We have had an eventful couple of days, construction-wise.

First, after months of work, we have the first set of doors complete and up!

It was a lot of work to build these, but I couldn’t be happier with the results!

All the steps to put these together are already fading into memory, but here are some pictures and notes from the process.

The Ponderosa pine was sourced locally through a sawmill up in the Gila Forest near Silver City. They let let us handpick all these boards and centerlined the boards to make the widths precise and the edges square.

After we cut the boards, we routed a groove out of each edge. Into this groove would be glued a piece of plywood to add strength to the joints. (This sounds easier than it was. It took a lot of testing and fiddling.) These are the smaller sections that go above and below the glass.

Then we glued in the plywood and put the parts together with pipe clamps. More weeks worth of work.

This is a door after it was glued (but not yet trimmed to size).

After this, Brad did a rough trim on the doors and then began hanging them. This involved many rounds of putting them up, trimming them, putting them back up, etc.

When they were finally perfect, I finished them. This involved the same 10 rounds of stain, sealer, and finish that we did on other timbers. There are many other details I’m leaving out like cutting the stop, but you get the idea.

There is one more set of doors to do, but they are already built and assembled so they just need to be hung and finished.

I think I’ll leave the other major feat of the week for another post. Until then.

I’ve been doing a lot of woodworking with rough finish wood. It’s nice to work with because it’s rough and meant to be “imperfect,” but you can’t really sand out any problems that you don’t want to show in the final piece. I found a great new tool to use on rough lumber though. It’s basically a hard nylon brush that goes on a drill. It works great for getting out black marks and smoothing out (in a rough way) other things.

In other news, we got the ceiling board lumber so I have lots of staining work to do. (Dad, we miss you!)

It is finally spring here! There are lots of baby cows and poppies this spring. We have had several days of warm weather and are stucco’ing madly. Not too much fun in the 40 mph wind gusts we had today, but that is a part of spring here.

Each evening after stucco’ing, I’m working on finishing the big timbers that will go up around the doors and windows where there is adobe. The color is the hardest part to me — to stain or not to stain? I’m leaning toward leaving the vigas (round timbers that are already up) and the glulam with a natural finish and doing the rough timbers and ceiling boards with a light stain like we have for the ceiling in the guesthouse.

The first step was to trim the timbers. Then for the finish. I don’t have much experience with finishing rough wood, so any advice is welcomed.

Here’s my process so far.

1. Belt sand the ends of the timbers.
2. Wirebrush all the wood, removing as much dirt as possible. (There are some grey marks on some of the wood, but not everywhere. At the beginning, I didn’t know how much the varnish would cover that, but it seems to be covering fine.) It’s weird to be not to be doing round and rounds of sanding.
3. Use compressed air to clean any miscellaneous dust, etc. off the surface.
   

   This is the wood before any finish.

4. Apply Minwax pre-stain wood conditioner. (These timbers are ponderosa pine, a soft wood. Conditioner is supposed to help the stain take better.)
5. Apply Minwax stain. I used a 50/50 mix of oak and natural, the same as we used for the ceiling boards in the guest house.
   

   This is after staining.

6. Apply two coats of Waterlox Marine Sealer. (This is a pretty expensive tung oil finish system designed for extreme weather. Some of these beams will be outside, and the other finishes I’ve tried for outdoor wood haven’t lasted. I’m hoping to use this on the new outside doors as well.)
7. Apply two coats of Waterlox Marine Finish.

With drying time and two sides for each board, the whole process takes about 14 days. This will take awhile, but so far, the results look good.

And with the final coats of sealer and finish