Happy Christmas! It's been a day of giving and receiving presents, and to celebrate the first year of living in our new house, I made it a present. The new back door is solid oak with an oak branch (from the tree at the bottom of the garden at our previous house) splitting the window. The frame and panels were all made by hand (no machines were used apart from to rough-cut the timber to start the job) and the whole process has been very enjoyable. The door is held together with four trunnels (tree-nails) in each corner of the frame, which draw-bore some very beefy mortice and tenon joints. Even the tongue and groove boards in the bottom half of the door were made by hand. It should last us f
We have a dog that needs to go for a walk every day. It never seems to be a job as I can always find something beautiful to look at. Take Tuesday for example.....
As always, there's a lot of stuff going on, and work and the weather are conspiring to give me a few head-aches. The lead up to Christmas is always hectic - everybody wants work finishing before the holidays. This coupled with the freezing cold weather and snow have meant that there are jobs waiting to go out of the workshop that have had to wait, so my work space is slowly getting smaller and smaller. I'm currently sharing the workshop with a huge pile of Windsor chair seats and spindles, and well as a solid oak back door, a set of shelves and several large and unwieldy bow-back formers. Today, it has been these that have been causing me problems. I have some bow backs and arm rails to stea
