The Project Hurricane Milton Almost Ruined!

This project has been one of the craziest projects I’ve ever done! Between the size of the project, and the circumstances around it all I’m amazed at the fact that it was completed! Let me tell you the story.

This project began with the vision of a feature wall going up the stairs filling the entire 18’x20’ wall space. The client provided me a picture of another piece in their house that showcased a design they liked and I ran with that. The plan was to divide the wall into rectangles that would be more manageable to work with. 18×20 breaks down to 3×4 rectangles going 6 high and 5 wide. When you account for the stairs it brings the number of rectangles down to 25.

So we have a plan, I work on the cnc software that I have to mock up the design based on the measurements that I had and the rectangle looks good, see a cool little design that will line up with the adjoining pieces. The design was the easy part, here’s where things get crazy.

So I planned to do this project in mid Oct. after my initial mock up the program for my cnc said the cutting would take about an hour per unit. Well the first run did not go as planned as I was a little over ambitious with the bit selection and despite it being mdf the bit didn’t make the cut. So after adjusting the bit and speed I was able to make the cut happen, but now the cutting took 2 and a half hours per unit!

This is not ideal, I went from being able to get these all cut out in about a week to it being a 2 week project, if everything went smoothly! On top of that, the same week I begin cutting the units out we were preparing for a worst case scenario hurricane to come right in our direction. Now I’m a Florida native, born and raised in Central Florida, both parents born and raised here, and even on my dad’s mom was born and raised in the same town. I say all this to let you know I’ve been through plenty of storms, I don’t live on the coast so evacuations aren’t a thing for me. Milton though was a little different, coming in from the west basically heading straight across the state as a major storm was the worst possible path for those of us in central Florida.

In the end it weakened enough before landfall that it wasn’t as devastating as it could have been, but trees down, power out, and without power the cnc doesn’t run. So work on this project was halted. Also my brother lives in Tampa and was out of town during the storm, so he asked if I could go check on his place post storm. Unfortunately his place suffered water damage so I spent another day working on cleaning it up and airing it out. This isn’t the platform to talk about insurance and the ridiculous policies that they have, but let me just say that they won’t be getting a Christmas card from my family this year.

After clean up in Tampa, thanks to the great work of the linemen I had power back at my shop within 2 days and was able to get back to work on this project. While I’m cutting these pieces out I’m working on a fireplace project and a laundry room project. I don’t typically do multiple projects at a time, but I knew this feature wall was going to be 75% cnc work so I might as well make better use of my time by taking on another project. The only issue with this was when I had a few install days mixed in I wasn’t able to run the cnc, so that slowed me down on the feature wall. Yes, I know, “Why don’t you hire someone Micah?” That’s a good question and I will answer that in an upcoming video.

I finally wrapped the cnc portion of the project up and was able to lay out the project on the shop floor to see what the piece would look like and to figure out how I was going to handle the stair case portion. When I met with the client to start the project I took pictures of the landings and the wall and wrote the measurements on those pictures. I also brought a laser level and set it up to line up with the skirt of the stairs, which is that trim board against the wall, and took all of the measurements to figure out the angles. This, kids, is why you need to pay attention in geometry class. I won’t tell you that I slept nearly every day in that class sophomore year of high school and still came out with a “B”.

Now that I had a plan for the pieces it was time to sand it all, and the sanding guys was no bueno. The orbital sander was great for all of the open spaces, but those tight crevices were so annoying, I have a detail sander that I like for corners, but even that wouldn’t get into these tight spots, so if you’ve got a recommendation for some sort of power sander that will get into these types of spots leave it down in the comments below, because hand sanding that literally 100 times sucked!

The easy and fun part of the project was the painting. Prop all of the pieces up around the shop and spray them, primer, sand, top coat, sand, top coat. Now we can set up install. Now as I mentioned this is a large wall and it’s going up stairs. So I knew getting the top row in was going to be tricky. The first day I worked on the bottom rows, cut my angles for going up the stairs and made sure row one was level. With a solid base I could then begin stacking these pieces. I installed with simply using trim head screws through the meaty part of the piece. If you have a better idea of how to attach these comment it below, but I didn’t think construction adhesive would be strong enough against drywall.

The next couple rows went up easy, I added biscuits to all of the connecting sides to make alignment easier and keep that flush look throughout the project. This worked great and saved a lot of time not having to worry about flushing everything up. I brought my scaffolding on day two which worked for parts of the staircase, but it’s just 6’ scaffolding so I was still short in the top right corner by about 6’. So I put my ladder on top of my scaffolding, now this is probably not recommended but you gotta do what you gotta do. I do take the precaution of strapping the ladder to the scaffolding so it doesn’t fall. This worked getting everything in place, but lets just say I was moving slow to get that 4’x3’ 3/4” mdf rectangle 18’ in the air, lined up perfectly with the piece below it and screwed into the wall.

In the end I think it turned out great, the customer is happy and it’s really a cool piece to do that is different from the typical piece that I get hired to do. Is this your style? Would you put this in your home? I hope you enjoyed the story of this project, it was an adventure with several detours.

Thanks for watching, you can find links to all the tools I used in the description below. You can find more information about Crafted in Florida at our website also linked in the description. I’d appreciate if you’d hit the subscribe button and share the video. Go build something cool.

Amazon links to tools I used in this projects and others.

https://amzn.to/48CWVOm. -Titebond 3 glue

https://amzn.to/4hDlsqL – Stanley 25’ Tape

https://amzn.to/3UDVTvJ – total boat thick set epoxy

https://amzn.to/4egVKWa – Dewalt drill

https://amzn.to/3UFqg57 – Dewalt table saw

https://amzn.to/3YW2Drv – Kreg Pocket Hole Jig

https://amzn.to/4hMeTSO – Kreg Cabinet Hinge Jig

https://amzn.to/3YAANzp – Dewalt jig Saw

https://amzn.to/4fzdTzp – Clamps

https://amzn.to/4hxMnUR – 2 Hammers Set (kid size)

https://amzn.to/3CjKN91 – Feather boards