Time to break out the fine carpentry tools! We are having a bit of a Chinook the next two days so I thought it was a great opportunity to carve the transition strip for the new bathroom. When you have two types of flooring meet and they are not at the same level the only real option is to create some sort of transition. I love carving these from hardwood and this will be the fourth one I’ve carved, so I have a sense of what I’m doing. Most of the work will be done with the table saw, but there are a lot of steps to make the transition pretty.
The picture to the right is the last transition strip that I carved. This is installed in our front entrance after I tiled the space. I still have a bit of finish work in the entrance, but I’m waiting for warmer weather to finish off the built in cabinet, I really do not want to spend the day on the tablesaw and router in below zero weather. For this transition I used a leftover piece of the maple floors that the previous owners had installed and carved it to fit into the gap between the tile and the existing wood floor. If you were to look at the transition piece before it was installed it was essentially a T shape with a little more material over the wood floor than the tiles (to account for the height difference). I simply installed this one with PL glue but in the past I’ve screwed transitions in and made plugs that I would smooth over. I prefer the finish with glue. This transition has been here for almost a year now and seems rock solid. This is the trajectory for my new bathroom transition.
I meant to grab a piece of wood yesterday when I came home from lecturing. However I forgot. The wood was in the garage which is cold, so I need to let it warm up. I took some rough measurements and found another piece of maple flooring that will serve my purposes. They had a stack of this stuff in the rafters of the basement, I’ve been slowly using it up for little projects.
The bathroom door is only about 2′ wide, so I grabbed a piece that was about 26″ to give myself plenty to work with. I needed something at least 3/4″ thick, which this piece is. Worst case I might need to laminate a strip on the bottom, we’ll take care of that later if it is necessary. What I want to do first, after the piece acclimatizes, is carve a T so that the top will be level and no more than 1/8th” above the tile. Because the wood I chose has ridges on the bottom, I’ll need to carefully carve it so that the bottom of the T is right over a ridge, otherwise I’ll lose about an 1/8th” of material and definitely need to laminate something to the bottom. I’ll post my measurements when I get in there and some pics of my table saw setup for each cut.
*Just a note on the header picture, a few years back I made a book of the contents of my various tool boxes so that my wife might have a better idea where tools went when she was done with them (I do realize this is pure fantasy). This was my fine woodworking box at the time, it has changed quite a bit since then. Lots of measuring new measuring tools and even a pin nailer live in that box now. I need to update the photo, maybe do a comparison post. I do try to keep the list under the picture fairly up to date, but in the end it is more for my own curiosity than anything else.
Let me know your thoughts...