A WoodWork in Progress

There are two very common projects that amateur woodworkers tackle, with similar workflows: cutting boards and chess boards. I've made a few cutting boards, and I have a request from The Boss to make another, but before that, I wanted to make a nice chess board. I also wanted to complicate things for myself, so I added drawers to hold the pieces. To add another element to the project, I made the chess pieces myself, out of epoxy. When I started this project, I took photos of my work, starting with the raw wood from the shop, the cutting and assembly. Once I completed the assembly and put the topcoat on the wood, I had a tragic incident - my photo had a fatal flaw and needed to be factory reset. All my photos were lost. I didn't have auto-backup setup on my phone, so they weren't stored on the Cloud. Lots of colourful language was used at that time. I will describe the build process in general, but without the photos to explain, many of the details won't make sense. For...

Our living room has a fireplace that our family likes to spend time watching. Part of that requires our couch to be in the right place to view it. We also recently made the decision to purchase a projector to show movies on the wall above the fireplace, which is another reason our couch needs to be oriented to face it. When re-arranging the living room, it was agreed that a console table behind the couch would be very useful, and would help eliminate the need for a coffee table. So, I designed a console table to fit our needs and more importantly, fit our couch. Our couch is only a few years old and wouldn't be changed for a long time, so I was confident that whatever table I make to fit this couch will be used for many years. One requirement we had was to integrate outlets for lamps and for phone charging cables. For a long time, we had thought of placing those outlets on the top of the table (I had seen many other designs for console tables with this placement). I decided shortly...