It's very slow-growing

It's looking okay in the spring with all the stalks turning bright green. But it has been in the ground 16 months. Does it really take that long? See previous post when it was first planted.

Emerald Gaiety Euonymus

Does it look like it's drowning?

While the plants below it thrived, the tree kept losing its leaves. It was gradual. It seemed seasonal. I could not tell if I was over-watering or under-watering. Unfortunately I had the automatic drip linked to an existing irrigation circuit that fed all the mature boxwood shrubs at the other side of the driveway. Adding a new circuit was way too much work. Turning down the water kept causing the old boxwood to yellow and dry out. Boxwood is slow-reacting, too, so each trial-and-error test took months to interpret. After each experiment, I had to dial it back up to normal for the sake of the old shrubs.

At this point the tree has been in the ground for 18 months, and it's still struggling.
Pittosporum undulatum or Victorian box or Cheesewood.

Project: bedroom #2

Bedroom #2 is next to the new office with street view.

Workstation

Desktop wood is sepetir (from Woods Unlimited). They're 5/4 inch (nominal) planks that typically goes into delivery trucks as cargo bed flooring. Some good belt-sanding got them glass-smooth. All the other pieces are maple plywood (from MacBeath Hardwood) and solid maple (from Yardbirds in Martinez, CA, which, by the way, has excellent price and selection on maple as well as mahogany, oak and clear doug fir). Three or four planks made each top piece. The top pieces fasten with knockdown fittings. Each section is connected to the adjacent with either steel plates, aluminum sleeves, or they're just free-standing.

Those acrylic tubes supporting the peninsula section were specially ordered (at a cost, after delivery and tax, of $229). It's probably my biggest splurge for the room in terms of appearance for the buck. There were lesser and easier options for sure, but I had to keep the beautiful Macintosh G5 tower visible from all sides! The tower, by the way, is bottom supported with a Simpson HL76, cushioned with foam rubber on sepetir, then hooked on top with an acrylic L panel.

All this is mere furniture, I realize. It's not "home improvement" in the purist sense, but I have to mention it because the entire room's design is based on it. At this point, the office is 95% complete. I think everything came together very well.

I was also glad to have found Kensington's extended wrist pad. It's a nice 27.5 inches of smooth, straight, nylon-covered gel, so a keyboard and trackball can be placed side-by-side on it. There's no feeling of hindrance sliding left to right. It's totally seamless. In fact, I designed the keyboard pull-out just for this particular Kensington product.



Total cost
All the sepetir subtotaled $534. All the maple (solid and plywood) was $565. Connectors and metals another $385. The acoustic tackboard assembly was $202. As shown above, the completed workstation and wall shelving with miscellaneous hardware, supplies, finishes, xenon lighting, under-cabinet fluorescent and the wall panels totaled $2,130. It compares favorably to the $6k+ quotes I got from California Closets and places like Galvins, which would be just laminate material and very "stock" functionality.

Designing the shoji

The idea for shoji panels came about after looking at what the office room lacked — occasional visual privacy. And that was it! Noise control, security and durability were not influencing factors (surprisingly enough, after some thought). Lightweight shojis came to fit the bill perfectly.

With a future maildrop cabinet taking up the corner and a 6-foot opening to cover, there appeared a serendipitous 2-foot blank wall area that got the shoji design off and running.

Three 2-foot panels became a natural choice. They would stack neatly to cover the blank wall when fully open. When closed, they had to overlap slightly. 25" turned out to be the best width.



And of course, I wanted them thin. I wanted the total stack of panels as compact as possible. I simply picked out some stock 1x2 clear douglas fir. They measure only about 3/4" thick. They're cheap, too. Red cedar is actually a better choice for shoji frames, but I would need to rip cedar in two dimensions because I couldn't find them in 1x2 stock — I was lazy. 1/4" pine strips was then fastened, using a spring-loaded stapler, to sandwich the shoji paper.



Such compactness meant careful planning in creating the narrow floor rail. It had to be wood, and it had to serve as a threshold to transition from bamboo on one side to an unknown future floor on the other. I found stock bipass-door rollers (replacement hardware) to fit inside mortised pockets in each panel. They needed individual rails. Only after getting precise dimensions was I able to take a router to solid maple.



Lastly, the headrail had to be kept simple. This little project became more planning and design than fabrication. 1/8"-thick pressboard was slot-glued to match the spacing below. And since each panel goes in place by sliding up, then lifting onto a rail, there had to be a minimum depth and width. It had to be tall enough but not too tall, narrow enough but not too narrow. With proper planning, it was easier done than said. The dash line indicates the height of a panel radiused from the first bottom rail — a required dimension prior to cutting the very first piece for the shoji panels themselves.

Total costs of materials: $100 for the shoji paper, $50 for everything else.