Living With Changes

The transformation of the old home we’ve transformed to bring up to date came quite rapidly but of course, when builders move in it can seem like a long time in the making. The work was quite major: replacing structural walls with steelwork to transfer upper-structure brickwork weight to the external walls for a clearspan inside was transformative and as far as the practical advantages it enabled me to work on a bigger new canvas. Additionally, the house was replumbed, rewired and rewindowed with wooden frames and doors and insulated windows. In the UK we use twin walls of hard material like brick or stone on the outside and cinder or breeze block on the inner walls. We use a 2″ cavity between the inside and outside walls which in new builds takes a 2″ insulating foam skinned with reflective facings. Older homes were built with cavities but without any insulation and so offers a lower resistance to exchanges of heat. We added insulation with foam where possible and where not possible we used a trickle-down material called vermiculite to settle in the lowest extremes and fill from the bottom of the house all the way up to the top.

Looking back on a single year and a couple of months I see how my wood has changed in the finished pieces. I knew it would but 98% of my work through all the decades of my making have been sold so I never really saw the work change week by week and mostly never saw the pieces again. One thing that became evident early on was the expansion of doors and drawers.

Whereas I do strongly dislike the kind of overlaid doors common throughout the US for decades and maybe still, the main advantages were mainly practical and that was that there was zero fitting into openings such as recesses so that expansion and contraction made no difference. Older styles were pretty ugly in that a face frame was fitted over the foreedges of plywood boxes and the doors hung with face-fixed hinges. Then they would leave an inch or so gap all the way around and mould the edges of the door all round. Lots of shadows cast around the faces of the units. Drawers don’t generally stick when using metal runners with roller bearings either, but that said, things can and do look pretty ugly when you do such things to furniture.

Kitchens of course, graduated to the European styling and the development of 32mm hinging systems so the whole face of a series of cabinet doors created a completely flat fronted melamine. Graduation has resulted in MDF fronts sprayed to perfection but fashionably disposable. All fashion is builtor made for disposability and that includes kitchens. Make something dated after a decade and the makers get to replace it with more plassy junk.

My doors and drawers at the house needed returning to the garage for a swift swipe with a plane. It was really just that, but that was mainly to do with the kitchen because of the increased humidity caused by cooking. It’s also to do with the reality that humidity in a house is often considerably higher than in my workshop. But I don’t really mind too much. Give it a few weeks to settle, refit, and you will have resolved the issue for life. When I fitted the garage doors to my garage, they swelled about a half inch over the 8’0″ width. I left them for a few weeks but not because I couldn’t be bothered but because I couldn’t get them open.

Eventually, they shrank just enough to prise them apart and I took off a combined amount of 3/4″ and they’ve been just perfect for three years to date. I could have allowed for this when I fitted them, of course, but I prefer this way.

The main thing I see in the pieces I have made is the change in colour. Oxidation, exposure to air and then ultraviolet light slowly transform the initial colour of newly exposed wood to darker shades with some woods deepening more markedly than others. My choice of cherry and mesquite are the two I know to be changed markedly in relatively short order. I knew that this would happen and especially in the dining kitchen area where there is lots of exposure in the brightness of the room.

Long-term, overexposure can and sometimes will change the colour to a faded, more bleached-out hue which is not what we want, but that usually takes a couple of decades of severe exposure to light. When that happens, if it does, and it’s not necessarily a given, I will scrape off the surface and refinish. I will be in my mid-nineties then so not sure if I will. Sycamore will often yellow a little. None of this worries me and had I made these for a customer I would have informed them. You can also apply finishes with UV inhibitors which stem the tide somewhat too.