Woodwork

Ruth and I sanded and stained every inch of the cupboards, doors, baseboards and trim. Once the sanding had a good head start, I left Ruth to work on it while I started staining the wood. Sanding is the kind of work I always had trouble with. I still didn't know why. This was still 9 years before the aneurysm. I just knew it gave me "that feeling" and I had to stop what I was doing, or pass out. I guess sanding takes pushing and getting your back into it. The pressure of sand paper against wood and the constant back and forth movement made me feel odd. A sander could only be used on large flat areas, which meant most of it had to be sanded by hand. Ruth was afraid of making a mistake and didn't want to stain. I never got that feeling when I stained. So we worked together, with her sanding and me staining. I didn't use a brush, I hand rubbed the stain on with rags. Lightly, and in small areas at a time. No pressure and I liked the immediate results. I put a hickory stain on the kitchen cabinets. Most of the doors were stained maple. Baseboard and trim were stained maple if the wall was plastered, or something to match the paneling in a room. We worked on all the woodwork before it was cut and put on. Once it was finished and in place, it just took a quick touch up at the seams and a couple coats of varnish and it looked great.

Ruth's Father built all the cupboards, both kitchen and bathrooms. He was a perfectionist and took great care to make everything fit snugly, and it showed. He had been building Grandfather Clocks from wood on his own farm, for each of his seven offspring and each of their kids. Ours was made of cherry wood and when we drew up our floor plans, we also planned just where the clock was going to sit. Grandpa was pleased by that. My own paternal grandfather liked our clock so much, he asked to have one too. W's Grandfather continued to make and sell clocks right up till he died. When the family had a auction after he died, his clocks, even the ones that weren't finished brought buyers to the sale.

The kitchen cabinets he built for me had a couple special features. A narrow door beside the sink with a triple towell bar that pulled out. That became more common in later years, but when he built mine, it was a new idea. He even thought to build the vent holes into the design, so wet towells could air dry. I also had two side by side doors that pulled out and stored cans on narrow shelves on each side of a center divider. These proved to be a bit heavy when full, but it was also a new idea and his own design. One that would have worked better if he hadn't used real wood. No thin plywood or pressed board in anything Grandpa built. It all came from trees on his own farm. Boards he'd cut, air/dry cured and had stored for years for his own projects. After his wife died, he had moved everything into the farm house, much to his daughters dismay, and continued to build inside the house. His girls couldn't change him or his ways, and he continued to work in the comfort of his own home. It took a huge cleaning party and everyone to get the house ready for that auction.

While we sanded and stained, the men were kept busy on the construction of our house. (I'm sure I'm not doing this in the order it was built. It was a long time ago.) We had a big bow window in the dining room, a picture window in the living room and a large patio door in the family room. Plus the windows in the rest of the house. This is also precision work. Everything went well, but the patio door. They never found the problem. Everything proved to be square in both the opening and the door, but somthing kept binding and they took it out and put it in several times. Because of it's size and weight, F was getting pretty frustrated. We finally decided it was all ok, it was just too big and heavy and all that heavy wood made it harder to open then we would have liked. F always considered that door one of his failures. He swore no one in the family would ever put in a wooden sliding door that big again. But, it gave me a beautiful view into the back where several dogwood trees and a pussy willow bloomed each spring. And we could watch deer in the woods while sitting in our family room. I didn't care if it was heavy to open, the view from the whole room made it worth it.

The bow window in the dining room created some problems for them too. No one else in the family had used a bow window, and F and W had to figure out how they wanted to finish it off on the outside where it stuck out from the house. This area, top and bottom, have to be finished in a way that looks good. There was the 4' overhang over both the picture window and bow window. We brought the roof line straight out to the 32' width the whole length of the house and that end of the house was only 28' wide. So we didn't have to worry about rain around the bow window. Just how to finish it for looks. Sometimes I felt those two could spend a week thinking about how to do something and then spend one day doing it. Which is why we lived in the basement for 14 months. But, I couldn't complain. They built a solid, attractive house that should stand through just about anything.