The scrap pile in my workshop was getting really out of hand so I made a scrap storage cart to organize things. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I deferred to this nice set of plans provided by Jackman Works. YouTube video available here.

I’m not sure exactly when I originally made this project.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.

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.

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.

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.