Odds and ends of a normal day in Ernie’s World.

It has been another nice day in central MN. For the first full day of winter it is mild, 16° this morning with bright clear sunshine. It got to the upper 20’s in the afternoon. I am glad to report that our ground is still brown! I think this will be the year for a Brown Christmas, at least I am optimistic. Some folks are beginning to get “concerned” about the dry weather, and not without good reason. If we go into January without snow cover we stand a good chance of having some serious freezing problems with septic systems and underground water lines.

It is remarkable how deep the frost will go in dry ground, if there is not some snow to insulate it. I have known of water lines freezing that were buried 8 feet in the ground. The only hope is that, if we don’t have some snow cover, we don’t get extremely cold. But we are almost sure to have -20 or -30 sometime in January or February, or March for that matter. I will never forget the time we had -30 on March 17^th. I don’t recall want year it was, but I know it was the 17^th of March because that is my birthday and I was grading lumber in the great outdoors. We expect temperatures like that the first couple months of the year, but by mid-March we are generally done with that kind of deep freeze cold.
This year we have barely reached 0 so far. The saying in MN is; “we are going to pay for this”, meaning we can expect some very nasty long spells when it finally does turn “winter”. However it turns out this winter, it will be much shorter, no matter what. Only 9 weeks until March! But, if we turn to sub-zero cold with wind and snow, a week can seem like a long time, so we won’t be celebrating spring anytime soon.

For me it was a normal winter day of shop work. That means getting a fire going to heat up the shop first thing in the morning. Then drinking a few cups of coffee and reading while the fire does its work. Then I spend most of the day working on whatever project I have going. Today it is another dresser of a slightly different design than what I normally make. That gives me something different and interesting to work on. Since I don’t work from prepared plans, it also forces me to pay close attention to my design work, or I will end up redoing a lot of work because of a flawed design, that is no fun, nor is it profitable, however, it happens more often than I would like to admit.

Last winter I had two mission style beds to build at the same time. So working under the impression that it is faster to build two at once than one at a time, I had them both assembled before I realized I had made a mistake in my dimensions. That is when I learned, if you going to build two pieces at a time, you best be sure you are doing the job right! In that case I had to do a lot of extra work to fix two projects. The worst of that deal was that my wife had questioned the width of those beds as I was putting them together. Her comment was that they looked too narrow. I explained to her that they just “looked narrow” because they were not queen size beds, but one was double bed and the other a single bed. I should have stopped and checked my measurements right then. But it was not until I was almost ready to start the finish work that I discovered they were both 2 inches too narrow. Live and learn everything the hard way, apparently. However, since I know a lot of furniture makers, I can take some consolation in knowing I am not alone when it comes to making mistakes on projects.

I mentioned that mistake to a full-time cabinet maker and he just laughed and ask me if I needed any “odd sized” face frames. Stating that he had a whole room full of frames that at one time or another, he had miscalculated the measure on and just kept them in hopes of needing one that size at some point, even though it never seemed to be the case.

There is always the stories of people who build projects in their shop, only to find out that they can’t get them out the door! I know of one fellow who build an ice fishing shack in his garage only to find after he had it all done, painted and the whole works, it was 2” higher than his garage door! I really enjoyed that story, since it was not me! He came up with a “unique” plan to fix the problem. He took house jacks and jacked up the front of his garage enough to get the shack out the door. J