Riverbend Journal

After getting all the drawer pulls and drawer faces sanded and finished, it was time to attach them to the drawer boxes. To do that, I used a trick to allow you to space everything all nice and neat. Starting at the bottom and using shims that I cut from scraps, I set the bottom row of faces in place. Prior to that, I had drilled holes in them that match the holes also drilled into the back of the drawer pulls. So with the drawer faces in place, I sent some screws through them into the drawer body using those predrilled holes for the drawer pulls. This holds the drawer face firmly in place until I can pull out the drawer and fasten the drawer face to the drawer from the inside of every drawer. I can then repeat this process for each row working my way up to the top of the dresser making sure to use the shims so the spacing looking nice. One detail you may or may not have noticed is that the drawers are grain matched from side to side. I used a single board for each row and kept the pie...

  After my BIL returned home from his week of work in Manila, we spent one weekend day going to visit "The Mansion" which is a cross between the White House and Camp David or creating an analogy for the current occupant, a cross between the White House and Mar-a Lago. In all my previous trips to the Philippines, it has been a summer home for the President of the Philippines and technically still is though the guards won't say that specifically. However, recently the main structure you see in the photo above is now a museum and open to the public with approved reservations which my SIL had obtained. The Mansion was actually built by Americans for American leaders after the Spanish American war and was completed in 1908. During World War II, it suffered greatly from bombing but was eventually repaired before being turned over the Philippines who then converted it into the summer home of their President. Not quite two years ago, it was renovated again and opened up to the pu...

  Upon returning from El Nido, a stay at the farm near Tarlac and our aborted trip to see the Hundred Isles, we spent a week close to our home in Baguio. My BIL, who was also our driver, returned to Manila for a week of work and my wife spent her time going out and meeting various groups of her friends and former classmates. As a husband, I sometimes went and sometimes didn't, depending on venue and what my wife was requesting. None of it was terribly exciting though so I won't bore you with the details.  At some point though during that week, I took my kids and their cousins out to eat at a local eatery called "Good Taste". It was quite the experience and I could come up with nothing quite like it that I've ever been too. First and foremost, the restaurant is massive and consists of five floors! At least the one floor we ate on, level five, could seat probably 300 to 400 people. I would say it was only half full when we got there so maybe around 200 people. I hav...

I'm not good at repetition which is why I always decline when someone sees something I have made and tells me I should make more to sell. The only time I have listened was when I built a second batch of inbox drawers for desks but I needed one anyway for personal use and I thought, why not build a couple more while I'm at it. I don't mind the work of cutting and assembling but when it comes to sanding, I always regret my decision. So when it came down to making the drawer front for my 12 drawer dresser, I wasn't terrible thrilled because I knew it would be a lot of repetition. Above is the beginning of the drawer fronts. Since they are just going to be plain flat oak without adornment, they shouldn't be too bad. It is fairly easy to sand flat things fairly quickly. The only real concession I made was that I kept things ordered so I can grain match the drawer fronts. Essentially every row of drawer is cut from the same board and in order so when assembled, the grain ...

  Judging solely by the number of pictures taken during any of my trips to the Philippines, transportation is easily at the top of my fascination list. A lot of that has to do with me spending a lot of time using it in one form or the other and some of it has to do with it being very different from where I have spent the bulk of my life.  If I had to boil down transportation to something more specific, the Jeepney (seen above) is perhaps my favorite of all. In the mountains of Baguio City, they used to rule the mass transportation market and still to this day play a significant part. They started off as discarded Jeeps left behind by America after World War II but are built specific to the Philippines now. I would call the above Jeepney the second generation of the vehicle and on my last trip, I saw my first glimpses of the third and even fourth generations.  The third generation is a more aerodynamic version of the second generation Jeepney's and lack all the colorful cu...

  I subscribe to a couple dozen woodworking YouTube channels mainly to get inspiration for projects that I would like to build. But one particular channel The Family Woodworker , I subscribe for a slightly different reason. The channel owner is a very artistic woodworker and has lots of projects simply creating art out of wood which is something I have always struggled how to do. I can design and build a 12=drawer dresser from looking at pictures and knowing how to build furniture but I struggle when it comes to making things that are just artistically beautiful. The Family Woodworker has inspired me over the years with his artistic skills and when this project came up recently, I knew I just had to do it. As a woodworker, I generate a fair amount of scrap. I generally save the bigger pieces on racks and in piles to use elsewhere, many times as jigs to help me do various wood working tasks or sometimes as smaller projects. But I still end up with a lot of small scraps of beautiful ...

  After two nights of sweltering in the heat of the lowland rice country, we were ready to move on and the plan had been to drive north to visit the Hundred Isles regions of the Philippines. We did drive north but we fell just short of the Hundred Isles. Perhaps due to the less than desirable sleep, we didn't get as early of a start as we had hoped. Above you can see why traveling can be slower than expected in the Philippines because when you are not in traffic, you are still sharing part of the road with rice being dried by nearby farmers. The fellow above was using a tricycle arrangement of some sort to stir the rice as it was drying in the sun. During my time in the Philippines, I see very little infrastructure for vehicles and humans that we take for granted. There are very few parking lots and in most towns, you simply park in the lane closest to the buildings along the road. That lane of the road also counts as a sidewalk too as there are no dedicated places for walking and ...

  After three nights on El Nido, we had the waiters float our breakfast on the tiny pool just so my daughter could get a pic for her feed and then they carried it inside where we ate it and then headed out the door with our bags. Julie our van driver was already waiting for us to take us to the airport. We arrived about 15 minutes before our flight's listed boarding time which turned out to be about 10 minutes more time than necessary to get through the check-in process. I could get used to life in the islands. We waited for ten minutes and then were boarding the plane and after verifying there was no caribou our chicken on the runway, we were in the air and heading back to the main island of Luzon and the former Clark Air Base, now known as the Clark Freeport and Economic Zone. As we neared the coast, we flew over what appeared to be huge fish farms and indeed, in the coming days I would drive near this part again though I really never got a good photograph. Photography has always...

  The morning of our second day in El Nido turned out to be one of the highlights of the entire trip and happened quite by accident. The previous day our driver had mentioned that he had an apple mango tree growing in front of his house. I had never heard of an apple mango which is a variety of mango that looks somewhat like an apple on the outside. Curious, when our driver picked us up in the morning, I asked him if he would mine showing me his apple mango tree and he readily agreed. When we arrived at his modest house, he motioned for us to sit on the front porch in the shade of the apple mango tree and went inside. A few minutes later he came out with a different shirt on and no shoes and before I could comprehend, he was 20 feet up in the apple mango tree with a plastic bag in one of his hands picking the fruit and putting it into the bag. I couldn't help but jump up and go into the lane in front of the house to get a better view of the apple mango picking action. Out of the co...

  Blogger friend Steve Reed posted yesterday (American time and Monday London time) about a painting that he remembered hanging up in his parent's home when he was a child. As soon as I saw the picture and before I read anything he wrote about it, I was first struck about how similar it was to a painting that belonged to my grandparents and now adorns my family room wall above our piano. Steve researched the artist, a Robert Wood, and wrote up paragraph about his findings. Intrigues, I got up out of my office chair, walked into the family room and looked at the lower left corner of it and saw mine too was a print by Robert Wood. What a small world! I left a comment on Steve's blog stating my discovery but thought I would share it with him and anyone else who happened to read his post and also reads my blog. I think he referred to it as sofa art. To be fair, after my grandmother died and we were going through her possessions, I saw the painting and passed it up but my wife grab...

  El Nido is know for the very scenic and protected islands off shore and thus the reason they get a large amount of non-native tourists from all around the world. Indeed we did see more non-natives from around the world on this day than I would see the entire rest of my trip but since we were visiting during the rainy season, it wasn't nearly as bad as it can be. YouTube videos of the harbor beach where people catch boats to ride out to the various islands typically show thousands of tourists. On this particular sunny day during rainy season, there was maybe a couple dozen when we got there. We met our guide on the beach and a French couple from Australia that would be joining our group of nine for the day and waded out to our boat. After rules were introduced and we had a discussion of where we would like to stop since we only had time for maybe five stops out of maybe two dozen places we could go, we set off for the first stop. There is a large lagoon and a small lagoon that are...