a working notebook of small house projects, one room at a time
The time lost to looking for a tool over a year is longer than the time it takes to build somewhere to put it.
A tool board works because a missing tool leaves a visible hole. Drawers and boxes hide what is absent until the moment it is needed, which is always the moment when looking for it is most expensive.
Concealed fixings work by cantilevering a steel rod out of the wall and sliding the shelf over it. All the load runs through a short length of rod and the wall it is anchored into, which means the wall has to be genuinely solid and the holes have to be genuinely straight.
The decision has to be made before the first fixing goes in, because it changes where everything else sits. Level is the right answer where objects will roll, where a shelf continues a line set by something else already level, or where the run is short enough that the discrepancy stays invisible.
Any project with repeated parts - shelf uprights, fence pickets, drawer sides - rewards the twenty minutes spent making a jig far more than it rewards care with a tape measure. Cumulative error is the problem: each measurement carries a small reading error and a small pencil-line error, and those errors do not cancel out.
Cut across the fibres and what is exposed is thousands of open tube ends. They take up finish far faster than a face does, which is why a stained shelf end goes almost black while the face stays the intended colour, and why paint sinks into a cut edge and leaves it dull.
Further back in the stream
Every month that carries an entry
