our house came with a newly remodeled home depot style kitchen. not that we were complaining, but if it were up to us we would have chosen a different style. we just moved from an apartment that had some nice built ins that miyoko used to display her glassware. we thought that adding glass doors to our kitchen might give it a little more character. on a trip to home depot we found that there indeed were glass doors to match our kitchen -- for $240 each.

i recently got a router for my birthday and finally got around to trying to replace the wooden panels with glass.

the first set up i tried was to route the panels out with the router table attachment to my table saw. this would give me a fence to make sure that the routs were straight. the down side (pun intended) was that since i had turn the doors upside down i couldn't see how far i was routing. i ended up with this...as you can see some of the routes were a little too long.

while at work the next day i thought about how i could possibly salvage the door. the first time i routed a side it left a small strip of wood with the outside laminate on it. i decided to chisel out the part i screwed up, put wood filler in the hole and glue little strips of the laminate on the outside. it kind of looks like crap, but it was the best i could do.

after the first door i decided that the router table was a bad idea. for the remaining 5 i clamped a 2x4 to a table and used that as a fence. then i clamped the door what turned out to be 15mm away from the fence. this allowed me to not only see what i was doing, but also get a straight route.

once i had the 2x4 set up and figured out the measurements, the routing went a lot faster. putting the quarter round still took about 30 minutes a door. and mitering the pieces showed off how unsquare my routes were, but it didn't turn out too bad. since i showed you my worst door above, i'll now show you my best.

all in all i spent $62 on glass, $15 on 1/4 round, $8 on a miter box and $.99 on brads. here are some pictures of the finished doors.

i've been thinking for awhile about how i thought it would be fun to make up a lot stories/songs about kuma and sing/tell them to my son when he is born. i thought it would be neat to create picture books with cds in the back that have the story in song form.

i'll be kind of surprised if i really go to all that trouble, but i already have 4 kuma songs i can sing him.

and this week makes #5. this is a bit of a fictitious story of how kuma ended up living with me and miyoko called "Hello, my name is Kuma":

hello, my name is kuma

i might take a bit of a break this week. i just got a router and there is a project of a different kind i want to try. plus with the world series coming up, i won't be able to spend much time playing songs.

perhaps it was nothing more than laziness, but i decided to do cover songs this week (this was also before the short email dialogue curt, todd, and i had about covers). to counter the laziness i did two.

the first one i did was a cover of "This book is so Awesome" by Harry and the Potters. I saw them for the first time earlier this year and it actually inspired me to try my hand at a wizard rock song. that didn't work out so well, but i'm quite happy with how the cover came out:

This book is so awesome (original)

This book is so awesome (cover)

The second song I did was "Come with me, We'll win" off of Boat's new cd. I can't say enough good things about that record. The Stranger be damned -- it did change my life.

Come with me, we'll win (original)

Come with me, we'll win (cover)