Well it’s been over a year since I’ve had a post on this site and a big part of that is because most of the work is done upstairs, and I haven’t really started much at all on the main level yet. With that in mind, there are a couple of projects that I’ve been working to wrap up over this year and I thought I’d give an update on that.

The master bathroom shower. As you’ve seen in a bunch of the posted pictures, as of last January (2020), there still wasn’t a shower installed in the master bathroom, and even the drywall was not in since I had to take a good section out to get the shower base installed. One of the things that was holding me back, aside from finding time, was that the cultured marble panels that I had for it were still outside on the deck, and I figured for sure if I moved them in winter, they’d shatter. So once it got warm enough last spring (again, 2020) I set to work on that. It was a relatively straightforward process honestly. The cultured marble is easy to work with, standard woodworking tools work just fine. I used a hole saw to cut out the holes for the shower head and handle and a router with a straight bit to cut out the corners of the side panels for the base and cut a slight angle on the two side panels (the wall was about 1/2 inch off from top to bottom). After that it was basically just using adhesive on the back of the panels and bracing them until it cured. The shelves are just glued on with bathroom caulking/adhesive and then all of the seams caulked as well.

The countertop. This was the doozy, quite a bigger project than I thought I was taking on, but in the end I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. So a little backstory on this, I was able to get my hands on a few timbers that had come off of old power line poles that had been taken down after decades of use. I thought it would be really cool to seam them together to make a countertop for my kitchen island, and it turns out it was!

I started out running them through a planer (top and bottom) and then a jointer (both sides…sorry, forgot to snap pictures of that process) to take the old wood off of them and square them up to be ready to seam together. This was a bit of a task in itself because they’re not exactly short or light pieces of timber (~10′ long and 8″ wide by 4″ thick), but we were able to get it done with a few extra rollers and a few extra hands.

So that was good, and in getting ready to put it all together I built a rack out of some pipes we had laying around so that I’d have a nice flat surface to put it together on. That was when I noticed that all of the beams had a bit of a warp to them and none of them sat flat on the rack I’d built. Well crap. You can see in the middle image below that they have a twist in them, comparing how the seams look on this end vs the other end.

Well now what? I guess I could have gone a couple of different directions here, put it together anyway and work it out at the end, take it to somebody with a mill to fix the warp, scrap the project and just put a regular countertop in, well I decided to build a mechanism to take the warp out of these boards myself. I built a track system that mounted on the rack that I’d already built so that I could leave the boards stationary but then move a belt sander across them at a set height and take enough of the wood off of any particular area so that they came out flat. Some folks said I should have used a router for this, and that might be true, it just seemed to me like I had more fine control over it with the sander. Once I got the tops and bottoms of all of the boards flattened then I did the edges/sides as well.

Once I got all the way through that, you can see that the boards are a bit different thicknesses yet, but the twist is completely out of them. From there I proceeded with lining them up, drilling four holes all of the way through them, bolting and gluing them all together and then it was back to sanding to get the top as flat as possible.

I got it basically as flat as I was hoping to, it wasn’t quite professional-grade and still had some extra character here and there, but I was very happy with where it got to. Then I filled the holes that were leftover from where the timbers were bolted onto the pole with epoxy, routed out a section on the bottom side where it would sit on top of the cabinet, and did the finish sanding of the bottom side. At this point I could have flipped it over and finish sanded the top side as well, but rather than flipping it over a bunch of times (it’s not light) I decided to stain and varnish the bottom side, and then start on the top.

From there I made some plugs to put into the sides to cover up the ends of the threaded rod that I used to hold it together, glued them in, and finish sanded the sides and the top. Then I got it stained and put 8 coats of varnish on the top to make sure it would be durable enough to last as a countertop.

After that it was just a matter of getting it upstairs (again, heavy) but there were a few folks around that were happy to help carry it up for a few beers. I had some heavy brackets made to attach it to the cabinet below, and then got it set on top and screwed down. All in all, I think it looks great!

Well there you go, an update from a year in! I’ve done a few other things, some shelving in closets, etc. as well of course but these were the bigger things I spent time on. I figured this was going to be a long post, but it turned out to be a SUPER long post. Hope you enjoyed it!