A WoodWork in Progress

After completing the potting table, I knew that I needed a better work surface. I was able to build a table for my wife, I should be able to build something for me too! The challenge I had was my work space. My garage is quite small, so I needed a work table that could be stored away when not being used. I did some research online and found a video for a fold-up workbench that stores on the wall. The link is here: https://youtu.be/dejyJEb9zgc The table in the video was too large for the space I had available. I needed to shorten the table, which would result in the legs hitting the far side of the frame. This is where I needed to make some weird modifications. I needed to offset the legs so that they would sit beside the others. The supports also would be hitting the other legs, so I needed to notch-out the legs. I needed to buy some chisels to do that. What I didn't know was that I was creating a 'half-lap' joint in the legs. I just thought I had come up with a neat ...

With my wife settling in to her gardening hobby, she requested a table that she could use for potting her plants. Until then, she had been using out patio table or the small ledges of the barbeque. A request was made for a true potting table that would be just for her. I looked up some online building plans for making a DIY potting bench. This is the plan I used for my build. https://www.thriftydecorchick.com/2011/08/diy-potting-bench-with-dad.html?m=1 The instructions were simple enough and I was able to customize it to suit the dimensions I wanted. At one point, I had to cut 5" off the feet because my own working height is much higher than that of my wife. For this build, I bought 4x4 cedar posts, and 1x6 cedar deck boards. They fit in my minivan fine and I started working. This was going to be an outside installation, so rough cut edges were fine, but the jigsaw was not ideal. Straight cuts are not easy with it, so I borrowed my neighbour's circular saw. That m...

In the Spring of 2020, my wife developed a taste for gardening. She wanted to make much of our backyard into a vegetable garden, and a flower garden that would attract bees and hummingbirds. This meant some landscaping would be needed. Ugly bushes were removed and old tree stumps were ground down by a landscaping service, leaving bare patches for fresh ideas. The first thing I built this year was a garden box. Probably the simplest thing one could build. I got some old cedar deck boards from a local Facebook group that re-gifts things for free. The boards were ugly, and were many different sizes. For a garden box, it didn't matter. I took the shortest of the long boards and decided that would be the length of the box. After that, I cut the boards I needed with a Ryobi jigsaw. I bought a Makita random orbital sander and removed as much old paint as necessary. I assembled the garden box walls and added a centre section to give more support. In the end, the box was 9' x 4' and...