I built a walnut mantle for my parents house in Madison wisconsin.
Back in 2018, I had had a growing list of problems with my old BMW 2004 330xi. The car had a slow oil leak, a slow coolant leak, a power steering fluid leak, rips in the boots of both front axle boots, and its front suspension was feeling really shakey. That’s a lot of problems, and the car was 14 years old at the time and its value was quickly dropping. Having all these things repaired would likely cost more than the value of the car, so my options were to either diagnose and do the repairs myself, or find a new car.
Unfortunately I’m a cheap masochist, so I decided to try to do the repairs myself.
When we moved into our townhouse it had a terrible kitchen: there wasn’t enough cabinet space, the cabinets were terrible builder basic quality, the counter tops were made of cheap laminate, there wasn’t enough working space on the counters, the sink was thin gauge metal with a bad faucet and garbage disposal. The seller did install new appliances before we moved in, which we were able to salvage. We needed a change!
Writing this in 2023. Back in 2018 a storm rolled through and took down a couple of huge limbs from of a silver maple in my mother-in-law’s yard in Naperville. They caused some damage to the house and really tore up the yard. I told her to have the cleanup crew leave any big logs in 8-10’ sections so I could have them milled up.
We refinished my childhood kitchen table, along with 6 chairs and a bench. Stripped the previous paint / finish and sanded all the way down to bare wood before finishing with a paint / stain combo.
Picked up a bargain load of ~200 boardfeet of walnut from out in rural Illinois.
Writing this in 2023. Not too long after we moved into our Westmont house, I built a bar cart to store cocktail supplies.
We moved into our Westmont townhouse in 2017, and I set to work on building out a suitable workshop in the unfinished basement. Its challenging to build projects without any suitable work surface, so my first project was to build a sturdy workbench.
Writing this in spring of 2023. During the spring of 2017 Kaylin and I were looking for houses. I was realizing we were way short of furniture for the house, and channeled some boredom into making some bedside end tables.
This was just my third woodworking project I attempted. Designed to be simple, both visually and to construct, with an emphasis on a two-tone color scheme. Built in my parents Grayslake house using a pretty crappy setup as described in Platform Bed.