Nightstand Project

Two of the most beautiful pieces of wood I've ever had the pleasure of working with.  These are 11 and 15 inch wide pine slabs.  Looking at them now I wish I'd built a table out of them, but there'll be more pine where that came from.

The problem with a slab this wide is that it's likely to be warped, and I had to sand off almost a half inch from the edges on one side and from the center of the other to flatten it out.  I probably spent 8 hours sanding alone just to get these to a construction stage.

I don't have very many construction pictures, but I ended up using my Dremel tool a lot.   Sadly it wasn't very well suited to the size of the project so I had to find something with a little more power.

As long as you're going in a straight line the circle saw makes an excellent router ;)
The notches are for the shelves to slide into for both stability and looks.  I found, not surprisingly, that it is difficult to get the notch the exact same height as the shelf.  I love the inlayed look though, it's something that I'm going to continue striving for with future projects. 
(If anyone is working on their Christmas list, I could use a router ;)

I saved the best sections for the top shelves.  I probably spent an hour lining the grain up, I wanted the lines from the back plate to match up with the shelves so that it looked like they flowed together.  It worked pretty well considering they were different pieces of wood.  It was difficult because there were always some grain that lined up and some that didn't, I could shift them back and forth by about a 1/4" and had to decide which looked best.

I'm pretty happy with the end result.  I finished it with a wipe-on polyurethane finish, it goes on very easily and doesn't leave any brush marks like I remember seeing in other projects I made many years ago.  Limei is suitably impressed too, I now have permission to commence work on pretty much any wood working projects my heart desires -
pending their usefulness of course ;)

One Man's Junk, My Treasure

If one man's junk is another man's treasure... I'm that other guy.  With all of the building going on in our neighborhood there is plenty of scrap wood laying around for things like the following:

Most people slap some hooks in the wall to hang a shovel from or stand it up in a corner.
I spend hours sanding, staining, and finishing.
It's worth it though, man that is one nice tool rack.  I'm one hook short though and I can't for the life of me find another black one.  Red and gray are in abundance but no black.

Every handyman needs a set of free weights.  Not for exercising with, but for holding stuff down while glue dries.  This was an interesting project.  Our door frame wasn't quite straight, which left a little gap at the top corner letting in cold air.  My carpenter neighbor came over and unscrewed the frame, and we pried the bottom corner out a half inch bringing everything back into line.  Left a little gap between the flooring and the door frame though so I had to install a strip of wood which I was able to do with the help of on 15" adjustable clamp and about 50lbs of free weights. 

This little pile of scrap wood is going to turn into the finest work bench I've ever had the pleasure of working on.

Halfway through completion I was able to use it as a table, woo hoo!  You can see at the right side the table tops for the nightstands I completed yesterday, those will be part of my next blog post.

There she is, a work of art.  Construction cost = <$5  I put it into immediate use, it's light enough that I can drag it outside into the sunlight, small enough that it doesn't get in the way of parking the car.  I'm already well on my way to destroying the top surface but I kinda figured that would happen.

Back in Bozeman

I realized that poor Patrick is missing out on all of the exciting details of my life due to us refusal to use facebook, so when my Dad came over after Christmas to bust out the circle saw with me I decided to get the blog going again.  Full post on the construction of the bed frame you can just barely see the corner of at bottom right of the first pic will be coming shortly.

We moved the office into the master bedroom, which affords me a much nicer view of the mountains as opposed to the window into my neighbor's house that my old office faced.  You can see the newest member of the Mixed In Key team at bottom center.  He's pretty lazy but good for moral.

Our Mac team should be happy, my new test machine came in the mail last night.  I look really excited but I barely use a Mac at all when I'm at home.  I'm going to use it as a HTPC to get some use out of it.