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.
We built a wine cellar for my parent’s Madison house. Built it in a single day with the help of my dad and brother. Didn’t put any finish on the wood. Capacity is something like 500+ bottles, and my dad managed fill it up!
I had recently replaced the blower fan motor on the furnace when the whole thing went out. Some failure in the control board which was cost prohibitive to fix. Thought it was wasteful to throw the new motor out so decided to feed two birds with one scone, and build an air filter cart for the workshop.
At the beginnning of 2019 we had been living in our house for just under 2 years. The storage situation in our master bedroom had been irritating us for while, and I started thinking of building a proper dresser. I wanted to build a dresser that would last at least my whole life, and which would never go out of style, so I choose to build it out of solid walnut, using traditional joinery everywhere except the drawer slides.
Leading up to this project, I had been working more with different types of joinery, and was starting to feel comfortable with executing the key joints (mortise and tenons, dovetails, lap, finger, bridal, etc.) using the equipment in my shop. Still, a dresser would have more pieces and different types of joints than anything I had done up to that point.
Writing this in 2023. I made a stepped planter to add some color to our back porch. Four years after originally making it, it’s holding up great and looks fantastic by mid-summer when the flowers fill in. Would definitely build another, but would make the trays deeper as the plants tend to get root bound.
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.