Altar Project: The Gathering

 

I have a love hate relationship with my local big box LowNards Depot, more hate than love. But when living out in rural America, there isn't a lot of better options especially since they drove out all their mom and pop competitors years ago. So when I placed my order for six sheets of A1 graded red oak plywood, I knew just getting it home would be a struggle. Under current prices, not sure if the tariffs on Canadian wood is in place or not as of this writing, this stuff is pricey coming in at about $120 per sheet. I need six sheets. I could have paid for delivery but in my past experiences, delivery operators that LowNards Depot contracts out too are usually reliably rough in handling the merchandise, not to mention, it would cost me the price of another sheet of plywood to pay for the service. The alternative is to just haul it myself. It is a lot of physical labor and six sheets is pushing the envelope of what my poor old minivan can handle, but I thought with no need to hurry, I could probably get it done. I figured it would could packaged up pretty good so I removed the seats out of the van, loaded up some tools to uncrate it and allow me to slide it inside my van one sheet at a time and drove over first thing this morning.

It was only 7:30 am, I wasn't expecting a lot of staff in their special order department at the back entrance to the building and there wasn't. But the one lady manning the desk was pleasant enough and soon we were walking outside to the racks where they store the special order deliveries. When she got her fork truck to get the one you see above, tightly wrapped, I hustled to get a pallet to sit it down upon behind my van so I could cut it out of it's cocoon and put the sheets inside my van, one sheet at a time. Unfortunately the lady had other ideas. She wanted to get the bundle close with the fork truck and then slide the entire thing in off of it right into my van. Probably weighing in at 750 pounds or so, I knew this would be no easy feat to pull off but it went surprisingly well as you can see.

The only problem was that the sheets hadn't been bundled together neatly. If done neatly, with their ends aligned, I could have gotten all six sheets inside the van and shut the rear hatch. I have done this many times before. But the shrink wrapper hadn't been so neat and they were misaligned by nearly a couple inches, two inches longer than the space in my van which meant I couldn't close the door all the way. But I knew they had some twine out front for bundling outgoing loads so I pulled around the  building and was able to successfully tie the back hatch door down to keep it from flopping. The only problem with that is that my car will emit an ear splitting fast repeating dinging sound whenever I am going more than one mile per hour, all the way home. I had brought tools to uncrate things and never used them, but I hadn't thought about ear plugs which would have been nice.

I got home, got the bundle cut apart in the back of the van so I could remove it one sheet at a time and got it all stacked up and ready to start breaking down into smaller pieces. One of my worries of special ordering is always not being able to selectively pick through them to cull out defects. The sheets themselves had been well packaged with full sheets of cheap MDF on either side to prevent fork truck handling damage, but as I slid them out to lean against one side of my garage, there was some damage to the face of two of the sheets. One had a missing layer of veneer along one entire edge but I think I should be able to work around. Another had some sort of sooty substance staining the middle of the front face. I hope I am able to sand that out without going through the veneer. I think I should be able to work around both issues but it is just one more thing I need to always keep in my head as I start figuring out how to cut all those sheets into their smaller components. Below is a picture showing them in my garage with the cheap MDF sheet protecting the beauty face.