Going to Milwaukee to Get Wood

So with the wedding coming up I am very busy. One of the things that is occupying most of my time is getting ready for the soon to be in-laws. They need to have a place to stay. Since they are staying a whole month we decided they should stay at our house. On top of that we decided to try to completely redo the middle bedroom for them. Well that decision was made months ago but the work didn’t get started until about 7 weeks ago. As I am out of town most of the time this means that most of my waking time home has been spent on the this not so little project. However it is finally coming to completion and it really is shaping up nice.

The biggest challenge of this project is finding supplies. We decided after fixing up the front bedroom that in most cases it wasn’t worth stripping pine woodwork just to repaint it. It makes a difference, but not a WOW difference I like to obtain. So for this room we decided to pull out the old woodwork and replace it with oak to match (as close as possible) the rest of the house. Unfortunately many of the old cuts of wood are no longer made in mass production and finding items that work has taken up a 3rd of the effort. For instance while baseboards are easy to get as they are just standard 1 X 8s the cap the originally completed this piece is no where to be found. Instead I had to buy a more modern version that is latterly ½ the height so now we have to patch some nail holes and do some extra touch up work.

Some of the pieces I actually had to custom make. Props to AP and his dad who spent ½ a Saturday ripping and routing oak boards to create custom casings for the doors in that room. Though I have since found a local family owned lumberyard that will do this work pretty cheap. FYI guys I found a shop in town that will do it cheap, I think it’s worth the $11 to just have it cut while I wait. This lumberyard also makes the picture rail for the ceiling I can not longer get anywhere else. Other pieces I had to pull some old woodwork in the garage down, strip it, clean it, de-nail it, take it apart, and reconfigure it to work. This process was used to create the headers for the windows and doors. It’s funny because before staining these pieces they where try color due to coming from three different sources.

Finally the hardest pieces to find, that finish off the look, were the plinth blocks at the foot of each door. These are decorative pieces that sit right on top of the floor and under the casing that runs along either side of the door. I just could not find ones that even came close to fitting. I drove all over town, twice at least looking. Since the casings around my doors are 4½” I needed plinth blocks at least 5” wide and as tall as possible. Menards had some that looked like they would work unfortunately one kind was too small in general for the correct effect and the other fell apart when you tried to install them (read JUNK). So as these pieces were holding up the work in the room because I couldn’t finish putting in the baseboards or even start the door casings until I had them I got a little frustrated to say the least.

So as I was frustrated and didn’t want to waste anymore of my weekend time trying to find these parts I figured I could look in Milwaukee while I was there working. This is exactly what I did. After an hour or so research on Google I found a place that looked promising. So I MapQuested the directions and headed over on my lunch break. This place was amazing. It had every single piece I couldn’t find in Minneapolis. Unfortunately you can’t take long sections of lumber on a plane. But what I could take on the plane where the 4 plinth blocks that I needed, and that this yard had! So I purchased 4 that were over sized so I could cut them down to size and brought them home. They worked perfectly. Now since we need to drive through Milwaukee twice in the next month to pick up and drop off RB’s parents I think I might just have to swing into this lumberyard and stock up on some hard to find pieces.