Category: Wood

We've got a friend who paints, and she gave us this painting recently. I made the frame for it out of a piece of walnut that hand a big knot in it, that I haven't been able to figure out what to do with. It worked perfectly for this project. This is now hanging in our bedroom.

I built this shelf a few weeks ago, based on one I saw online while surfing for inspiration. I love how this design provides lots of little nooks and crannies, with varying elevations for displaying things. We've been slowly acquiring things to put on it as we come across them - we've still got room for more, but we're in no rush. All of the joints are reinforced with biscuits - which a couple of the joints really hard to get together. I actually broke one joint while trying to assemble it, but I was able to repair it and if you didn't know where to look for it you'd probably never see it.

I've been calling this thing a "cabinet", but apparently it is more officially called a "chest of drawers" - as to be called a cabinet something has to have doors with shelves inside. Regardless, I built this thing over the last few weeks. Over the Christmas break the kids and I bought an old Nintendo and Super Nintendo off of Ebay, and have been having a lot of fun playing old games on their original hardware. We've slowly been acquiring a decent collection of games since then, and I built this chest of drawers to keep it all organized and "living room acceptable". It's made from local red oak and contains two drawers (the bottom for Nintendo, the top for SNES games), with a shelf for the consoles and a tiled top - which will eventually be topped with a lamp and some plants. I was going to experiment with making a concrete top for it, but it was too cold to get concrete to cure and I didn't want to wait until spring.

I've been replacing my stationary workstations or tool bases with these rolling carts. I'm trying to incorporate drawers wherever possible to keep the accessories or supplies for a particular tool right at the tool. This way I'll be able to reconfigure the shop during a project to optimize my workflow, and I can tuck all of the tools into a corner of the shop when I'm not using them. I'm in the middle of building an assembly bench right now (not shown), and then I've still got to build the rolling cart for the table saw - which will also incorporate a router table that will be able to use the same fence as the tablesaw. I'll post pictures of the other carts once they're done.

I built another bookcase for under my electronics workbench, to handle some of the excess stuff that was starting to encroach on my workbench space. It's not even half full yet, but I'm sure it won't take me long to fill it up.

Since the last post on this project I've got the wheels mounted, painted the shelves, and affixed the red oak false front. Although I had some chip-out on the oak front when I routed it flush - I may need to replace it before I'm done.

I'm building a slide-out pantry to fit in the gap between our refrigerator and the wall on it's right. It will give us a great place to store our spices so that they are much easier to see - right now they are in a normal cabinet next to the stove, where all but the ones in front are impossible to see. This pantry will make use of some space that is currently wasted anyway. I'm going to veneer an oak panel on the front of it to blend it in with the rest of the cabinets - so it looks like it's always been there.

I built another bookcase to go under my electronics workbench, in order to get some stuff off the bench and out of my way. I will probably end up building one more to go to the left of the corner bookcase, so that I can move the rest of my "how-to" book collection down to the "lab".

3D-printed a wall-mounted holder for my digital calipers today. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and keeps them in easy reach. You can't see it, but it's in even got a little cutout for the caliper's micro-adjustment wheel.