I Suck at This

Got all ready to work on the hideout tonight, when I discovered the piece of drywall I took off the wall downstairs won’t work for the hideout ceiling. Because of the receptacle that was cut into it, it’s not a big enough. Because the ceiling has to go up first, I couldn’t just use it for the walls – yet.

Too late to head to Home Depot and get more, I decided to build more volumes for the kids climbing wall. I had a stack of Pine we’d bought to use for our stairs before we decided to use oak instead. It would be perfect for volumes. I’d set up an assembly line of sorts and crank out a few in a matter of minutes/hours.

I reviewed the instructions I found on the web, and got to work.

The measuring, cutting, gluing and nailing went pretty well. Of the five I made, I only kind of screwed up one.

Then I moved to the “optional” step where you cut a 45° angle into the sides where they attach to the wall and it all went to hell in a hurry. The 45° angle insures the volume fits flush to the wall. Typically at the gym they skip this step and simply tape over the gap that’s created between the volume and the wall. That’s fine and dandy at the gym, because they don’t have toddlers climbing their volumes and trying to get their finger into every little nook & cranny or pull off every piece of tape they can find.

The problem with cutting the 45° angle is that in order for the tip to fit smooth and nice at 45°, the end has to have a significant amount of material removed. So what was a volume with 8″ sides at it’s tallest point is now a volume with it’s tallest side somewhere in the 4″ to 6″ range depending how good you are with the table saw (or math, I’m not sure which).

That’s the other hellacious part of this. The table saw is suicide. Wrestling a 4′ triangle through an unguarded table saw, while maintaining the 45° angle to the edge of the wood is nuts.

In the end what used to be a 4′ triangle with 8″ sides is now only 3′ with 5″ sides.

Nothing more encouraging in life than starting with what you think is a lot and ending with much less.

Yeah. They really weren’t that big to begin with.

The only thing keeping me from thinking this was a complete waste of time is that maybe I learned something.

What did I learn?

I either need to pay out the nose and buy volumes or start with significantly larger pieces of wood, so that when it’s all said and done I have the size I expected to have.

Of course wrestling larger pieces of wood through my table saw is about as appealing as wrestling a larger alligator, which leads me to consider a safer table saw.

Ha!

One more reason to sit on my ass and watch TV!

– b