Thursday, November 10, 2016

This is what happens.......

This is what happens when you decide to downsize, sell the house that you've lived in for sixteen years.... and have barely a month to pull it off.

I think there were 22 boxes of Airstream related "stuff"  that is either waiting to be installed or was supplies. Yikes! 

The summer went by in a blink of an eye!  We are temporarily living in an apartment while searching for the next house.

The good news is that Moonraker has been relocated to a warehouse where I can actually work on her this winter.  Out of the snow and with heat even!   The bad news is all my stuff is in storage.  So an average day of working on Moonraker consists of four hours of looking for a darn tool/supply and 2 hours of actually accomplishing something.   It's quite evident at this point that I should have taken the time to label the boxes better. 

Here's Moonraker in her new digs.....


At this point I have all three closets built.  The cabinets were all built with 1/4 inch Baltic birch, except for the one panel that will hold the future TV, that was 1/2 inch Baltic Birch.   The face frames are  all maple:  1x2 sides with a 1x6 board at the top and 1x3 board at the bottom.  All assembled with the Kreg jig.   The front long outside edges were then  routed with a 1/2 inch round over bit.



The old cabinet sides were used as patterns but there was quite a bit of tweaking to do to get a good fit.  I reused the old metal "F" frames but the 1/4 inch baltic birch is wider than what Airstream used,  and even after widening the f channel as much as I could I ended up rabbeting a layer or two of the baltic birch off the back edge

And no they don't have doors yet!  Muttering.....

I wanted the shelving to be adjustable so I used something called a sawtooth shelving system.  I purchased it here.  It looks like this (from their website).
 I am happy with how it turned out but it was a lot of extra work!   And it meant the shelves had to be cut in a pretty funky pattern!


The side rails with the "teeth" are glued and brad nailed on.  The shelf supports just wedge tightly in place.  I was prepared to have to tack them in place with some double sided tape but surprisingly enough they stay in place as long as the shelf has something on it.  The one time we traveled with a closet empty everything had tumbled to the floor, thank goodness I labeled the back of the supports!

Some close ups of my cabinets.  Note that I can even have a shelf in front of the fuse box as it can be removed in seconds.





And my favorite part, I used a patinated copper for the side in the shower area!   Love how it goes with the aqua of the tub. It went on fairly easily with contact cement (ie with only minor hyperventilating).  I still have to figure out what to trim the top edge of the tub with because I was missing a piece of the original.



This area at the bottom is going to be tricky, I can't rivet it up tight to the wall, there just isn't that much give in the tub wall, the plan is to fill it in with some custom cut PVC exterior trim board and then to cover it with ....well something.  Sounds like a stellar plan huh?  Well maybe not so stellar, but it IS a plan!

Other things to see... The cabinet is attached with aluminum brackets at the top.  Kreg jig screws at the bottom.. Solid as a rock.


Also managed to finally wire these beauties in.  They have the same star pattern as the sconces up front .  They are glass and have to be babied but sooo worth it!

Hubby:   You mean we have to take those down every time we drive? Are you kidding me?
Me :   Yup, but aren't they beautiful?

Another case of form over function lol!

Ugggh, that white plastic knob is ugly, need to look for a metal ones!  They each have two led bulbs from M4LED ( here ) that put out a surprising amount of light.  I went with the natural light rather than the warm light.  There's enough yellow tones in this trailer to make Big Bird happy, I didn't need to add more!! 


It really is nice to have a true workshop, think that can fit into a downsizing plan???????

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Here be dragons....

Well it's been winter in New England, so I thought it was time to work on some projects that could be accomplished inside!

Drapes!

And that's where the "here be dragons" reference comes in!   These drapes kicked my sorry self back to high school!   Let me preface this by saying I consider myself an accomplished seamstress.  I've made wedding dresses, prom dresses, I've made dresses where my daughter has handed me a picture of an actress wearing a dress and asked me to copy it.  I can smock, embroider.. you name it, sewing doesn't scare me, I've even done a houseful of drapes.   ..... BUT  I've never done a pleated drape, and trust me.... There be dragons.

My criteria for choosing a style of drape was as follows.

Pleats not gathers,
I wanted a clean, stream-lined look
Modern, not old fashioned (that ruled out your typical single and triple pleated drapes)
NO rings, as minimal a curtain rod as I could find.
And absolutely NO curtain tracks which I find truly hideous.

What I settled on was an inverse pleat like this:

I think I googled every curtain rod on the planet, I wanted to use a low profile wire system but very few of these exist, and they get lousy reviews about the ability to hold a heavy curtain without sagging.

After testing several alternatives I settled on these.
They are made to handle artwork (ie heavy duty) and while typically used vertically, I didn't see any reason why they wouldn't work horizontally. Plus they had a tensioner built in so my drapes would be sag free.Cause sag free is important ya know!

I'm not going into the minutiae of my thought process( you really don't want to get into my mind like that, trust me !) but in order to get these drapes to work I had to figure out how to hang them without using curtain rings.   In a typical pleat, the fabric is in front of the rod, in inverse pleats it's behind,  so to make the drapes stay close to the wall I installed metal grommets in each pleat.

I used grommets with 1/2 inch holes on top, 1/4 inch holes on the bottom.  The top ones needed to be larger in order to slip over the tensioner so the curtain can be pushed all the way to the sides.

I'd like to say at this point that I will forever associate these drapes with the 2016 presidential debates..... Also any mistakes I made are wholly attributed to me yelling at the TV when I should have been paying better attention to what I was doing!!

How the heck did I get this far without showing you the fabric!

Here it is.... It's Richloom Rave indoor/outdoor fabric in cherry.  It's a nice weight with a linen like weave.
https://www.fabric.com/buy/un-817/richloom-solarium-outdoor-rave-cherry

 I ordered 15 yards and used every bit of it!    This fabric that was already pre-lined, but not light blocking, so I added blackout lining.

Here's one big drape that I was starting to mark the pleats on.
After pleating and installing grommets!
There's a lot of math that goes into doing pleated drapes!  I didn't have any trouble actually sewing them,  but figuring out how many pleats would fit on each window  and adjusting a few of the pleat depths to make them all the windows look the same was extremely tedious. There's ten pages of this!

Here's a picture of the curtain grommets on the wire curtain rod.
And here's some pictures of completed drapes.
One of the nice things about this style of drape is that it stacks back really compactly for maximum window area.
On the bottom I used clear elastic cord that attaches to command hooks on either end.  This snugs the curtain up to the walls and when the curtains are open you can barely see the cord.  Actually, you can barely see it in this picture too!
For the snaps at all four corners,  I found snaps that look like bullet casings!
I also sewed some of those tiny magnets into the inner edges of the curtains,  so when I close them they stay closed!
 I was able to sandwich the magnets between the inner lining and the blackout.
I even did a snap on cover for the skylight!



The last step was to "train" the drapes with strips of paper.  I stacked them all to one side to do this but the drapes actually open in the middle, and stack back on both sides.


I also made these duffel bags that get hung under the bed from safety cup hooks.  The idea is to be able to pack them in the house and just bring out to Moonraker and clip them in.  LOTS of storage space, and they'll double as laundry bags.  They actually were kinda fun to do after the drapes!  They are lined in vinyl and the bottom is vinyl too. Aqua of course!

Work will resume shortly on cabinets! We've decided to put our house on the market in a couple a weeks (time to downsize), so I've been busy to get the house ready to go.  We've got lots of camping trips planned for this summe,r so I need to get back to work on them!

Oh,  and we ordered two leather recliners for the front of Moonraker .  We may not have running water or a stove, but between the beds and the recliners we will be comfy!!