also picked up some empanadas for breakfast (I love not having to cook on Shabbat). Shabbat dinner was orecchiette in (store-made) red sauce with basil and rosemary from the garden with a kale/white bean/roasted garlic skillet thing on the side for protein. It was... so fucking good, for real. We ate it again for dinner the next two nights.

Shabbat was sleeping in, empanadas, and more woodworking time. I did some work on my bench to make the workholding not suck as much. I set up our new WAP/router. We ordered in dinner and hung out enjoying each other's company.

Sunday I did some more shop maintenance, got the box bottom chopped out (rabbets, baby), started mortising in the hinges for the lid, and glued up the box bottom. It's gappy, probably because the rabbets are a bit uneven, but I'm willing to live with it -- this is all a learning process. I've been doing actual woodworking (that isn't building a work bench) for only about nine months, and only on weekends and the occasional weeknight at that, so I need to remember to cut myself some slack. I'm in the stage where I'm very much still learning the basics but want to Make Useful Things but don't quite have the skills yet to make them, or to make them in a way that won't frustrate me. Getting there.

Today was back to work, of course. Hopefully I can grab some time this evening to get the hinges fitted on the box lid and maybe start applying finish. Whee!

Q: Do I want to work this week?
A: No. No, I do not.

Q: Did I foolishly not take PTO between xmas and New Years due to a lack of foresight?
A: Yes. Yes, I did. I am (allegedly) working this week, alas.

Q: Do I regret this?
A: Yes. Yes, I do.

Q: Am I actually working, though?
A: ...I plead the Fifth.

Q: Do I have to go to my daily standup meeting and give a report on what I've accomplished each day this week anyway, thus requiring Cleverness and Trickery on my part?
A: Yes. Yes, I do.

Q: Did my "work" yesterday consist of organizing and cleaning out my office of a year's worth of detritus while listening to trans punk bands?
A: Yes. Yes, it did.

Q: Did I just order myself breakfast because I don't want to get out of my recliner and make myself something?
A: Yes. Yes, I did.

Q: Is writing this entry possibly a way to put off the "going to work" portion of my day?
A: ...Yes. Yes, it is.

Th*nksg*v*ng is a bullshit "holiday" and I do not celebrate it. However, it was my wife's (z"l) favorite day of the year other than her birthday, so today is when I get together with my kids, eat a lot of food, remember the Glitter Princess, and consume pie in frankly terrifying quantities.

Speaking of pies, I did in fact survive the store on Sunday and was able to get the pies made well under the wire yesterday. It's amazing how well things go when I don't have to do it all myself and can get stuff done ahead of time. The sour cream apple pie that is $KID3's favorite turned out well, I think -- I've never made it on my own, so I was nervous. The pecan pies... well, I couldn't help myself because I am, as my partner would say, a fancy broad, so I made brown butter and bourbon pecan pie instead of regular. They smell insanely good so I hope they taste as good as they smell.

I am being summoned to set the table. More later.

I may or may not have thrown a fit this week and pulled down everything from my Web site with the intent of rebuilding it from the ground up. By "may have" I mean I absolutely did do this thing. Not that it was any great loss -- this last go-around I tried out Wordpress for managing everything but I do not vibe with it at this point. It's an excellent piece of software that has managed to become So Very Much to deal with over the last couple of years, with the unfortunate effect that it's slow and I am too impatient to deal with it. So I moved it aside and have been playing with a very simple Python static site generator. (This generator allegedly has the ability to deal with blog posts, but the functionality on that side is rudimentary to say the least and Dreamwidth does it better.) I forked the repo for the site generator, added a bit of functionality to it to generate the site structure the way I want it, and pretty much have it dialed in at this point.

Other than nerding out, this has been a nice Shabbat. Tomorrow if I don't go to the damn grocery store there will very likely be no pecan pie for Th*nksg*v*ng two years in a row, which is unacceptable. Pray for my ability to acquire any Karo syrup at all.

Someone is just flat-out weeping out in the hall. Loudly. This is the kind of shit that's really unnerving about staying in the hospital with my wife. It happens on the ICU floor (where we are right now) more than it does anywhere else. And that's understandable, but it's... unnerving, like I say. I am not always prepared to deal with my own emotions being up here, let alone someone else's.