The Phantom Woodworking Show

Saturday my wife and I got up early (for us, on a Saturday) and hit the road to drive down to Marlborough, Massachusetts to attend a woodworking show I had found online a few weeks ago.  We made the 86 miles drive in bright sunshine and good spirits, arriving at our destination 10 minutes before the show was scheduled to start that day (the website advertising a 3 day event, Fri - Sun).

Imagine our surprise to show up and find an empty ...  nay, a desolately deserted ... parking lot (I mean this was just a tumble-weed away from spooky).  The event center was associated with a hotel set in the same complex so we drove up to the hotel and found out, sure enough, no woodworking show.  The hotel told us the show had moved to Connecticut this year and we were the 5th person they had turned away so far.

I later sent an e-mail to the publishers of the website and they responded with an appology, wanting to know how I had come across that page as it was just a test page.  My responce: "google".  They did get my address and are supposed to sending me tickets to the "Big E", witch is a big show in Boston every January.

Not to be denied my woodworking fix, I grabbed my GPS unit and pulled up the address for the local Rockler store.  That worked out kind of nice as I had not been there before (I have a Rockler and a Woodcraft within an hour of my house).  So we got to roam around the Rockler for a while and walked out happy, but poorer.  At least I got some change.

But I got some neat stuff:

Life's a Birch... with Cherry on top.

Monday my beautiful wife and I went to Goose Bay Lumber to pick out lumber for the top of the built in. I wanted something a little thicker than you find at a big box store, so we were looking for 6/4 material (that's 1 1/2" thick to you lay folk).

We ended up with 3 nice pieces of Cherry all 10 feet long, 2 pieces about 7 inches wide and one 4" (25 board feet).  Here is it stacked up on the work bench:

Here's a nice shot of some the grain showing on one of the pieces:

While were there I also wanted to find some wood for a shaker table project I am doing for the Woodworkers Fighting Cancer march build-along.  For everyone who signs up and completes the project, money will be raised for the American Cancer Society.

Here is a sketch-up of the table:

I had originally thought to make this out of white birch (the New Hampshire state tree), but found white birch to unsuitable for such a thing (or so the guy at goose bay told me), and ended up buying 13 Board Feet of Yellow Birch instead.

The large piece is going to make up the top, back and sides of the table and it has a "flame" pattern in it (costing me another 1.05 per board foot of that particular piece):

Now in my minds eye I see an inlay in the top of the table.  Nothing too fancy, really just a square frame of darker wood to give the piece a little extra pop.  To that end I did buy a nice piece of Ebony, 2 1/4" wide and 24" long (another $10):

Hopefully I have the guts and talent to pull the inlay off.  I know HOW to do it, but the chances of screwing up my nice "Flame" top are not insignificant!

Putting up a Fasle Front can be a good thing....

I'm real sore today, but that should be expected as I spent almost 4 hours on my knees yesterday (no, get your mind out of the gutter).  I finally got all the drawer fronts finished with a final coat of stain and poly and it was time to install them.

For those who may have forgotten, this is what we started with way back when:

Then we progressed to this:

And now finally we are here:

And this final step turned into a bigger job than I anticipated.

The tale of two Kitchens

One Kitchen is a soothing, well laid out, modern, cullinary workshop, and the other kitchen is the one we actually have.

Step one in the transformation happened this weekend.

BEFORE:

AFTER: