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After making a fair amount of live-edge pieces without much carpentry involved I decided to actually try and build something with my father-in-law. This was fun and rewarding to see take shape and only took a couple weekends (for the most part).

The table is built from big box store pine common boards and and assembled with glues and screws. We mitered the apron around the table and tapered the legs using the simple jig below. The drawers use wooden runners (not metal ball bearing sliders) and the fronts as well as the top received detailing from a new router bit I purchased.

I’m very pleased with how this one turned out and it gives me confidence to build that dining room trestle table my I promised my wife (eventually).

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These shelves were built with the off-cuts of the beech desk I worked on and an extra piece of magnolia I had (the top). The process for this build was essentially the same as the desk and below is a reminder of the board flattening procedure.

Another place to put stuff that we don’t know where to put.

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This was a project that my wife and I planned on doing almost since we moved into the house. It was a pretty straight-forward and rewarding weekend project built from quality maple plywood. We routed out the contours of the wall/moulding and openings to access the power and water shutoff valves. It’s attached to the studs via L-brackets and supported underneath by some (invisible) 2x4s.

Basically it gives us a place to put stuff that we don’t know what to do with.

This was a fun project. My first foray into bent wood lamination, this was inspired by a project that some art student did somewhere. I took some pine common boards and cut thin strips on the table saw. After gluing them together and clamping them in the desired shapes they retained their curvature surprisingly well.

I got a decent cloth-woven lamp cord with a built in rocker switch and anchored the base in cheap cement which I poured into the same orange bucket (coated in vaseline for easy extraction – wife’s idea!) and then finished it with some teak oil.

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Built with leftover laminated oak/poplar from an earlier project I decided to try and build a decorative light to go on my desk. Between the two pieces of wood is a smaller block with an LED strip attached. I cut and glued some strips of frosted plexiglass to diffuse the light, bought a cheap Chinese remote control and voila.

This is the natural progression from the coffee table I built before. This large slab of beech wood is about 7 feet long and 3 ft deep on the left side (2ft on the right) and 2 inches thick. It was relatively dried out but unfortunately it was bowing from side to side and twisted as well. I ended up using the router sled to flatten the whole thing on both sides which took a whole weekend.

I filled in a fair number of cracks and knot holes with black dyed epoxy resin and inlaid a couple oak bow-ties along the largest crack. I kept the bark on the left side in the crotch of the wood and just coated it with lacquer which not only strengthened the bark but gave it a nice luster.

The base was built using 1″ metal piping which is custom sized to fit the odd shape of the desk and then painted a gray color with Rustoleum.

After I put it in place and began using it – I missed my old keyboard tray so I built one with poplar, matched the color with teak oil, and coated with polyurethane.

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This is a live edge coffee table I built out of spalted maple. This being my first time working with flattening or planing a larger piece of work I discovered a technique to achieve the desired result through building a router sled. The process is time consuming and messy but you can’t argue with the results.

There were a few knots in the wood that needed to be addressed so I filled them with marine-grade epoxy resin (mixed with black dye). After everything was sanded I applied a few coats of lacquer and some finishing wax and bought some hairpin legs off Amazon.

I was originally intending this to be a bench but after re-evaluating the finished aesthetics and furniture requirements in the home it became a coffee table.

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This was my first go at creating something more significant. The interior pattern is the same laminated oak and poplar as the hammer I made earlier and the background is gray-stained cedar.

This project took a lot of time and required that I use a variety of new woodworking techniques. Because of this I learned a lot about how wood behaves when cutting, gluing/clamping and finishing. I also learned (the hard way) about wood expansion and this piece began to cup and break after a season because of how I built it. Overall it was a great learning experience.

I saw a picture of a birdhouse with a modern twist somewhere and decided to give it a go. The whole thing is made of cedar with a coat of teak oil on the main structure and white paint on the roof. The roof is also hinged so I can clean it out in the winter.

Funfact: we were playing catch in the front yard and a friend hit it with a football and it bounced off like it was nothing. STRONG.

This is one of my first attempts at a woodworking project – if not my first. I knew generally what I wanted to achieve from watching YouTube and luckily everything happened as expected.

The exterior pieces are oak and the lighter wood including the handle are poplar.