Hello, new festool owner from UK

SafetyThird

Member
Joined
Feb 3, 2017
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14
Hello all,

I'm J and I've just ordered a TS55 with accessories and rails as my first Festool purchase. I'm returning to woodwork after a decade or more away. I lived in Texas for a few years and, while there, took up woodworking, doing some handtool work (bookshelves, cabinets and boxes, along with a wall of built in cabinets, cupboards and shelves with the power tools.

I used to have a Grizzly cabinet saw, jointer, planer, dust collector and a host of hand power tools. However, after a divorce, I found myself living in a room at a friends house and, co-incidentally, out of work so most of the toys/tools were sold.

Fast forward a decade or so and I'm remarried, living in Devon in England and renovating an old farmhouse. Most of the major building work has been subcontracted out as I've been away working to pay for it all but I'm now getting to the point of doing more of the work myself as I have more time at home and we get to the interior finish. One of the projects is a wall of cabinets and shelves in the living room that will be 14' wide and 7' tall. I'd been looking at prices to have them made until my wife said 'you used to make stuff like that, why don't you make the ones here. You could re-equip a workshop for what that would cost to have made'. You can see why I married her, can't you :)

The last lot of shelves and cabinets, I made up as I went along, built a frame of 2x4, fitting panels of MDF, routed for library standards and with rail & stile cupboard doors. Much of the time was spent staring at the empty space and figuring out how to make each bit fit as I went along.

This time, I'm planning to use the 32mm system after seeing a few variations on it on another forum (garage journal) where one of the members there, [member=15946]sakurama[/member] (who's probably on here somewhere I expect - Gregor, this is all your fault ;) ) started a renovation project on his mid-century house and blogged about it in detail. I've followed that thread for a few years and fell down the rabbit hole of Festool-envy.

I have some new doors to fit after I've finished laying the floorboards in the cottage and that seemed a good enough excuse to order the TS55 and rails to trim those and also to make up some plywood panels to reinforce the back of the ikea wardrobes that I'll be building and fitting this week (yes, I know, but there's only so much time available for building stuff and I need the wardrobes right now).

Currently looking at the MFT/3 as the next addition.

I do have a small workshop that we built at the back of the barn here, studded the walls and insulated them boarded out. Fitted a little woodburning stove that we found in the barn when we bought the place and which I cleaned up and renovated, so it doesn't take much to warm it up. So far I've built some simple bench units and a basic hand tool workbench and a stand for a combination lathe/saw/planer that I was given by a friend after her father sadly passed away and so that's in the process of being cleaned up.

I reckon with a TS55, MFT/3, a guide for my dewalt router to fit the festool rails and my current shopvac and knock-off dust deputy I hopefully should be able to put some cabinets together that will be a useful addition to the house.

Edit: and because everyone likes pictures, I found a couple of old ones of the cabinets I built in the states. The central fireplace was already there, but was flanked by two empty alcoves.

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Hi J and welcome to the FOG.

Looks like you're going to have some fun if you're renovating an old farmhouse. Is it listed, or just old?
 
Hi Garry,

no, the place isn't listed, that was one of our considerations when we bought the place. It's a 250 year old cottage with 2' thick stone walls built directly onto clay, with a 1980's extension on one end. Everything you can do wrong to an old cottage had been done to it. So far we've dug the side of the cottage out where the ground came 6' up the side, dropped the rear patio 2' as it was above interior floor level, stripped the exterior cement render which will be replaced with lime this summer, stripped the interior cement render downstairs and replaced with lime plaster (just finished painting the new walls) removed an old oil fired rayburn and even older woodburner with 2 new woodburners, one with back boiler, rewired the downstairs, put 6kw of PV on the roof, replaced all the draughty single glazed windows and doors with oak framed double glazed windows and oak doors, replaced the rotted kitchen units and put in a garden and allotment. There's more been done but that's a rough rundown of my last 4 years :)
 
Oh, Devon.  Up north then.  Well when you live on the Roseland peninsula everything (except The Lizard) is up north!

Welcome to this great forum, good luck, and keep posting.

Andrew
 
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