Build a kitchen table for my parents with a walnut top, and a painted maple base. Design is original.

A batch of frames, including a frame for a print we bought in Kauai for Virginia, and an old print from a family trip we took out west in 2005.

I did a commission! Well sort of. My friend asked if I was interested in making a bar for his apartment, and I agreed to do it for basically the cost of materials. We worked together on the design and went back and forth with a couple iterations.

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!

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.

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.