My wife and I are expecting our first child, and I decided that I wanted to build the crib myself. A few years back a bad storm rolled through and knocked down a few sizable limbs from a soft maple tree in my mother-in-law’s yard. My friend Grant helped me get the logs milled into boards, and the wood has been sitting in my basement drying ever since. I constructed the crib from this wood, and so now our baby will sleep in a crib made from a tree that my wife grew up alongside. What a great connection!

My working arrangement recently became permanently remote, and my old desk just wasn’t cutting it anymore. The desk’s surface was small and cluttered, its clumsy finish was becoming increasingly hard to look at, and its fixed height was not particularly ergonomic. It was time to invest in my home office setup, and build a better desk.

Kaylin and I have been getting more into making our own pizza since quarantine started. We started getting better results when we switched from store bought to homemade dough. We’ve been baking the pizzas on cooking trays, which I suspected was holding us back. They simply insulate too much to develop a good and crispy crust.

And so we purchased a pizza stone. The process of using a pizza stone involves letting it heat up in the oven for a while, which means you need some way to transfer the raw floppy pizza to the stone. What you need is a pizza peel, which is basically just spatula big enough for a pizza. You prepare your pizza on the pizza peel, then shimmy it from the pizza peel to the pizza stone in the oven. When baking is complete, you again use the pizza peel to retrieve the pizza from the stone.

One of our cars is a 2007 Toyota Highlander. We went to get the oil changed at the dealership and during the standard multi-point inspection they discovered a number of issues:

• The rear brake calipers had seized
• The transmission pan gasket was leaking
• The front passenger side CV axle had a boot that was leaking grease
• The rear license plate lights had burnt out

They gave us a quote for $4,700 dollars to fix everything. The car is worth less than that, so no thanks.

A couple of months into COVID lockdown, I made a couple of box planters as mothers day gifts for my mom and my mother in law.

I’m not sure exactly when I originally made this project. It was sometime when I was living in Wicker Park. What makes it hard to pin down is that I didn’t have it when I moved in, I did have it when I moved out, and somehow built it in Grayslake. Must have gone home and built it on weekends or something. One of the original construction pictures I have says that it was taken in February 2016. We’ll go with that.

Refinished a wine cabinets my parents didn’t want anymore. Sanded through the previous finish, except in some hard to reach places. Refinished with a gel stain trying to match the previous color, then Arm-R-Seal satin.