Tag: Mantel

November 24, 2020 – Mantel Project is Complete, More Have to Want it

November 24, 2020 /

I finished my mantel project on Sunday. I kind of fell off of keeping track of my hours and I definitely didn’t hit my target date. I suppose if you are keeping up with the theme, I didn’t really want to.


I had other things that I would rather do. I had bids that I needed to get out. I had interviews to attend, I had blogging I wanted to do. I had other things that I had to do like hanging light fixtures, moving furniture for new carpet and assembling new furniture.

As with all projects, I ran into some things that didn’t go exactly as I expected. I was going to use a special router bit to make the 45 degree miter stronger, but I found the setup to be way too fussy without a proper router table. I also found that the air dried fir was too brittle to precision route an touchy joint. Those kind of derailments made me pause for a new strategy and that kind of pause put the brakes on momentum of the project.

To be truthful, I am looking more forward to the table that I am going to build next. I built this one first to get it done because the next project is going to be significantly bigger. I will need to do some more planning to get a more accurate estimate of how long things are going to take. One thing for sure is that I am not going to have the kind of time that I had previously.

With the holidays approaching, there is always significantly less free time. I also took a seasonal job delivering for Amazon. I may be working four to six days a week doing that for now. I think it will allow time to keep looking for a replacement job and writing but there is only so much time in a day and week for doing projects.

This is a job that I wanted. Don’t get me wrong, it is my lowest, post college degree paying job by a long shot. But, it is a four ten hour shift a week, turn it off when you clock out kind of gig. It is going to bring in some money consistently and there are worse jobs for less money out there. Believe me, I have been looking.

I have always thought that I would be interested in a job driving. I can download my playlist, listen to my podcasts and get paid to do so. I will talk more about my experience later, but I am thinking that this could be fun for a while.

If you were to ask me what my favorite job was, I would tell you that it was when I was a student janitor my senior year in college. Many people could find the downside in being a janitor, but I actually liked it, a lot. Beside the obvious benefit of getting some spending money, it forced me to budget my time effectively because I worked every week night. The best part was getting away from my complicated cerebral calculus and high level science projects and spend three hours a day sweeping, mopping and doing event setup. I lost twenty pounds, stayed focused and got paid.

I am hoping that this job will be a motivator with some of the same side benefits. In the mean time, I still have some days to do my own business if I get any or work on projects.

November 16, 2020 – Testing some changes and building a template

November 16, 2020 /

Supposedly, things are working the way they should. I did finish my post on Friday, not without struggles. Things were adjusted again and I will see if they working better. In technical jargon, there was some caching issues and a bunch of sessions on the server, more than were allowed. I have a hard time buying that, but I guess time will tell.

As another side note, I have discovered that it seems like my maximum image size is 2500×2500 pixels without upgrading server resources (paying more). It seems like I am going to have to edit every image in order to get them to post. I guess where I find this frustrating is that this is not the cheapest plan, I don’t know how the cheaper plans would work beside just plain text or a simple static site.

OK, accountability time. I didn’t finish the mantel on November 4 because I didn’t stick to my schedule. And I didn’t stick to my schedule because I wasn’t feeling like it. Part of my excuses were fiddling around with this site more that I should have. Part of it were other things in life going on and a lot of it was I was just not being disciplined.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t made progress or that I am not close, because I am. I have the final fitting and the finishing to complete. I think that I should be close by the end of the week. But, what I wanted to talk about today is making a template for the proper fit.

The mantel is not even depth across the width. It is an inch wider on the right side than on the left. I was also concerned about different angles so I built a template of what the top should be so that I could try to get this as close to perfect on the first try. This is a technique that is used by counter makers to try and accommodate for uneven walls.

To build a template, one way to do it is use thin pieces of wood, hot glued together to follow all of the contours and angles. This also helps as a mock-up technique as well to make sure that you have an idea of the proportions of what you are building. This template is then used to trace on your work so that with an accurate cut, you get a perfect fit.

To get the very best fit, the template should be scribed against the wall. Scribing involves using a compass following the wall at a set distance. Once the line is made to fit all of the contours, cut to the line and test the fit, it should fit like a glove. I realize that this is vague and probably warrants a video or separate post. Check this tutorial for a primer.

Templates can also be made with paper or cardboard as well. Use what you have on hand and what is convenient to work with. Take your time and sometimes a template is the right technique to use.

October 26, 2020 – A little more about project planning, with an actual plan

October 26, 2020 /

Sometimes when I write, I don’t have a solid end goal in mind. I am writing against the clock to get my content generated so that I can move on to the next thing. I really wanted to get an example plan made up so that I could show it in action, but I didn’t want to spend the time I needed to make the plan, craft a well written article and also get some other work done.

Maybe it would be better to hold off and write something more comprehensive. But, the way I am working now, I am looking for not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. So, today I have created the plan for my mantel project and I can talk about how I use it.

On Friday, I introduced the concept of work segments (or units as I have written above). Remember that those are the blocks of time that you have to complete a particular task, or tasks that have a natural ending. So, I have broken my tasks down to what I think I can accomplish on a given date (assuming no interruptions) with no more than four hours a day. If I treat each unit as a work day and my work days are Monday through Friday, then I would in theory be completed with this project on November 4.

I want to say a little more about planning. In my past, my experience and expectations as a project manager was to over plan (in my opinion). If you look at my plan carefully, you will see that there are still decisions to be made. That means that my end date could very well slip because I didn’t build any extra time for ordering bits, testing colors or making mistakes cutting parts. I am very close to margins on my whole lumber bill of material which means I may have to mill up more lumber to finish this project. The truth is, I should have done some of this planning before I started cutting and now I am hoping to make it work.

Wouldn’t then over planning play into my benefit? Well, maybe; the devil is in the details. In my opinion, the best plan is detailed enough to guide your work yet broad enough to have room for unanticipated elements or decisions that have yet to be made. I also feel like too much detail leads to rigidity causing too much time fiddling with the plan instead of working. I actually made this plan more detailed that I would normally to illustrate how the pieces should work together and the consequences of how one thing might effect the other.

If this project was a job, once my project roadmap is set, then I would just get started. I wouldn’t spend any more time adjusting mid-stream unless there is a change in scope for some reason like this changes from a mantel to a whole fireplace surround. Once the bid is confirmed, then there is nothing really to do except document the hours and cost against the plan. There is probably another article about dealing with change some time in the future. I don’t see it on this project, but if the opportunity arises, I will write about it then.

This plan is really for my me and my wife, this is her project and she is the customer. I do use this process but the main reason that I put it together is so that I have a way to communicate where I am at on the project, what is left to do, any expenses that may occur and when she can expect that I will be done. She does not get into the technical details of how things get done or what tool/technique should be used, but she does understand time. Each decision of the day potentially has a compromise on the schedule. It means that to get this finished, time has to be allocated in the shop in addition to my other business dealings and family life. I also have a much larger project, the farm table waiting for this to get done.

When it comes down to it, there is no real deadline for this project. But as I said on Friday, without deadlines things tend to slip and this might get put aside for months. If this were a job, I would want to add travel time to get materials, planning time, billing time and build more time into the schedule to account for unknown. That would then go into my estimate for my bid.

I am going to keep track of my hours for my own business purposes because I have largely done woodworking as a hobby, but I would like to have in my pocket the effort of a custom mantel. I would also mention that I have the material already so there is no cost there. All in all, this is probably a $2000 project for a paying customer.

October 23, 2020 – Planning for the end and success

October 23, 2020 /

If you are like me, then you then you tend to prioritize the things that you want to do over the things that you don’t want to do. Or maybe said a better way, I deprioritize the things that I don’t really want to do and find lots of reasons to not do them. This has lead to projects literally sitting around in the shop for years.

Sometimes, when these projects are personal you want to get away from rigidity, accountability and structure. It is OK not to proceed with a plan because that is part of the escapism or hobby aspect. Other times, even when the project is personal the shop space is used for business purposes and having partial built projects is going to be in the way.

Today, I am going to talk about building a project plan to get things accomplished in your life. These are the techniques that are working for me.

  • Visualize the End State

This probably seems self explanatory, however you need to know what the end state looks like. What is this job going to create, look like, function or how is this going to benefit me? It helps to have an end in mind when starting a project. Without a definable benefit, I would question that there is value to this project.

For wood working projects, I like to sketch out what I think the end state is going to look like. This helps me select the right lumber I am going to need and keep track of the sequencing as I work through the sub steps.

  • Be Realistic About Your Tools, Space, Skills and Available Time

For me, the biggest gotcha here was not looking at the overall time commitment and just starting on something without regard to how long a project was going to take or even whether this was a priority. I would suggest, look at your schedule and determine what available blocks of time do you have consistently. A 1000 hour project is a lot of nights and weekends.

The reason this step is important and in this order is that later, when you are determining your work segments, you are planning to make success within the time that is available. Let me try to be a little more clear. If you only have one hour a day available, your tasks need to broken down to the point that you can succeed within an hour every day.

  • Create Work Segments That Fit Your Available Time

If you only have one hour a day to work on a project, then your planning needs to be to that level. Since I am probably largely going to work on this project as part of working time, I won’t have that short of constraint. I will use it as an example.

  1. 4hrs – Rough Mill lumber 4x 6″x72″

or

  1. 1hr – Find the rough boards in the lumber pile that will yield 6″x72″
  2. 1hr – Rough cut four boards 6″x72″
  3. 1hr – Joint the four rough cut boards
  4. 1hr – Plane the four rough cut boards
  • Create Your Own Deadlines Using Your Work Segments

You can add up all the job parts and put them on a calendar. That will essentially give you a project time line for completion. Just remember that life is here, I don’t live on an island. I don’t have the luxury of every weeknight and all weekend all the time. I suspect that most people don’t either, so don’t build that in to your plan.

Do also build some extra time into each task if possible to correct mistakes. Unless you are an expert (in which case you probably don’t need this help) you are going to have some things to correct. This is time that can be used to jump ahead in the plan if everything goes well.

I know that once I get things planned, I now want to meet or exceed my own deadlines. That is OK. The point of this whole exercise is to get things done and feel good about it.

  • Socialize Your Plan for Personal Accountability

It is pretty easy to do all the previous steps and still not get things done. You have to be on edge a little bit about whether you are going to succeed to keep you engaged. A spouse pushing is a pretty big motivator, but a social media post or a friend could also work.

  • Keep Track of Your Progress for Future Use

Maybe you just guessed at how long something would take and you were badly wrong. You would want to account for that next time. There is also a piece where experience and familiarity can speed things up so it is helpful to keep track of progress for better future estimating.

There you go, you have just project managed your first project. That is all there is to it. I have used this technique to get un-stuck on projects very successfully. It is also a similar mindset to building estimates for my business.