garage continued.

I've been trying to piece together prepping the garage in between seemingly a dozen other things. Luckily this project will not be nearly as ginormous as painting my entire house this time last year. But like coming back from a backpacking trip this weekend Sunday evening to get hold of the paint scraper and pressure washer and scrape and wash the siding and under the eaves of the two sides I'm prepping to paint. And Katie had been a dear - when I opened the garage on our return I saw spread out on the floor all the trim primed and everything.

But before she could prime them I had to do some prep work one evening last week. Like set up wood shop in my driveway -

Then do some cutting, planing and routing. I consulted my diagram and other notes for what it was I was supposed to do. Like take three 1x2s to the table saw to rip them down to just an inch wide which would let them stick out from beneath a 1x8 above by just a quarter inch (instead of three-quarters of an inch) -

Then pretty much plane down just about everything at least a little - and some more than a little -

Having a planer is spectacular. It's like sanding - only a hundred times faster. And it made it possible to take a three-quarter-inch-thick 1x2 (the same 1x2s I ripped to an inch wide) and plane them down to a half-inch thick. And of course just get all the muck off lumber by sending it through the planer once on each side.

But then something a bit more challenging to do ... cutting out the architectural beams I was building to match the three on the front porch gable. I luckily got the idea to use two 2x8s after realizing I didn't have a saw that could make the necessary cut through a 4x piece of lumber. So I traced the outline of one above the porch and got to work -

Got to use my new (well, refurbed) jigsaw. Holy cow. All this time I had been using my classic five-dollar-garage-sale-circa-nineteen-seventy-six B&D jigsaw (complete with the old B&D logo). This Dewalt blew it away the moment I turned it on. Smooth. But still - I tend to like to have things pretty precise so I clamped my speed square to the 2x8 as a guide -

Then used a long straightedge to cut the diagonal line -

to wind up with this -


The trouble was - I had to do that five more times. And then piece pairs of them together -

And of course they didn't line up perfectly. But I wasn't sweating it - my plan was to use wood filler to fill in the differences, then sand them and make it appear as if each beam was made out of one piece of lumber instead of two -


And then time to prime and paint them. I'll get to that later - instead, now time to do some other work. Like tear out the beautiful light above the door -

and the other one - plus the spectacular galvanized metal vent - in the gable -


While at Mclendons the other day getting a gallon of the Benjamin Moore Brilliant White and a quart of the Sandy Hook Green, I asked if they had a 12x12-inch cedar gable vent. Well, they didn't - but the guy asked me if I was a carpenter. I sort of shrugged and told him I was a hack-of-a-carpenter. I guess that was acceptable though cos he suggested I just buy some clear cedar and build my own. I liked the idea - so picked up a 1x4 and a 1x3 and a piece of screening material and tonight spent an hour hacking a gable vent together. First I built the box out of the 1x4 -

Then, to figure out the spacing of the slats I wanted a calculator - and realized a garage-sale-find tape measure sitting on the pegboard in front of me had a calculator on it!

How handy that ol' Calcu-Tape ... I knew there was a reason I paid a quarter for it! So with the measurements all figured out, I just had to jot down some lines on the frame -


(uhh, photo courtesy of Katie)

Then grab the router with the chamfer bit I got for the porch railings to create a molding for around the edge - oh and rip the 1x3 down to a 1x2 (instead of, well, buying a 1x2 - in addition to planers, table saws are awesome - should've bought that new-looking Ryobi I saw at a garage sale a couple months ago for $40 ... ) -

The stapler came in super-handy to put it all together -

Then tack the screen to the back -

And wallah - a cedar gable vent -

I'll stain it when I do the shakes after they're hung. Meanwhile - Katie painted some stuff while I had busied myself with all of that -


Her layering up the pieces of wood was pure genius!

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And that's where I'm at - all the trim is primed and painted. The siding is scraped, pressure washed and all holes filled. Basically the next step is to prime the siding and under the eaves then slap on the Benjamin Moore Sussex Green. Once that is done - it's just a matter of installing a lot of trim and the cedar shake - which will be much faster with the awesome stapler I got last year after finishing the cedar on the house.

Phwew. I love working on the house on warm summer evenings after a day spent working in a stuffy office. A quick snack after getting home - then a few hours of work til dark or past dark - and a light supper and relaxing night. Good times. Good times for sure.