Little to see, but progress non-the-less

The dry waller finished mudding and texturing the ceiling today.



As you can see, it's not pretty, but all the holes are gone and that's the point. Flooring starts tomorrow morning.

Because the veneers are taking up space in my shop, I'm preparing to start the veneering process. The island parts will be first. But before I can do that, I have to prepare the blanks for the doors and drawers. This means making the solid wood pieces which will cover the exposed edges of the center MDF cores.

In case you didn't follow that, the doors and drawers will have a core of MDF. All 4 edges will be dressed out in solid rosewood, then both faces will be veneered with rosewood. This way, no matter how you turn it you see real wood. The trick will be the extra steps needed to make "end grain" sticks that are consistent with the grain direction of the faces. This extra step will make the combination of the veneer and solid wood appear more natural. I'll do a detailed photo essay of the process when I do it.

To finish off today, I milled a bunch of thin sticks of rosewood from several of the rough boards I showed you last week. This is what unfinished Bolivian Rosewood looks like when it's milled flat.



These pieces have a lot of wild graining. For more visible parts I'll try to cut around as much of the curly grain as possible. But since this wood is so expensive, and these edges will not be very visible (only when you open the doors and drawers), I opted to use the less desirable parts. I will still cut out as much as possible in the next steps.

Ideally, the visible pieces would all look like that beautiful center stick (or the second one to the right of center). But hand selecting every piece like creates a lot of waisted wood and drives up the cost. This client is very sensitive to environmental conservatism, and most people are cost conscious, so this is a good place to compromise because of it's low visibility.