The Piano Desk Project (Part 1)

Part 2: A day from hell
Part 3: The Finale


Here's the background, the school has 4 or 5 pianos, 2 of them are always in our practice rooms and aren't in great shape. We've got one of those however that simply can't be tuned anymore, the soundboard is cracked and there are various other issues with it that we decided it has reached the end of it's life. So, because we're a crafty bunch we've decided to save as much of it as we can. Which is where I come in. Yesterday I started to strip the piano down and take out the guts inside. All of the keys/hammers/etc everything I can pull out will go to Nancy and Janet and be used in 3D art pieces. The rest they've left to me. Once I get it all apart I'm going to turn the frame into a desk (which may be a little less work than I had originally thought, more on that later).

Here is where I started, around 2pm yesterday. I have a picture of the registration tag on the back, and I've saved it to reapply to the new desk when I'm finished, but I can't figure out how old the piano is. Partially because Chickering and Sons doesn't exist anymore, they were bought out by Baldwin, and Baldwin is owned by Gibson guitars, so there are a few layers of obscurity there and I can't just enter the number anymore and find out the details.

Though once I get back down to school I can check the serial number and have a general range that should  give me the approximate age of the piano and then I can do some more research.

This was an easy level to get to because all of the pieces here that are gone are made to come off. The face just clips in and out and the bottom section just slides in and out, the nice part is I think I'll leave the bottom open for storage which means the front panel will make nice wood to turn into shelf pieces or drawers.

Here you can see all the pieces I've laid out. I've got them sorted with all the hardware I've removed and even though I'm almost done breaking it down I'm 90% sure I could reassemble it all successfully and have it back to working order again if I had to. The keys here are on a sort of tray, it's part of the mechanism but once you remove a couple of screws the whole thing can lift out.

This is what the frame looked like at the same point in time. (almost) the green felt and frame are the tray I just mentioned. In the previous picture the keys are all resting back on top of that frame. The only pieces left to remove at this point really are the hammers which you're staring directly at, and the cast iron (that's where the weight comes from) Plate that the strings are attached to. I haven't really figured out how I'm going to remove that. It's screwed to the frame with big lag screws and some of them fall under the strings so I don't have access to them. I'd like to keep these all intact and not have to cut any strings so I may try to drill out the screws that I can't remove. If that works the only remaining hassle will be actually pulling the cast iron out. Though I may sit the piano down on it's back which would allow me to pull the iron out the top.

Here's what it all looks like with the key frame removed as well as the hammers. The hammer mechanism is pretty complicated but it also is one solid unit. So it's held in by a couple of thumb screws for adjusting (which will make nice pull knobs for drawers on it) and once they are removed the whole thing lifts out. I was actually pretty surprised at what a solid desktop it already makes. I thought I'd have to make a new top, but other than some screw holes in it, that is a solid smooth piece of wood. I'll sand it down and find some stain that matches the rest of the piano and the top may be done. I'll leave the rest of exact what I'm planning to do a secret for now since I haven't gotten around to testing any of it or sketched anything with measurements yet. I am however, confident that I'll be able to reuse about 98% of this piano. In this picture and the last you can see 3 strips of what I think is poplar which connects all the pedal mechanisms, I'll even be able to use those. The only stuff I'll be throwing out is some of the old hardware and maybe some small scraps once I start cutting pieces down. ALL of the rest will become art projects and so this whole thing will get a brand new life. I'll leave here with some final pictures of pieces. Everybody may have seen them on facebook already but I think I'll have to print and frame a couple for my office because of how they turned out. I only wish I'd had my real camera and not my ipod camera. Boooo.

Of Shining Stars, Church Groups and Museums

It's been awhile again, I know. I'm finding that my beard directly reflects my level of stress and free time. The longer it gets the worse things seem to be at work. I don't have the time or energy to shave. Oh well.





Last Thursday the arts department took the entire freshman class to visit the Rhode Island School of Design and their museum. It was a surprisingly good experience and none of our problem students were an issue which is nice. They have quite a collection there spanning all over the world. Their current exhibit features a former grad student of the school who was inspired by Monet's work and "painting air". It was a nice day off for all the freshmen.

At the moment I'm trying to balance everything that is going on, I've found this part of the year to be more difficult than having big shows to deal with. All these little things with their own needs has been pretty hectic. That same thursday I had a lower school performance in the evening. Basically May seems to be too busy for everybody it's always overbooked and full of too much work. The focus in my life now has shifted to what Saint Andrew's calls the Night of Shining Stars. This year's event is a black and white old Hollywood theme and features a Frank Sinatra style band. This event is the big money raiser for us. All of it is paid for and donated by people in the community so we have no expenses to cover. Every person buys a ticket and all the money that is raised goes directly to financial aid for students to attend the school. This is how we are able to help students who can't afford to pay tuition to come to the school. I guess the goal this year is just shy of a million dollars and I have to say I'm glad that the biggest event goes directly to helping people who can't pay still be able to come here.

BUT it's a pain to set up. Part of the night is in my theatre, then we move outdoors to a tent which needs to be lit, have 2 projectors playing slide shows and have a live band with all their sound. And truthfully we don't really have the gear to be able to easily do portable outdoor type stuff, but we'll make it work. The upside is I get to attend for free, we get free catered food out of it, and it's an open bar. So as long as I keep an eye on my student workers and can still fix stuff should something go wrong I get to relax and hang out a bit and just monitor what's going on. Of course we have to strike EVERYTHING that night after the event ends at midnight, but hey, it's part of the life.

Tomorrow I have to be in to the theatre at 7 am to help a church group who's using our space to pick a new bishop. At least my commitment is short and I'll get some extra cash in pocket for it. Thus far I still haven't heard for sure where I'll be living on campus for next year other than that it's down to one of two places.... I should be finding out in the next week or two which is good at least. So that's the mess I've been in for the last few weeks, busy busy, oh, and we've got about 20 days of school left. Thank God.

Of Jungle Books and Alumni

Finally getting around to another long overdue post here but this has been one of the first chances I've had to do it. Jungle Book went off pretty much without a hitch and everybody seemed to love it.  This was the set before it got it's final hit of greenery. I'm rather sad with myself that I didn't get any great quality pictures of it in a finished form. The downside to this job has been that I'm so pressed for time I forgo some things that I really should be doing professionally, such as taking quality photos of my work. Oh well, I'm making due. Maybe next year I'll try to make a short photo call standard so that everybody is used to having to take some pictures like that, and so that I can get in on it, the few times it has happened, I've been preoccupied with other work while it was going on.

Here's one of my lower quality shots of the final product. Just some more green and some last bits of color with the stage finally touched up. The kids seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, they were always coming down to play on it while they were waiting for the show and rehearsal to start. All said and done I'm pretty happy with it, and on top of that I got paid more to do it than I thought I was going to, which was a fantastic plus. The turn out seemed to be a little less than it was for Pippi, but I think we still had a great crowd.

Now that all this is finished my life gets a lot easier till I start summer camps. I've got a few things left but no building, no major productions, just stuff that needs some sound and lights. Easy compared to the other stuff I've been doing.

In related news for those who haven't heard yet I'll be living on campus next year. Not sure where just yet but we were informed of that a week or so ago. This will be 9 kinds of awesome for lots of reasons. On campus you live, rent free and they provide tv, internet, water, electricity and 3 meals a day. So it will save a ton of money and get us out of a neighborhood in Providence that is.... less than ideal. On top of all of this, I'll be able to walk over to my shop whenever I want, home will always be a couple minute walk away, which has me really excited. It will make everything I do take less time and easier to do.

At the moment I'm gearing up to head home to Ohio in... about 4 hours for Bowling Green's Alumni networking event, to show off the new Wolfe Center and gather up some graduates. I'm a little disappointed because looking at who says they are attending I may be the most successful tech graduate coming back which is no good because we've got a lot of people working on broadway, or on national tours etc, so it looks like I personally won't get any new connections. However, it sounds like it should be a fun filled friend reunion of everybody we know and love together for a weekend of crazy fun and seeing Chicago in the new theatre. Sounds good to me. That's all for now folks.

Jungle Book Crazy

So things are way underway in Jungle Book world. I'll start this off with informing the world that I am a terrible scenic/lighting designer because I still haven't read this script... don't really need to though, (at some point I'd like to, but I haven't received a copy yet) The upside is the director gave me a great idea of what she wanted and I remember the old movie pretty well. So the idea is that since the story is A. a show with child actors and B. A meta story that starts out in the real world and enters the story/jungle world, we'd make it a playground taken over by the jungle. Imagine Jumanji when the jungle takes over everything. So far I've actually stuck pretty close to the original sketch I posted a couple posts back. This is where it has taken us.

We've got the playground side that you've seen and then other side has this climbing rock wall and a tunnel that also serves as a cave. Again pardon the quick sketch, I was trying to show my students how to frame the tunnel out.

Note that the tunnel got moved to the other side, partially because I didn't quite have enough space on that side of the stage and ultimately the monkey bars got tied into it to help strengthen them. So here is the framing for the levels. They got a little more work from here but this was the basic frame.

This is something I learned how to do when BG did Winter's Tale and I love the end result. So this material on the face of the wall is homasote, for those who don't know what it is, essentially it's recycled paper (cellulose) that is compressed and formed into a sheet primarily for sound proofing. So to make the nice stone and mortar look I used a V shaped bit and a router and just cut in a "mortar" trough wherever I wanted. After that to give it a little more texture and to harden the outside you use a scenic dope which hardens and gives it a tough durable shell. At BG we used a product called Jaxsan, I mixed up my own variety from a recipe. The great thing about mixing your own is you can tint it since one of the ingredients is paint so it gives you a nice base close to what you'll be painting, or in theory if you liked the color you could be done and not have to paint it after applying the dope.

So here's the whole thing a couple of nights ago. We've got a "tower" just like a fort might, the slide and some great levels on both sides of the stage. Down the center I've got the start of a river. As if the area sort of rests on a delta. This has a bunch of purposes. It's a sort of demarcation line between the two areas of the stage, the good and the bad if you will. Also you can treat it as individual tiny little brooks, or view the whole thing as if it's a scaled down map of the area in which the story takes place.
 There are a lot of different ways to look at it.

Here we are a day later. The monkey bars came in today and they are great, not only do they work for this, but in the future I could mount them vertically and I have a nice metal rung ladder on a set. Awesome. I played with a bunch of placements until I ended up with them here. This was better than I ever could have imagined because with it tied into both sides of the set it doesn't need a whole lot of extra bracing, (it will still get a bit more, but I swung all over it testing it out and if it can handle me.... it can handle most anything). So it's got the strength AND it physically ties the two sides of the stage together and bridges the river that separates them. Another advantage is the legs have a built in step so that you can use it to climb on top of the tunnel to stand, plus it doesn't block any views or get in the way, it ended up perfect.

Lastly, here is where I ended my night, I commented on facebook that it felt like I was painting a map and I kind of am (in either case its fun doing it). The river is going to stay pretty crisp but it will get some lighter blue and white "flow" lines in it to give it some texture and bring it to life better. The grass and sands will all get softened with some sponging and maybe some rag rolling and the lighter green will serve as a base for some light touches of the dark green paint. With all said and done I'm really happy with how this is turning out and after my tech class attacks it with paint tomorrow it should be nearly finished. Still a lot to do, but it's all going to be pretty fast stuff that should get checked off the list in no time.

Keep checking in and hopefully there will be some more good stuff once this show is over and I've got some more time to post.

Headboard Makeover

About a week ago I started my next big project, a headboard out of a recycled door. Today I finished said project. I think I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was generally pretty simple (once I figured it out).

The final product took about 3 coats of paint, a little more for the cream sections and I'd say... maybe 6-10 total hours of work, but I spread that over a weekend and a week so it wasn't really too bad. It sat in my office most of the week and I'd give it another coat of paint each night until I was satisfied.

General Supplies:

* 2 colors of paint (I prefer two tone because having it all the same color is boring and the panels of the door make it easily doable for some nice contrast.)
 Over the years I've learned that paint samples can be your friend. Lowe's sells all of their samples in Satin which tends to be the most general paint choice people use in their houses. Home Depot seems to have theirs all in flat, with the exception being one of their other brands which I think had eggshell. Satin was perfect because its just enough sheen and right in the middle, so it looks nice.

* lumber: I used a 1x5 for the cap piece to make a nice overhang, and some 1x3 for the rest of the frame. Then pick a piece of crown molding or casing that you like to frame off the top and give it some nice detail.

* Nails: I used a combination of small brad nails to finish some of the lower sections as well as finish nails for a pneumatic nailer which makes the work a whole lot faster, though you could hammer all of them in and set them if you don't have any air tools.

* Wood glue and wood filler, to glue all the pieces and fill the nail holes.

* A door in a style you like.

First step is to cut the door to the length you want. The bed this is going on currently is a full bed, but in the future it may go onto a queen bed. Luckily those measurements aren't too different in width and the panels on the door lined up pretty nice, so I shot a little wide for now and it ended up framing the bed nicely and once it moves to a queen bed it will be a perfect fit, around 60 inches... give or take.

The next step was to lay everything out so I could start to get a visual of what I was doing. The plan was to run 1x3 down the sides of the door and to frame the edges and run crown molding along the top. Somewhere in all this process you should clean the door up. This one had paint on one side and was stained and sealed on the other. For paint to adhere nicely you should sand everything down, and I didn't want to put all that work into the stained side, so I decided to use the already painted side. So when I needed breaks I'd sand off and chip away any of the loose paint that was there to get a solid base layer that wouldn't pull off once it had new paint on it. Then I gave everything a quick sanding and was done.  This picture on the left shows it with more paint stripped off and with the frame clamped down after being glued and nailed.



This is where I started to run into my first problem. Without thinking about how I'd need to attach things or form corners, I cut the crown molding too short. On top of that with the frame intersecting things I had a gap looking under the crown and couldn't think of an easy way to tie it all together. Also the molding took up most of the free space at the top of the door. You can see here that the bottom of it is butted up to the top of the panels in the door. I ultimately decided I was too tired to try to figure out how to fix all of this and I didn't like it being that close to the panels, so I ran back to the store and chose a different solution.

This was my second major problem. So here you can see the other piece of 1x3 nailed to the side of the door to form part of the legs. The clamp is holding the top 1x5 to the top of the door as it dries. I was going to put the 1x3's together differently when I started and changed my mind. So I forgot these were going to be too long. This left me with about a half an inch that would push me off of the wall and leave that gap on the back of the cap piece. Not happy. So I had to take the jigsaw and rip this extra off of both sides.

I decided to worry about fixing the overhang till later in the project and moved on to cutting and nailing the molding for the top of the bed. Here's a picture of what I settled on. A bit different and a cleaner look and easier corners than the crown molding that was at a 45 degree angle. Also despite the corner pieces being pretty small I just about nailed the 45 cut and got them lined up nice, you can see there's a bit of filler on the point just to even out some of the torn up wood but it came out pretty smooth.

At this point I was just about done, everything was glued and setting up, nailed, and the holes were filled in, so it was time to take it home and get painting.

Here it is on my office floor with the first coat on everything. After working at Lowes doing paint I have come to despise yellows/creams. I like the look of them as long as I'm not trying to match or paint with them. Everything just keeps showing through and you have to do coat after coat until it finally covers everything up, and this is true of just about all paints. I don't care if you have a built in primer, it just can only cover up so much. And trying to color match a yellow? Kill me. They are impossibly tough, the machine can't do it. They never read yellow right and to match we would always dispense a little less and then start to inch up on the color until we got it right, adjusting the formula a drop or two at a time until the customer couldn't tell the difference, most of the time those we could still tell we were a little off. Yellow is just mean. The only other things I did after this was box the legs off by adding a short piece to each of the insides for the door to sit on top of and so you couldn't see the inside of the legs. After that I just had to clamp it to the bed frame, drill holes in the boards I attached at the bottom of the legs where the bedframe lined up and then put a couple of bolts through and unclamp. I think I'm pretty happy with this, another go at it would be a little smoother but I don't have any major complaints. Now for a 4 day weekend and some relaxation.

Boris Bally

 So here's a recap for this past week of school. We had our artist in residence, Boris Bally, the kids loved him and needless to say, he was awesome.

He's a really down to earth guy, super successful and honestly struck me as me in 25 years. We were incredibly similar and had some really great talks during the week, I hope I get to work with him again in the future. So since he's a metal worker primarily he brought in all kinds of stuff and the kids dove in... I did too. The plan was to use circuit boards as a sort of canvas and then to add to them however you want, almost everybody was completely engrossed in the project and the whole week flew, it was really surprising how much some of the kids excelled. With all of them finished now it will get pieced together to make a patchwork quilt of all their work and the example that Boris made them and we will install is as a permanent piece in the lobby of the arts building. Put together all of their work is really neat and you can spend an hour or more looking at all the detail people put into them.

 It was a great experience and it really has kicked  me back into gear with my own work, in part because I really want to learn more metal working (it's one of the last materials I haven't really gotten into other than plastic) I can't express the amount of fun I had, I spent nearly all my free time up in the art room working on things and just tinkering. Part of the reason was I just wrapped up Mill Girls and this was the first real project that I haven't had to think about. I just sat down and started attaching and riveting things together. I didn't plan it out I just added a piece, looked at it and added another piece until I reached a point, 3 days and maybe 10 hours worth of work later, where I said... yeah, that's done.

This was my final piece (along with a small metal globe I made) It's got a lot of personal stuff so it really is stuff that I pulled out of my junk pile as well as little touches that are important to me. I think more importantly it has jumped me back into woodworking. In one of the talks we had he mentioned that his first real job out of college was making models for a company and he was burning out and he stayed sane by doing his own work at night when he got home. It made for long days but he was able to make something for himself and I think I needed to be reminded of that since I'm going through some of the same thing right now. So This past saturday I picked up my list of projects and un-tabled the "upcycled" door headboard.

I spent maybe six hours on this, but part of that was a couple trips back and forth to home depot and some head scratching because I planned something out, changed my mind, forgot I had changed my mind and then caused myself some headaches down the line. That said, I'm pretty darn happy with it, I'll do a step by step once it's actually finished, it needs a little more work and some paint and it will be all set.

With that mostly done I've started two more projects of my own AND I'm about to get real heavy into the build for Jungle Book. I think once that is done it may be my best scene design yet, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. More on that in a moment. The two projects in my shop which will also get some pictures later are a blanket chest made out of 1x3 furring strips very similar to the treasure chest I made Erin Moeller/Damm for her wedding, but larger. The other is another "upcycling" type project where I'm trying to turn a used pallet into and end table. I haven't done this before so I'm prototyping it and just kind of winging it to see what I can turn it into to refine for another attempt some other time.

For now I will leave you with my rough sketch for Jungle Book and I will get into the concept and all the work we are doing on it in another post. Just imagine a playground in the jungle or the part of Jumanji where the jungle starts taking over the house.

Long Overdue

Well, It's about time I get this thing back on track. I don't remember what I last updated on but I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff and it will just get dropped. Sorry about that for anybody who was deeply invested. I've been neck deep in our spring production of Mill Girls. It opens this weekend and I'm almost finished, but then it's right back into work and starting on the Jungle Book. As an exercise for the uninitiated in tech theatre, design and tech direction when all of this is done I'm going to do a small primer on the step by step approach of designing, building, painting, and teching a show for those who don't know what all goes into it. I think it will be kind of neat to document it from start to finish and since I may actually present at the BG alum gathering that is happening I'd like to have a recent design through the whole process. So if I haven't described Mill Girls it is exactly like it sounds. Girls in the early textile industry who work in mills and fight for their rights as workers and go on strike etc. It's actually a pretty good (albeit short) show. The set features a boarding house, the gate to the factory, the main factory floor and a couple of general playing areas that are used for a couple of different purposes.

I was a little concerned about the floor going into this but I think it turned out alright. We're actually seating people on stage and over flowing into the house only if needed so it's going to be a really intimate, mostly thrust stage. All the curtains and soft goods except the cyc have come down and we're playing up the fact that we're in an industrial looking theatre and we are even using the loading bridge as the roof of a building a girl is going to jump from. It's turning out pretty nicely. The floor and gate are pulled as closely as my skill allows from the actual mill the play is based on. The entrance is a cobblestone drive leading into an open courtyard surrounded by factory and the work floor is planked rustic wood. My facebook has an album of the field trip the cast took to see the mill.

The picture on the left is an almost finished product when it comes to the floor. I have a little minor work left on in. I took this standing on the second story of our boarding house which I had to re-engineer from the house we had built for Pippi Longstockings. It looks similar but it entirely different and was completely taken apart and reassembled. I have a different view for this show. I'll be running sound from the corner of the stage and we've got both lights and sound control sitting on stage behind the audience with a live "band" of found instrument percussion which actually its a lot of fun.

I am affectionately calling this sound post as the "cage" because its shoved into the corner sitting next to our electronics box and I'm literally caged in with stuff on all for sides of me and a laptop between me and the board. It's pretty tight quarters and I can't move without a search and rescue expedition to come after me.

While I'm just about ready to be done with this show I've had a great time with it because we're really pushing what the community here views as theatre. While I've seen stuff like this done before, for our group it's fairly extreme and will confuse and weird some people out as they realize not all theatre has to be proscenium, bright and shiny musicals. I'm looking forward to the reactions. I've also gotten to play with the space a lot and I'm continuing my love of practical lighting as stage light and above the factory floor we've got 4 Ikea work lights hooked into the dimmers to actually function and it really adds a lot to the space.

They look better in context and by next week I should have some good photos of the final set and some lighting, we'll see how that goes.

I've had a couple of long nights in there painting floors and working lights, but it's 89% finished so I'm into the home stretch and starting to think out Jungle Book which has me both tired and excited. I'm starting to burn out, but Jungle Book is the last major show and then it's pretty much done for awhile other than our benefit concert thing, and then maybe a break.

End of a night of painting.

The Jungle Book plan thus far is (since it's children's theatre) to have the set as a playground, with slide, rope net rope swing and monkey bars but taken over by jungle. So think of the movie Jumanji when the jungle takes over everything. It will be like that creeping in, overgrown with plants and made of bamboo and wood. As if a child was literally out at recess and imagining this jungle land of talking animals and setting on what he or she has available to play with at the time. I'm excited and this will be another pretty non traditional set for me. That's all for now I'll be back soon with some more pictures and more exciting news including (hopefully if I can find time to start) documenting the making of a headboard out of an old 4 panel door that's sitting in my shop right now.