Ellery's Big Girl Bed pt 3

On Tuesday Kuya Veevoi came over and we began sanding by hand, but quickly concluded that it was going to take forever. All the 2x4s had deep ridges in them running the length of the pieces and it was incredibly slow-going. One of the other students here had a power sander we could borrow but he wouldn’t be home for a few hours. In the meanwhile, we cut all the pieces to the right size. The end pieces were a bit tricky as we worked out how to cut them in a manner that would hide those pesky blue ink splotches. In the end, we managed to get everything cut and ready to be sanded.

On Thursday Kuya Veevoi came over to work on sanding while we were doing class with our other language helper. We doubled our class hours that day so we ‘enjoyed’ the constant (and loud) hum of the sander in the background for 8 hours. By the end of the day, there were only 4 pieces done with just the rough sanding step! Even with the power sander, it was extremely slow-going.

The next day we decided that sanding like this was not going to work so we sent out to see if we could find someone with a planer to take the grooves out for us. The first wood shop we stopped at didn’t have a planer. The second shop had a planer, but it was broken. Kuya Veevoi had another idea. He knew that just up the road there was a guy who did wood working so we went to see him. He had a working planer but he told us it would not be good to use since it would take off too much wood. He said he could use his grinder to sand the pieces down.  We decided to try it and were led to his shop. We went through their store front, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen to a door at the back of their house. We walked across the roof, down a short ladder, and down a few more stairs to the open-air basement where wood chips and sawdust covered the floor. He grabbed his grinder, put a piece of sandpaper on it and went to work. Within 5-10 minutes he was done with the first piece (aka what took the sander about 2 hours to do). We brought him the rest of the wood and a few hours later I went back to collect it all.

The next Monday we spent some time sanding the grinder marks out and following up with the fine paper to. I had about another hour of sanding to do after our Monday night language meeting. The sanding was finally complete after about 15 hours of work between everyone involved! When we started out, I thought we could have it completely assembled in a week, but now at the end of week 2 we were ready to start assembling Ellery’s bed.