Turning lemons into lemonade

Skylight for cats & dogs...

I wonder if those particles are ferrous and can be moved around with a magnet before curing sets in; could do cool eddy currents and vortices in the nooks!

But wait, there's more! 😀

We have been enjoying our new table a great deal, but had plans for some additional projects. We just had the entire house painted inside, after having all the baseboards and trim replaced (new windows and doors last year were part of the reason for this - the snowball effect), so now finally time to bring in some of these projects.

We used to have a small stand in the front entrance that people could set a hat or purse on when they came in the door, so we decided maybe a nice maple floating shelf there would be nice...





We also needed some storage in a small bathroom that is just off the garage, so we added two more shelves there - you can see the hardware for these narrow shelves...









Neither of these are terribly exciting, but very functional uses of the wood. One of the cuts they made on the log early on was to flatten the top side so the chainsaw mill would make nice flat cuts - one the off cut pieces was quite nice when dried, so my wife wanted a wall hanging/art piece made from it...



Here it is in situ...in the same room as the table...



This one was my idea - we had this small phone stand right beside that small back bathroom near the garage entrance door. It was made from the same granite that our counters are. I suggested we ditch it and make a nice maple shelf...



And here it is...



The last one is a bit whacky. For many years I have had my various audio components on this stand (yes made of maple by a local company that is no longer around - very good quality stuff):



It used to be full, but as the system has progressed, I'm left with just two components. The room the stereo is in has an odd shape, so seating can be an issue - there's never enough when we have people over. My wife wanted to free up space where the stand is, so came up with another shelf application. I spent a lot of time worrying about length of power cords and ethernet cables, but didn't pay a lot of attention to the speaker cables, so need a longer set of those, but this is what we have now:



The plan is that a small couch will go where the stand used to be, once I get longer speaker cables...



The shelf before it went up...the only downside is you can't see the wood all that well now that it's in place...



Now the concern is the equipment weighs a fair bit - about 20 kg for both units. The brackets used here and for the phone stand are not what the rest of the shelves used. This system requires a recess machined into the back of the shelf, and half of the bracket is screwed into the shelf. The other half is screwed to the wall, and the shelf is "hung" onto the half that is screwed to the wall. Set screws are then tightened from the bottom of the shelf to lock the two parts of the bracket together. It's a very sturdy system that is really slick.



Web site if anyone is interested...

Heavy Duty Floating Shelf Hardware | Hovr Bracket System Canada

We have two remaining projects that we are considering, so we may add to this still...thanks for following along if you have made it this far. 👍

Thanks for sharing, Archer. Great way to turn a negative situation around and nice use of the materials. I enjoyed seeing how it's all being utilized.

Back again for more.

We just took delivery this morning of a waterfall shelving unit made from our maple.



Top...



For those who might not have heard of this before, the "waterfall" name comes from using one slab of wood for the top and the side, with the grain flowing continuously from the top to the side, which requires precise cuts to keep everything aligned. We added some



There isn't a lot of epoxy on this one, but what was there we went with a colour called onyx black, mixed with something called "sapphire ghost blue." You can't see a lot of it because the area is smaller, but we have one more project we want done and plan to use it on that one...



Here's the mix on a larger table...





When used on it's own the sapphire ghost blue can create an opalescent effect that's pretty cool...





One more large project left.

Exactly. This in a room just beside the table, so we are surrounded by that tree now.

Few more pics - took this of the exposed side in some late day sunlight...it's spectacular...



The Dutchmen (bow ties) and the splines are again made from a cherry tree from our yard. Here are some in progress pics of the splines:



Dry test fit...



Final glue up...

So, tangentially related, my wife and I spent some time this morning along with some others (the municipality and the local conservation authority) volunteering to plant some trees in the new subdivision behind us...





Some are hard to see when planted...





Planted red oak, red maple, black cherry, basswood, and lastly sugar maple, the same species as our tree was. Hopefully the people who live there will appreciate them...

Nicely done, Archer. In the future people will be enjoying shade from those trees for decades because of the time you took today.

Just turned a lemon into lemonade. End cut of some wood I got for knife handles has been made into a table decoration


But more sanding to go…and some polishing the dressed edges.

A few years ago, I faced a similar situation when I had to remove a Bradford pear tree that was located too close to our house. The tree had started losing large limbs, which posed a safety concern.

After the removal, I gave the stump and larger branches to my neighbors, who could use them for various projects. With the remaining smaller branches, I decided to get creative and explore new ways to repurpose them.


Kinda looks like Mont Saint-Michel at this stage.



Lots of adhesive later...

Bit of an update - we are getting more maple items made from our old tree, and I'll post about that later. But this is to show some of the unintended consequences of all this were...

The area at the very back of our property was essentially in the middle of a wooded area, and when they removed that 10 meter section of trees behind us, it exposed the wooded areas of our property to sunlight where there had been only filtered light before. This caused an explosion of noxious weeds, and of course there is a by-law requiring us to control those weeds. Once things start to grow out there, there's really no way to even get back there, so we went out before everything came up to do some cleaning...



Most of what is visible at this time of year are wild raspberries - we pulled and dug out what seemed like thousands of them...one small pile about 10% of what we removed:



We can't do larger burns anymore, so the fire pit got a workout:



We put down heavy landscape fabric to help prevent things from coming up too fast:



Had to do this over a few weekends, and this photo is maybe 1/2 done - it was hard work:



We contacted the company we used for tree services and got a delivery of wood chips:



7 cubic meters...



Back after those woods were removed, we got some saplings from the local conservation authority - here is a maple after a few years:



Not much progress, which is why we bought 3 mature trees (one maple and 2 red oaks) and had them planted out back. The small tulip tree saplings really took off, as you can see here:



Hard to believe these were the same size to start with, and have been planted the same length of time. One has grown a few inches, and the other is 10 feet tall. More in the next post...

We contacted a local company about getting in some additional larger trees. We wanted 80 mm diameter, which means they are pricey, but waiting for the saplings to grow just isn't going to be fast enough. Here's the delivery:



Again we are keeping this all native trees for this region. We added another maple, a hackberry, and 3 tulip trees - as you can see these are quite tall in some cases. We also wanted something that was a little more dense for specific understory areas, so we ordered in 3 eastern redbud shrubs. We had a bunch of invasive buckthorn removed from the front wooded area, so some of these went in the front and some out back.

The root balls on these are large enough that hand digging would be a lot of labour, so they brought in this little drill rig with an auger on the front:



Here is one of the redbuds:



The maple:



The hackberry:



We have more coming - some spice bushes, witch-hazel, and some paw paw.

Back to wood chips - borrowed my neighbours little trailer, which made the job go a little faster that using a wheelbarrow:



In the second to last picture in the left foreground, you can see one of our larger Jack in the Pulpit plants. In all of this work we made it clear to the company that we anted as much of the native plants protected as possible, so this guy got a lot of attention so no one would run him over...here he is a couple of weeks earlier:



Of course were also very protective of the Trilliums we have in these woods. But even the more common Mayapples are pretty cool:



We don't get a good view of the flowers, but the rabbits do I suppose:



We are doing our best to help restore the area that was destroyed by the development. It has taken time and a lot of money...

Some new projects were delivered today...some shelves for another bathroom.



We wanted a small table of sorts for our listening room - something that can fit between our chairs, and we can set a glass of wine on while we listen to music. We had a little mini waterfall edge table made:



Waterfall edges:



Mitre cuts:



The room we made this for is in a but of disarray right now, as the dog is doing physio in there several times per day, but this is the spot where this will go:



So the people doing all this work for us obviously know us well, because when they made that little table and cut those mitres, they looked at the pieces that they cut off and said "Those are too nice for the scrap pile" so they sanded and finished them for us:



Darker than the original table:



They made a nice addition to the mineral collection on the mantle:



More later...