Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Home Improvement

Custom Closet Storage

We have a closet underneath our stairs that opens out into the kitchen and family room area. That’s where a lot of our cleaning supplies get stored along with extra trash bags, paper towels, etc. We’ve always wanted to have that be a little more organized so I embarked on a small project to build some shelves and cabinets.

I started by designing the project with Google Sketchup. I’m really liking that tool and hope to use it more. It’s a great way to visualize the design decisions and then also to take measurements of the various pieces that need to be cut. The entire project was built out of 1/2” MDF with a little bit of 1/4” MDF for some facing. I cut everything to size first and painted it before I assembled it. I’ve never painted/stained a project BEFORE putting all the pieces together but it sure made painting a lot easier. I’ll probably try that again, but I won’t do it for a project like this where everything needs to fit precisely into a pre-defined space. As I started installing it, I realized that the closet wasn’t square so I ended up with some goofy looking gaps and pieces that didn’t fit quite right. The pictures below show it loaded up with our supplies and honestly you can’t see most of the issues. I do need to cover up the screw holes around the door (this would have been a good use for a finish nailer) but that should be pretty quick.

I got to use some new tools in this project. The table saw was a huge help as I was able to make big, repeatable cuts very quickly. I don’t miss crawling around on the floor, clamping a straight edge onto the big sheet and then using the circular saw to make each cut. I also made good use of a self-leveling laser that I got for Christmas. It made it super easy to attach the closet support pieces to the wall and get everything at the same height.

All in all I’m happy with how quickly this project came together (7 days from first cut to final install). If I can’t learn to live with the gaps then I’ll either rebuild part of it or add some trim, but something tells me that probably won’t happen. I learned a lot from this project and will probably put the skills to use again in one of our upstairs storage closets.

benmartens January 22, 2014 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Frozen Hosen

We had a spell of exceptionally cold (for this area) weather. Daytime temps were barely above freezing, and it dipped down into the low teens at night. After a few days of this, I was outside and noticed a big ice formation growing from one of my hose bibs. Oops. There’s a shutoff valve inside the garage, but I forgot to flip that this year and the entire valve froze along with much of the pipe leading up to it.

Thankfully nothing broke but I wanted to get it thawed before anything bad happened. So I wrapped a rag around the valve. Then I hooked a hose up to my tankless water heater and ran it out to the frozen valve. (Thanks to Brent’s guys for adding this valve right by the water heater! It has been incredibly useful!) The hose I connected is the white one on the left side of this photo.

After a minute or two, the ice started to break up and eventually I was able to turn the valve and get water to flow again. Phew! Hopefully I won’t make this same mistake twice. Next time I might not be so lucky.

benmartens December 23, 2013 Home Improvement

Lumber Rack

My garage is plenty big, but I’ve never figured out a good place to store leftover wood, especially big sheets of it. The original plan was to build something that hangs from the rafters, but for lots of boring reasons, it just wasn’t the right answer. So instead, I decided to stack the wood up against the wall.

I had to build a platform to keep the wood above the water main, so that’s why it’s not resting directly on the ground. It’s a very simple design. The bottom platform bears the weight and then there is a bar running across at about 5 feet up from the platform to keep the wood in place. That bar is held in place with a U bracket so I can just slide it up and out when I need to access big sheets of wood.

This solution won’t hold a LOT of wood, but I think it will do the job for a while. I actually don’t have a lot of big scraps left. Many of them went to this project!

benmartens December 9, 2013 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Workshop Additions

I recently purchased (used) a few tools which will greatly expand what I can do in my workshop.

I’ve always felt a bit stuck without a tablesaw. Whenever I needed one, I had to drive up to Monroe and bug Tim. That also meant making very sure that I had all my measurements ready ahead of time. The alternative was trying to use my circular saw to make the cuts myself. All that is behind me now!
I never knew I needed a biscuit joiner until I had access to one. This makes it so easy to join pieces of wood together. I used it heavily when I was building my desk and again when I was building the church sign.
When Tim offered to sell me his jointer, I said, “What’s that?” After a quick YouTube search, I wrote him back and said I’d take it. This helps you make two sides of your board perfectly flat and at a perfect 90 degree angle. This will come in very handy when I finally getting around to building some nicer furniture.
benmartens November 26, 2013 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Custom Storage and Desk: Part 3

Part 1 showed the cabinets going in. Part 2 talked about building and finishing the desk surface. Once that was all done, it was time to install the desk!

The two desk pieces fit into their spots pretty well. There were some non-square walls that I had to deal with and it required a bit of sanding on one end for a good fit, but overall, it wasn’t too bad. The oak desk surface was screwed to the cabinets and supports from the bottom up. I added a couple 45 degree angle supports just to ensure that the desk was solid. I was able to put all my weight on the biggest span so it should be ok.

After installing it, I drilled a hole for the cords to snake down under the desk and installed a grommet. This was one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the build. I had to take a giant hole saw and cut through this piece of wood that I had spent weeks building. Thankfully it went smoothly.

Once it was all assembled, I realized that the surface was an inch or two too high. I’m a big guy so I like a tall desk, but this was too much. When I designed this, I had only accounted for the height of the cabinets and forgot to include the thickness of the desk and the spacers I had to put under the cabinets so the doors wouldn’t scrape against the carpet as they opened. It wasn’t a huge deal though because I knew I could use a keyboard tray. I don’t generally like keyboard trays because I feel like they are too small or too flimsy so I decided to build my own. I ordered 14” slides and then used some leftover oak plywood to build a keyboard tray that is almost 3 feet wide and over a foot deep. Now THAT is a keyboard tray! It’s rock solid and plenty big enough.

After that was all done, it was time to move in. I ran all the cables and tried to start with some nice cable organization. One of my favorite features is this little cord manager which sits to the left of my keyboard. It holds all of the little USB dongles that I use regularly (micro USB, mini USB, smart card reader, etc) so that I don’t have to go digging through a door or under my desk to find the right one.

I’ve started cleaning up the pile of boxes that used to be up against this wall. A lot of it is getting thrown away or donated, but the remainder is getting organized into the cabinets. Once that is done and I finish a couple other house projects, I would like to build some small shelves under the desk to the right of where my desk chair is to help even out that space. Right now that opening looks a little lopsided. I also need to add some handles on the drawers and cabinet doors. Those parts can wait a little while though.

This was a huge project, but I’m very proud of the way it turned out. I did it for about $3500 less than a contractor would have charged me. It’s not overly fancy, but it gets the job done.

benmartens November 12, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Custom Storage And Desk: Part 2

Part 1 showed the cabinets going in. Once that was done, I added two sets of quad outlets above what will be the desk surface. Each quad outlet contains two outlets that are built-in surge protectors. This seemed useful for things like printers and scanners which will sit on the desk surface.

The length of the wall wasn’t an even multiple of the cabinet sizes I had available so I couldn’t stretch cabinets all the way to the end of the wall. Instead I wrapped some custom shelves around that corner. This is my least favorite part of the project, but they were cheap and functional. I can replace them later if I come up with something better. I bought some 10” metal supports and a couple melamine boards. I cut the boards to fit, ironed white veneer on the exposed ends and mounted them.

Next it was time for the hardest part of the job: building a desk surface. I went through a ton of different ideas from buying a bunch of boards to make a butcher block style table and using laminate flooring. This kept me up nights. I won’t go into details but there were a bunch of requirements that seemed to conflict. Finally I decided to build it with 3/4” sheets of oak plywood and face it with 1” strips of solid oak.

I had to build the desk in two parts in order to get it up the stairs into the room. One piece was an L-shape with a 45-degree angle where I’ll sit and the other wise was a simple 2’x8’ rectangle with a notch cut out of one corner to accommodate a support structure in the wall. I don’t have a table saw (yet) so all of the big cuts were done on the garage floor using a clamped straight edge to guide my circular saw. It’s not the most glamorous way to make cuts, but it sure works well even with one person. (The blue tarps were set up to cover my shelves and to block off the third bay where I was working in an effort to control dust.)

The building work went pretty quickly once I got started. The L-shape part was two pieces of plywood joined together with biscuits and glue. The facing went all the way around the desk and was also attached with biscuits and glue. There are no nails in the whole thing so the surfaces are pristine. I bought some 48” clamps and got good at using them as I slowly attached each piece of oak to face the plywood.

Once the building part was complete, I nervously set about staining the desk. It’s a huge surface and I’m no expert. A new 5” random orbital sander helped immensely as I got the surfaces prepped. I ran through 120 grit, 150 grit, and 220 grit sand paper.  I figured I needed to do each piece in one pass so that the stain would be put on roughly even. I started by doing the bottoms of both pieces, made my mistakes there and then did the tops. After the stain I applied three coats of polyurethane (the bottom only got one coat.) Given the cool weather, I wanted to let everything dry extra long so I did one coat per day. That stretched the project out a long time, but in the end, I had a desk surface that I was pretty proud of.

Next up: Installation and finishing touches

benmartens October 28, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Custom Storage And Desk: Part 1

The only want I’m able to distract people from the pile of boxes and junk along the wall in the man cave is with a 110” screen. On that same wall, I also had a tiny little cheap desk and chair setup that have been progressively getting worse and worse over the years. I had grand visions for what that area of the room could be, and after completing a bunch of other home projects, it was time to tackle this one.

My first decision was whether to do this myself or contract it out. To get a rough idea of material costs, I did a drawing in Google Sketchup using the dimensions of Ikea cabinets. I then got a bid from a contractor for one of these online cabinet places. The contractor’s design was definitely nicer than what I drew, but it was about 2.5 times the cost. While getting that bid might feel like a waste of time, it helped me a lot throughout the project because I knew how much money I was saving.

The cabinets were the first big steps in the project after the planning was done. They were quick to assemble and very easy to hang even with only one person. The design of the cabinets is really intelligent and allows me to easily swap shelves for drawers or vice versa if I ever want to later. I could also upgrade the cabinet facing without too much cost. I still need to pick out door pulls and cabinet handles but I’ll probably do that at the end.

Next up: shelving along the left side of the cabinets and a desk surface.

benmartens October 21, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Low Power Living Room

Tyla laughs whenever I start talking about light bulbs, but here we go again. Our living room, eating area and kitchen are now completely incandescent free. When we bought the house, that area contained 11 60-watt bulbs, 2 100-watt bulbs, and 5 40-watt bulbs. When all the lights were on, that was using over a killowatt every single hour! We spend most of our time in that area and if we left all those lights on for 5 hours a day, that’s $193/year in electricity bills. With the new combination of CFL and LED bulbs, that same usage would cost $32. Not too shabby. By my calculations, it will take us about 2-3 years to recoup the cost of the bulbs and then we’ll be saving money.

The tricky part of this was finding good 40 watt equivalent LED candelabra base bulbs. There aren’t a lot of them out there yet. I tried three different types:

  • Costco sells a 3 pack made by Feit. These were the cheapest at about $10 for three bulbs, but they were also the lowest quality. The light wasn’t the standard 2700K color that you get from incandescent. It was significantly whiter and it also has a delay when you turn it on.
  • Torchstar sells a bulb for $7 that turns on instantly but is a bit too white. It’s better than the Costco bulbs, but still not acceptable for a lamp that we use all the time in close proximity to other lights.
  • The winner was a bulb from Sexy LEDs. It has the right color and comes on instantly. If I had to knock it, I’d say that it’s not quite as bright as a 40w incandescent bulb. It was close enough for our purposes.

Unfortunately those Sexy LED bulbs are also the most expensive. I chose to use them in that main light fixture above our eating area and then use the cheaper Costco bulbs in the other areas of the house like the stairwell and the upstairs hallway. Color and delay don’t make as big of a difference there.

This will all pay off as long as the bulbs are reliable since part of the savings is that you basically never have to replace them. We’ll have to wait a while to figure out if that holds true.

benmartens October 15, 2013 Home Improvement

Picking Ikea Cabinets

I don’t know when Ikea started selling cabinets, but I’ve been hearing a lot about them lately. Sure they sell very cheap melamine cabinets, but they also sell cabinets that look very high-end. We have a homeowners mailing list at work which is usually full of high end remodels, but even people there have been buying the cabinets and having their contractors assemble and install them.

I recently purchased seven cabinets for the project in the man cave and it’s worth sharing a few tips I picked up for getting the cabinets from Ikea. Like all the furniture in that store, it comes unassembled in a about 4-6 boxes per cabinet. You can pay $40 to have an employee pick all the pieces for you off the shelves, but it’s not too hard to do it yourself if you have the right preparation.

Let’s say you want to buy Akurum wall cabinets. First, go to the website and choose the exact size and color options that you want. That will give you a specific “Article Number” located under the price. Write that down. Near the bottom of the page, there’s a section that says it comes in 4 packages and has a link to view the sizes of each package. In the popup window, each package is listed twice (once in imperial and once in metric.) Write down the article numbers here and note how many of each one you need. The text of the website will also suggest if you should get other things with the cabinets like legs for the base cabinets and suspension rails for the wall cabinets. Finally, create extra blank columns for aisle and bin numbers. Now you have a table that looks like this:

Print this off and take it with you to Ikea. Take a look at the map when you walk in and skip straight to the warehouse. Head for a computer and type in the main article #. That will pop up a screen showing each of those pieces that you listed and the aisle and bin where you can find them. Fill those numbers in on your sheet.

From here on out, it’s just manual labor. Visit each of the aisle/bin locations and grab as many of the items as you need. At the end, add up how many pieces you expect to have and then count the items in your cart. Keep this sheet around because when you’re back home, it will help you remember which boxes go with which cabinet style.

The $40 service from Ikea is expected to take 30-40 minutes. I did this in just under and hour, and that includes wasting about 15 minutes miscounting the items in my carts and trying to figure out why it wasn’t what I expected.

My father-in-law kindly loaned me his truck for this, but it turns out I could have fit everything in the Escape. But given how far Ikea is from us, I didn’t want to drive all the way down there and then not be able to get it home.

How easy are they to install? That will have to wait for another blog post. I’m still figuring that out.

benmartens September 6, 2013 Home Improvement

Ikea Cabinet

Have you ever used Ikea cabinets? I’ve heard really good things about them and I’m thinking about using their cheapest version for a project in the man cave. We’re going to make an entire wall into a bunch of storage and a long desk. Playing around with Sketchup and a premade library of Ikea cabinets gave me this rough idea:

This is probably going to be one of my big projects for the month of September when I’m home on paternity leave. Next steps are to finalize the design and pick up the cabinets. I’ll get those installed and then figure out how to make a desk top and the shelves. If you’ve done anything similar and have advice for me, I’d love to hear it.

benmartens August 19, 2013 Home Improvement