Pecky Cypress and Anniversary Lobster

We didn’t make it up to Lake Byrd this weekend as we took a campervan trip to the Florida Keys to celebrate our anniversary. Even though we didn’t come up to the house, I made good progress on the pecky cypress boards that I brought back that will become the ceiling of the front bedroom.

Planing the boards

With the boards back at the shop, the first process is to get them all the same thickness. They varied from 7/8″ to 1 1/8″ and I’m looking for a finished dimension of 3/4″ thick. I ran them through my old foley belsaw planer which made quick work of thicknessing them and also made a massive pile of cypress shavings. Fortunately, it’s about time for more bedding material in our chicken and duck coops so I had a great way to reuse the cypress shavings.

Straight line ripping

With the boards the same thickness, it was time to get them straight and then the same width. I use a track saw for cutting a straight line down one edge of the boards. A track saw is basically a circular saw that rides on an aluminum track that acts as a guide. For the longer boards, I was able to join two tracks together to make one long track.

Cut to width, then sand

Now that the boards have one straight edge, I set up the gang rip saw and ran them through to cut them all to the same width. This process could be done on the table saw but I find that I can get better, safer results with the gang rip saw. With the boards at dimension, I ran all of the boards through the drum sander to clean up the finished face.

Tongue and Groove

Now the boards are ready for the tongue and groove. This was done by hand with a pair of routers and a few different router bits. With the routers set up, I ran the tongue and groove bits down each edge as well as a chamfer bit to bevel the edges where the boards meet. It gives it a little more detail and hides any minor irregularities between the tongue and groove of the board.

Spraying on the finish

The boards are done! Now it’s time for finish. I sprayed the front and back with vinyl sealer. Vinyl sealer sets up real fast – like less than 5 minutes for a thin coat. As soon as I finished spraying the last board I went through and sanded the faces of the boards with 220 grit. I then top coated all of the boards with satin lacquer. They’re now ready for installation. This ceiling is going to be spectacular.

14 years!

Instead of coming up to the house this weekend, we took a few days off to celebrate 14 years together. This year we headed to Key Largo to an RV resort/marina in our campervan. We’ve stayed here before but we didn’t have the canoe then. This time we looked to try our hand at some lobster fishing. We found that night lobstering was more fruitful than going out during the day. The lobsters hide under rocks and ledges during the day and come out to feed at night. We used underwater lights to locate them and then a net on a pole to catch them. We had a blast! This was our first time catching lobster so I’d say that we did well. Here’s a video of us catching a few lobster.

We’ll see y’all next weekend. Thanks for following along!