The Floating Garage Shelves

The floating garage shelves was a quick single day project.  Only a few hours actually.  I got the idea from a youtube video about a guy who cut up some doors and made shelves out of them.  The materials where simply 2x4 and a door and some screws.  I have all of that laying around in my garage from other projects. In fact I have quite a few spare doors sitting around because I've been replacing them one by one in my house.  More on that later.

I'm in the garage with the idea that I'm going to clean it up and reorganize it so that I can build a nice workbench that includes my table saw and compound miter saw and new craigslist drill press, with room for a vice and router table.  I've got big plans but in order to accommodate them, I need to clear out my garage. So naturally I get to wondering what I'm going to do with these doors that I have and I am reminded of the shelves I saw on youtube.

The door I use is a plain flat faced hollow core door.  I set up the table saw for an 8 inch cut and I rip both sides off so that I have two pieces that are 8" wide closed on three sides and open on the fourth.  Then I rip the remaining piece to 8" that is closed on both ends but open on both edges.

I take an old 2x4 that I have that is actually only about 6' long because it was used on another project and I rip it straight up the center so that I have two 1-3/4" x 6' pieces that I set into the hollow core of the shelves and hang on the wall.

Inside the door I discover that the supporting pieces are actually just cardboard.  Not even thin strips of wood, it's straight up corrugated cardboard glued loosely to the 3/16th panels. It easily taps away from the panels, so all I do is use a tool to push the cardboard deeper into the shelf to make room for the 2x4 I'm going to stick into the edge.

The gap between the panels is only 1-1/8" thick, so I needed to rip my 2x4 sticks down to 1-1/8" so that it slides neatly into the edge of the shelf.  I make three like this, and check that they fit into the edges.  Then I find the studs on my wall and screw them into the garage wall evenly at about a foot apart and as level as I can get it.  The first two shelves that are enclosed on three sides are very easy to install because I don't need to do much with them.

The top cleat is identical to the two holding in each shelf.  I attached the bottom two shelves with wood glue. Then after leveling them, I punched staples all along the top back edge to keep it from pulling away from the cleat while the glue dries.

If you look close you can see that there is a keyhole mark in the lower shelf and two hinge marks in the middle shelf.  I used some of the thin strips of wood that I salvaged from when I trimmed the 2x4's down to size to fit it into those grooves and glued it into place.  Then I used wood putty to fill in the little gaps left over.  Now when (if) I paint the shelves, the hinges and keyhole will be mostly hidden.

The top shelf was a bit trickier since it did not have a face on one of the edges.  I first attempted to rip a thin piece of veneer and glue it over the entire edge, as can be seen in the picture below.  After letting it dry for about 2 hours I took off the clamps.  It didn't stick at all, it just fell off.  There wasn't enough surface area on the two panel edges to hold the veneer.

Plan B.  I decided the only way this would work would be to rip another piece of 2x4 down to fit inside the groove of the edge and glue it where there was more surface area.  I cut a piece that was wide enough, but still only about 1/2" thick so as to not be too heavy and cut it exactly as long as the groove in the edge was so that I wouldn't have a lot of gap to fill with wood putty.  Sadly I didn't get any pictures of me gluing the piece into place, but here is a closer look at the end result.  Not too bad, a little paint and it will look normal.  After the glue had dried I thought the edge could use a little work as it was a bit jagged and the 2x4 piece didn't fit in evenly the length of the shelf.  Instead of sanding it all out, I ran it through the table saw and took off about 1/8 of an inch.  Just enough to make it perfectly straight, and then I sanded it a little to smooth the edges.

I attached the last shelf to the wall the same as the first two.  I had a little trouble because the poorly mudded wall was rather uneven near the top, so this shelf is not exactly flush with the wall all the way across.  It is flush at both ends though, and because the cleat is firmly against the wall all the way across, you can't see light through it.

Here are the shelves as they are empty.  I like that they don't have any visible supports, they're just floating there on the wall.

Here the shelves are full of this and that.  I am not sure what will end up sitting on them, the stuff here is just what was handy on the table nearby for demonstration purposes.

All told the project took only a few hours.  I am pretty happy with the outcome, and as usual, I don't plan on finishing the job by sanding them down and painting them.  It's a garage after all, and I don't have to worry too much about looks.  Maybe someday I'll get the urge to finish the job!

On a side note, I do still have a four inch section of the door that didn't get used.  I'm thinking about making a mini shelf right near the bottom a foot below the lower shelf.  I've already got all the pieces, just need to take the time to do it.  It will only take an hour or so and I can put little jars of nails or other tiny items on it.

Brought to you by "The Amos School of Construction"

The hardwood floor

The hardwood floor project was a surprise post Thanksgiving project.  My wife had been whispering in my ear sweet dreams of hardwood flooring in our dining room and kitchen for a while, as early back as when we first bought the house.  I too was not happy with the old dirty looking linoleum kitchen floor that no matter how hard you scrubbed, it never seemed clean.  Also the nice carpet in the dining room that somehow always seemed to get wet, stained, covered in crusty rice and in need of constant vacuuming.  But a hardwood floor? Not really in the cards.  Hardwood would cost a fortune just for materials, I had no idea how to install it, and a professional installer would probably cost more for the install than the materials.

Sadly this is the only
picture I have of the
actual product in its
original package.

A screen shot of what the flooring looks
like from ConsumerReports.org

Then one day in November it seemed that fate was calling me, for there, in the middle of the floor in the markdown section of Lowe's stood a pallet holding 10 packaged boxes of solid oak 3/4 inch nail-down tongue and groove "gunstock" finish hardwood flooring for 50% off last marked price.  The brand was NobleHouse. Apparently Lowe's no longer sees fit to carry this brand so they liquidated it directly into the trunk of my Pacifica.  Each box would cover 20.9 square feet.  I sat down on the pallet of wood in order to signal to all the circling bargain hunters that this was my hardwood!  I got my wife on the phone and had her do an emergency floor measuring session while I waited, only occasionally having to pound my chest to defend my territory.

After an excruciatingly long time, the measurements came in.  190 square feet of coverage needed.  A quick calculation told me that I was sitting on 209 square feet of Oak.  SCORE!  I flagged down an unsuspecting Lowe's guy and requested a pallet jack.  They flagged down someone else, who flagged down a third someone else, because apparently everyone there was working someone else's department, and it was decided that instead of a pallet jack, they'd simply help me load it onto an elevated flat cart, apparently because no one knew where a pallet jack was.

The trip from the discount rack in the back to the registers in the front was a whole adventure all by itself.  I had Eric with me, who was on foot, and three helpful Lowe's employees in tow, all supervising as I pushed the 3800 lb cart with a broken left wheel, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, and a right wheel that had an ancient piece of bubble gum stuck to it, causing the cart to hiccup and stall every time the wheel turned, jiggle, jiggle, ka-thump, jiggle, jiggle, ka-thump, jiggle, jiggle, ka-thump...

As the juggernaut begins it's slow role down the aisle, it's clear that the Thanksgiving specials consisting of giant cardboard displays filled 240 piece drill bit/socket wrench/soda can openers are going to be a problem. The people who thought to put those in the middle of the aisle know that they have 42" wide carts right?  I dodge past the drill bit display, weave between the 8 pack of pliers and the combination floor scraper/flash light display, and plow straight into the Kobalt Multi-Cutter Utility Knife display.  Eric at this point has decided that he needs to jump in and help push, possibly because even a 22 month old baby can see that three supervising Lowe's employees is not enough to get this thing to the front of the store. To their credit, the employees did graciously volunteer to clean up the wide swath of destruction I left in my wake as I negotiated finally made it through the obstacle course.

When we reached the other side, Eric bounded off toward the exit without me, and I still had to turn the corner and head up toward the cash registers.  One of the employees started to push the cart for me as I scrambled after Eric.  When I caught the squirming toddler, I turned back to see that my cart of flooring was sitting around the corner, about 10 feet from where I had left it, and the helpful employee who apparently had lost interest in my cart was wandering aimlessly away looking for customers to help.  I plopped Eric down on top of the flooring and pushed him the rest of the way to checkout.  Total cost, $340.  Thankfully, (and redeeming Lowe's employees everywhere) the front manager and his sidekick both helped me to my car AND unloaded the flooring for me.  Thank you front manager and your sidekick!!!

I brought my hard-won prize home and unloaded it into the upstairs living room behind the couch where it would be safe from the damp and cold of the garage and still be out of the way.  One six foot package at a time, each weighing in at ~300 lbs.  My motorcycle weighed less than these things.  At least they where bulky and unwieldy, so that was a blessing. There the flooring stayed for the next three weeks while I recovered.

After Thanksgiving I was ready to tackle the project again.  I unloaded each package and stacked all the wood neatly according to length right on top of the area where it was to be installed.  Moments later I realized the problem with this and had to move all the neat little stacks to the living room.

Next began the most difficult, tedious, irritating and annoying part of the job.  Removing the linoleum and flooring in the kitchen down to the sub-floor.  I figured I could do it in 3 or 4 hours.  Not so! First, I figured out that the top floor goes under all the cabinets as well, cabinets don't sit directly on the sub-floor after all. Next I discovered that it's not a plywood overlay after all, but rather, 1/2" of particle board with 1/4" of plywood on top of that.  To make matters worse, the installer saw fit to nail down the 1/2" of particle board with ring shank nails at approximately 1 every 4 inches and then nail down the 1/4" plywood with some sort of nail gun nail that is twisted in order to provide maximum holding power, 1 every 4 inches.  The result was this floor was held to the sub-floor by about 50 nails per square foot.  Too late to give up now, I proceed.  

I made it this far in 4 hours.  I then gave up and went to bed.

The next morning I had worked out in my mind what I was going to do to get the flooring up. I headed off to Home Depot to rent one tool and buy another.  First on my list:  Toe kick saw.  I'd seen one of these babies before somewhere so I had a good idea of what I was looking for, I just didn't know what it was called.

 The Toe kick saw looks like a circular saw but with a long neck to reach underneath annoying things like cabinets!  I rented the tool for four hours for $25 including tax and insurance and all that, and used it for about 10 minutes.  I buzzed my way around all the cabinets in the kitchen and thankfully even remembered to pull out the stove and refrigerator and buzzed the floor up there too.  I cleaned up the tool, handed it to my wife and she most graciously returned.

The other tool I bought turned out to be one of the most handy tools for the project, not only for removing nails from the flooring, but also later as a pry bar to make the new floor nice and tight on the end pieces.

The Dead On Tools 10-5/8 Inch Exhumer Classic Style Nail Puller.

With this tool, I pulled out approximately 9,500 nails from the the floor.  It was the most valuable player in the tool world for the flooring project, and that's saying something, for there where so many valuable tools that I'd never even used before that I needed for this project.

After two more days of floor removal, I finally had the kitchen down to the sub-floor and also rolled back the carpet and pad in the dining room and cut it back to where I estimated the wood would start.  I left myself about 6 inches of overlap because the last thing I wanted to do was mess up the carpet transition.

I enlisted the aid of Liam to pull out the last 200 staples, carpet tacks and tack strips in the sub-floor where the carpet pad had been.  He did a great job, and can verify that 200 staples was not an exaggeration.

We worked together to pound down the nail heads that where sticking up a little bit more than they should, and also nailed in a lot of extra nails to help work out as much of the squeaks and creaks in the floor that we could.  This is more difficult than you might think, given that the addition of 5 nails directly on a squeak doesn't necessarily get rid of the squeak... figure that.

Next it was back to the store, for I decided that installing the hardwood directly to the sub-floor was going to be one of those bad ideas that only the Amos School of Construction would think of. So instead I went with a quasi-bad idea and installed 1/4 plywood overlay right on top of the sub-floor and put the hardwood on that.  It looks really good at this point, even though I know there's a lot of flooring experts out there that would likely cringe.

I decided to include a little dog-leg in the flooring to account for an area that I thought might look awkward in the flooring transition.  I removed the carpet from this area as well and left some overlap in hopes that I'd be able to make a good carpet to hardwood transition later.  I put down some of the hardwood and hand nailed it into place per instructions I found online.  I tried to get a single piece to use as the edge board, but my longest board was two inches too short, so I had my wife pick out a pair of nicely matched short boards to use as edging and also pick out the best looking pieces for the edging all the way across to the other side and nailed that down too with extra nails on both sides to make sure they were in their really straight and tight.  The whole floor was aligned off these boards so I took extra time to make sure they were aligned as parallel as possible to the opposite wall.

At this point I made a bad judgement call and continued to hand nail in the boards.  It was slow work lining up the individual sticks and pounding in the nails and then using a nail set to tap them in flush on the tongue of each board.  This was bad judgement for several reasons.  One, I pounded in the nails too far on several of the boards and caused some minor but visible dents in some of the edges where the hammer lightly touched the board edge.  Two, I used 2 inch finishing nails.  They are only going through about an inch of wood into empty space, so I really needed ring shank at least, so I am certain that over time the boards are going to start to feel loose as the nails lose their grip on the wood.  Three, it was such slow, tedious work that it seemed I wasn't making much progress.  I was losing my joy in the project to lack of perceived progress.  I made it through an entire box of finish nails before the day was over and I was done.  That night I resolved to get a floor nailer and do the rest of the floor right.

It took about 6 hours to do this much by hand.  Looks good but
I suspect there will be problems in the future.  Time to get a floor nailer!

Even Mommy gets in on the action!

Eric helps out whenever he can!

The next morning when I got to Home Depot to rent a floor nailer, there where four other people in line already, and the poor fellow behind the counter was obviously short handed, mostly obvious because he kept saying how short handed he was.  One guy wanted a repair, but the repair guy quit the Friday before. Another guy wanted to pay cash for his deposit, but apparently Home Depot only takes credit for deposit, probably so they can hit your card for the full price of the tool if you break it.  Another guy wanted to rent something that he didn't have because the five in stock where broken and the repair guy quit the Friday before. Some other guy tried to haggle with him over a tool rental, trying to get him to rent a tool to him for $5 bucks because he'd only need it for an hour.  No luck on the haggling, but nice try!

When it was finally my turn, I told him I needed a pneumatic flooring nailer.  This was not accurate, since he took me over to the nailers with a cart and started to load up this big air compressor and a hose.  I stopped him and asked if I had to pay extra for the compressor. $30 for four hours, and $30 for four hours on the flooring nailer.  No, I said, what about that manual one on the wall there.  Yep, that's only $25 for four hours or $40 for 24 hours, but I'd have to hit it really hard so people don't usually like those.  I'll take it!  Oh, by the way, the Home Depot is out of flooring nails.  I'll take it anyway!  Lowe's is just down the road, and I know I saw flooring nails there the other day.  Thankfully they actually do have some in stock... one whole box, $20... and I make it back home after only an hour of lines and running around.

Meet the Powernail 16 Gauge Manual Hardwood Floor Ratcheting Cleat Nailer! This handy dandy contraption was designed to let you pound in flooring nails at just the right angle and depth so that the you don't have to waste all the time lining up a nail, then tapping it in, and you don't risk damage to your material.  This was the second most valuable player in my tool set for this project and cost about $40 / 24 hrs.

When I got this home and set it up, it was clear that I now had the right tool for the job.  My wife and I where able to slap down four additional rows of hardwood in record time.  It went so quick that I initially had hope that I'd finish with the nailer and be able to return it in the cheaper 4 hour window.  This proved to be optimistic.  I ran into a setback when it was time to move the refrigerator back up into it's hutch.  A year earlier when we bought this large refrigerator, I had to cut away the wooden hutch in order to allow it to fit, not just for width, but for height as well.  I removed the upper cabinet, sawed it in half and removed about three inches from it and then glued it all back together.  This allowed my new fridge to fit in the space and still have cabinets above it.  There wasn't much clearance to begin with.  When I installed the new floor, I removed 3/4" of material and put down 1/4" underlay and 3/4" of hardwood, effectively raising the floor 1/4".  Suddenly I wasn't so sure the fridge was going to fit back in the hutch.  

Gennie and I worked out a way to get the back half of the fridge up onto the hardwood and sure enough, it didn't fit.  It was ever so slightly too tall.  I sat back and stared at it for a while, mentally cursing the Amos School of Construction for always being 1/4" off. Then I saw a possible solution.  The refrigerator was only half way on the hardwood.  The front was still an inch lower being on unfinished floor.  Because of that, there may be a chance that when I raise the front, the back will lower enough to get under the hutch.  I heaved up the front of the 1,000 behemoth and jammed my foot under the front so that it wouldn't drop back down. Then I wiggled my foot back and forth and I tried to jockey the fridge forward.  Sure enough, there was just enough clearance now that it started to go under the hutch. Once I had the fridge all the way onto the hardwood I started to press it into place, careful not to crush the water hose or power cable.  At last, when it was in place, I saw the damage.  When lifting it up and jockeying it into place, the rear feet of the fridge must have dug into the floor, because there was definitely some groove damage.  Ah well, it's a small price to pay for the absolute luck that I didn't have to take that hutch down and shorten it again!

Is it just me or can you still see light between there?

I swear there's less than 1/16" clearance between the fridge and the hutch now!  WHEW!  Even now I marvel that the darn thing fit.  The cabinet doors open too, although one of the handles does bump if you are pulling down too hard.  I'll have to fix that sometime later.

I finished up the kitchen portion including under the stove up to the dishwasher until I couldn't put the nail gun into position anymore.  Then I switched over to the dining room and finished that side until I couldn't line up the gun again.  Near the sliding glass doors I put two header boards to give it a transitional look.

The hard part for the wall pieces was ripping some boards lengthwise so that it fit against the wall while still leaving some clearance for expansion.  This was especially true under the dishwasher where I did not pull the dishwasher out, but rather cut the sub-floor up as far as I could get.  That left me with a small area where I had to cut a piece of flooring in a rather odd manner and get it to fit into the shape left by the opening.  It turned out very good, except that I couldn't nail it into place.  I turned to wood glue and glued it to the board next to it and now I simply hope that the glue holds forever in an area destined to get water under it.  Fingers crossed!

Over by the air vent was a similar situation.  I cut the wood strips to fit on both sides, then made L shaped cuts into the other pieces and a tiny 1"x12" piece that fit in a small section that needed covering. This part I'm proud of because the vent fits in perfectly.

The last part was to fix the carpet transition so that it looks good and doesn't bunch up.  I hoped to avoid buying a transition piece because I didn't want an ugly transition piece.  I read on the internet that you should cut the padding back about six inches, then fold your six inch overlap directly under and make a nice tight seam and tuck it into the groove of the hardwood.  I did this and it seemed ok, but it didn't stay down.  So I tried tacking it down with finish nails.  This only made dimples in the carpet and really looked bad.

Dimples!  Dimples are only cute on babies!

See?

Then I decided to do it with tack strip instead.  I went to Harbor Freight Tools and bought the cheapest carpet puller and stair tool I could find.  I pulled up the carpet again, cut away the extra overlap, replaced the carpet pad, and nailed down tack strip to hold down the carpet.  Then I pulled the carpet up over the tack strip and used the stair tool to tuck in the ends into the groove.  This ended up looking a lot better than before, simply because now there are no dimples in the carpet.

No more dimples!

Overall the project turned out really nice. Surprisingly nice actually.  I still have to put down the base boards and trim, and now Gennie wants to paint the cabinets because we have an awful lot of wood in our kitchen/dining room and she really wants to break it up a bit. The boys like the hardwood too because it's fun to slip and slide on it. I am particularly happy with the fact that it's now all one surface between the kitchen and the dining room, giving the area a nicer feel to it.

Left alone on the new floor the two boys wonder what to do.

Naturally they hitch a ride out of here!

During the project I found 5 or 6 pieces of wood that I would consider to be sub-standard, such as cracks, bad grain, and a couple even looked burned a little.  Also, there where another 5 or 6 boards that I ruined, either by nailing wrong, or by installing backward, or whatever.  On the plus side though, there where many boards that I had to custom cut to fit with the table saw, and I was able to use almost all of the cull and damaged boards in one way or another.  I had almost no waste.  I had about 16 square feet of left over boards which means that Lowe's had exactly what I needed to get the job done.  If there were only 9 boxes and I bought them, I wouldn't have been able to finish the floor.  Lucky find!

The total cost for the project adds up as the following:  Hardwood, $340, underlay, $98, nails, $31, nail removal tool, $14, rental tools, $25 + $44= $69.  The grand total, $552 +tax and gas, putting us right around $600 for a beautiful hardwood floor!

Lessons learned?  With regard to nailing the floor down, always get the right tool for the job early, don't figure you can do a better job by hand or with the wrong tools, you'll regret it later.  With regard to the hardwood expansion space, pay closer attention to the end spaces. Some of the end pieces are a little shorter than I'd have liked. With regards to the carpet transition, if you know the right way of doing a job, do it that way first, instead of taking a shortcut you find on the internet that looks bad and end up redoing the whole procedure the right way to begin with!  With regards to the refrigerator floor damage, I don't know if I could have avoided the floor damage.  We used paper and cardboard to protect the floor, but really, I'm so happy it fit that the damage is a small price to pay.

Brought to you by "The Amos School of Construction"

The backyard playhouse

The backyard playhouse started as an idea to build an underground bunker in the backyard that would not be visible to the casual observer.  I wanted it to have an access hatch of some kind and lead to a room below the back deck, and ideally in the laurel hedge somewhere.

In searching for the perfect spot, I got this idea that I could have an underground bunker and also an above ground structure so that the kids could have a playhouse, and also have access to the secret room inside. Additionally I wanted to have an above ground tunnel to the playhouse leading to the house, possibly into my son Liam's room.  

Taking my wife's comment that my idea would be fun as resounding approval of the project, I began clearing a site for the playhouse.

Deck removed

Bench removed

Hedge trimmed

At this point I discovered that I didn't really have my wife's approval for the project because she didn't fully understand the scope of my project.  This is partly because I didn't fully understand the scope of my project either, and thus could only explain it in abstract ideas.

Nonetheless, I was not to be deterred!  The Amos School of Construction does not need a scope!  I started to go to town creating the underground portion of the playhouse.

Just keep digging, just keep digging...

No gold yet.

I began to dig, first moving the dirt with simple buckets, and later realizing that man invented the wheel for a reason.  I appropriated the use of the neighbors wheelbarrow.  It turns out that the soil isn't exactly soft under my deck.   It consists of the following, in this order:  Top soil similar to what you would use to pot a plant, about 1 inch. Gravel, similar to a driveway, and just as compact, about 4 inches.  Compacted rocks with some dirt, about 8 inches.  Mt. St. Helens ash, very densely packed, about 4 inches.  Clay and rocks with the consistency of concrete, about 4 feet.  This ground did not give way in the slightest during the whole endeavor!  It was the single most difficult hole I've ever dug.  I had to dig it out in sections over the course of several months, wheelbarrow loads at a time.  Digging in sections made it easier to get larger chunks of clay broken free.  I made stairs out of the dirt so that I could get to the bottom. The goal was to either reach a depth of four feet, or strike gold so that I could pay someone to do all this digging for me.

Eventually I made it to a depth of about 54 inches from the bottom of the hole to the underside of the deck. This would have to do since I had lost all hope of striking gold, oil or finding a buried pirate chest.  The hole would fill up with water every time it rained, causing me to have to bail out the water with a bucket and dump it over the side, which created a stream into the park next door.  Sometimes the water would be as deep as 18 inches, giving rise to jokes from my wife about the swimming pool, hot tub or Koi fish pond I was digging in the backyard.  Liam also found time to fall into the water once or twice while showing the hole off to the neighbor kids.

It took two days to clean all the horse poo off the wood

The results were excellent!

Materials to construct the underground bunker where slowly being gathered throughout the winter and spring and stored either in the garage or off to the side of the house.  I still wasn't sure how I was going to build the underground portion of the structure until one day I found a posting on Craigslist advertising free true size 4x4 posts of about 7 feet in length.  Apparently they were replacing a 30 year old horse ranch fence by pulling up the posts and rails and installing new posts and rails.  They were burning the old material but thought to post an ad in case anyone wanted to come get some of it.  I got a U-haul trailer and Liam and I went on out to Woodenville to check it out.  Sure enough, there was a whole lot of wood to get.  We loaded up 54 dirty 4x4 posts and a stack of 2x6x16 dirty boards and brought them home. Then we got back in the car and went back for a second load!  We borrowed a pressure washer from my Uncle and, after having it repaired due to bad spark plug and subsequent broken pull cord thanks to pulling too hard too many times, cleaned each and every board till they looked only 15 years old, not 30 years old.  All in all I estimate we got about $500 worth of wood, even after taking into account the condition.

The quantity of 4x4 posts that I got gave me an idea on how to construct the underground bunker.  I decided to simply stack the 4x4's on all four sides and create a box, and use the 2x6's as the flooring.  It would be solid and because they were treated lumber, rot and leak proof!  Well, as it turns out, just rot resistant and not leak proof.  I still had to deal with the water issue, since my hole was still filling up with water even in just a light rain.

I got lazy and didn't remove all the dirt, I just dug channels

Built with love for Liam, Eric & Henry
May 9, 2013
By the "Amos School of Construction"

I had a brilliant idea to set blocks of concrete and lay out some 4x4's as a foundation, and if I then paved the whole floor of the hole and sloped it all toward a single point, I could install a sump pump and pump out any water that got under the bunker. What I ended up with was a bunch of channels leading to the rear and a 5 gallon bucket with a $30 pump and a water level sensor that turns the pump on for 10 seconds when it detects the water level is too high.  The pump moves 1900 gallons of water per hour, or roughly half a gallon per second, so in ten seconds it is able to empty the bucket of water and switch off.  This actually works out really well! I also took a moment to dedicate the project to my boys.  I always hope that someone will see my dedications someday, but then again, that just means that my hard work has been demolished, so it's a bitter sweet thought.

Blue Rust-Oleum paint to help stop rot

Sump pump access hatch included.  Forgot handle.

I painted the underside of all the boards and the bottom support beams with a bright blue bucket of Rust-Oleum product on clearance from Lowes that was supposed to be used to restore decks by filling in all the cracks with some type of rubberized paint.  Not exactly water proof or lumber treatment, but I figured that the beams are already treated lumber so it'll be fine... maybe.  I finished laying down a deck and installed an access hatch for the sump pump in case I ever needed to get at it.  This shows an unusual level of foresight, possibly learned from many years experience with the Amos School of Construction.  I would be needing to access the sump pump numerous times in the coming months.

It's questionable whether the tarp
actually does anything, but at
least it was really annoying to
work around!

At this point the bunker began to take shape relatively quickly as it was simply a matter of cutting the beams to size with a skill saw and screw them into place, staggered so that they interlocked at the corners.  I used 3 1/2 deck screws and about 12 bottles of bright white caulk in between each beam to help stop water leaks.  It's probably ok.  I also bought a 22' by 14' heavy tarp from Costco, cut it in half and wrapped it all the way around the platform and tucked it under the first layer of 4x4 beams.  The thought was that any water that got next to the bunker would be deflected by the tarp down underneath the structure where it would be channeled to the 5 gallon bucket and ejected via the sump pump.

Eric tries out the bunker for the first time.  I also realize
that the bunker isn't going to be as big as I initially pictured.

Soon I have used up most of my 4x4 posts and I have caulked all the cracks and lines and seams as best I could.  I realize a few things.  First, I'm going to need more free wood.  Second, the bunker is not as big as I would have liked. Third, I need a ladder, because climbing in and out of this thing has given me terrible muscle and back pain.  It's around this time that I start to visit Dr. Momyer to have my spine readjusted a couple times a week.

Beneath the deck

Above the deck

I picked up a sheet of outdoor weather rated plywood for the ceiling as well as some 2x3's to bring the ceiling level with the deck.  I coated the plywood and the 2x3's with black tar paint normally used on driveways because it was cheap and sounded like it would keep water out.  I also picked up some 1/2 inch plywood for the floor and 1/4 inch plywood paneling for the walls to hide all the caulk, wood splinters and chemicals in the treated wood. The end result was a pretty neat little underground bunker with a roof that shouldn't leak and a deck above that almost matches the surrounding deck, effectively camouflaging the existence of the bunker to the outside observer.

Liam wanted to put it
back together as is

Reusable hardware
and monkey bars that
I turned into a ladder

I have come to the conclusion that I must find some more free wood.  I continue to browse Craigslist on a regular basis and stumble across an ad for free wood from a play set that I would also have to dismantle. After making arrangements with the owner, I come out with a U-Haul trailer and, with the help of the owner and Liam, dismantled an ancient wooden fort and hauled it away.  It wasn't as easy as that, given that most of the bolts had rusted in place, so we used the saber saw to cut it up.  The big 4x4 posts each had about 10 1/4 inch bolts that had to be cut off with a hacksaw when we got them home. The owners gave us additional items such as chains and swings and a never used canvas topper that I have yet to find a use for.

On the way home with the trailer full of our latest scavenged materials, I also stopped on the side of the road and picked up a 10 foot corrugated flexible drainage pipe that had flown off someone else's vehicle and landed on the shoulder, and later stopped at a sign that had fallen down years earlier but two great big 2x6x10 posts where still attached.  The sign was gone and the posts where laying on the ground.  I figured no one wanted them and I was doing the world a favor by removing them.  It looked like litter to me. Unfortunately, as I was getting back on the road I had to do a U-turn to get going in the right direction.  This was a problem for the 16' beams sticking out the back of my u-haul trailer, so they punished me by pressing a nice deep dent into my tailgate.  Yay!  The wife will be pleased when she sees this.


With my newly gathered wood I start construction on the upper structure.  I still don't know what it's going to look like, but I assume I'll need an enclosure for the access hatch and a platform for the upper level.  I build a box around the opening, including a side access door.  I figure that if there's only one entrance into the bunker, inevitably I will have one child in the bunker and another sitting on the access hatch giggling while his trapped sibling screams at him.  I build a small step ladder to the platform above the access hatch, and if you look close you can see a ladder that I built from the monkey bars of the scavenged play structure from before.  I replaced the old rotting wooden rungs with cut sections of a 14' aluminum pipe that I found underneath the deck.


With the floor in place, things really start to pick up, as does the cost.  From this point on I start to use mostly purchased materials rather than scavenged Craigslist material.  The four walls go up pretty straight and much taller than I thought it would.  Initially I was thinking that I would fit it in under the big overhead trellis, but after seeing how much head clearance there would be, I decided to go bigger and I cut away the overhead  beams to make more room.  This was a precarious moment for me, for at this point I feared for my life as it was only a matter of time now before my wife noticed what was happening to her trellis, something she specifically told me not to mess with.  Yikes!

Things really start to get interesting when, during a trip to Vashon Island to pick Liam up from summer camp at Camp Burton, I stumble upon a clearance sale of unfinished cedar siding.  We drove passed a lumber yard and a big handwritten sign says Cedar siding, 15 cents a foot.  WHAT!  I pulled in and went over to the office to inquire.  I had no idea how much siding I needed, or even what the overall dimensions of my finished house was going to be or how to calculate it.  I guessed that my playhouse was about 9' by 6' and about 8' high.  I made an estimate that I needed to cover 240 square feet.  I had no idea how to cover that with the 5" wide cedar siding though.  Fortunately the lumber guys know exactly what to do and they told me I needed 600 linear feet, and the total comes to 90 bucks.  Yep, 90 bucks!  SCORE!  I strapped the siding to the roof of my car and we headed home.  I had to stain and seal the unfinished cedar, but in the end it was totally worth it.  I had beautiful cedar siding vs crummy looking t-111 siding that just looks like a manufactured home or a fancy dog house.

A few final touches were needed of course.  I rolled on some composite roll-on roofing and built a dutch door for the door way.  It's the kind that you can open the top without opening the bottom.  I also installed a handrail with a fancy rail setup so that we can paint a sign on the front.  Then, as a finishing touch, I installed the slide that came with the salvaged fort we picked up a few weeks earlier.  Awesome!

As way of celebrating, Liam and Eric and I all spent the night in the underground bunker near the end of summer.  Well, Liam and I did, but Eric gave up a couple hours in and made such a fuss that mommy had to come get him and put him to bed in his own bed.  Nevertheless, our playhouse was livable, even if it didn't have power yet.



Since then I've installed an outlet and an 18 foot LED rope light in the bunker and plan to install outlets and power in the upper section.  I also installed some awful colored shutters that immediately expanded in the openings and now refuse to open at all.  Also I installed a loft inside the main playhouse and plan to install a ladder and a fixed desk inside with some nice little chairs.  There's also a number of small touches that I need to install, such as the mailbox, the house number, 2023 1/2, and also the doorbell

"The Laurelside Inn"

Still lots to do, but overall the project is well over 80% complete and the kids get to play in it whenever they want.  Eric loves going down the slide, and Liam shows it off to his friends and anyone new that comes over he can't wait to give the grand tour.  Next spring I'm going to remove the shutters and build better ones that open and have plexi-glass.  I'll fix the door to have a knob and a lock, and I'll finish getting power to the upstairs.  Maybe I'll even install a porch light, who knows?

Brought to you by "The Amos School of Construction"