Community Brag Posts

I was looking for a way to better organize my basement workshop. After looking at your Ultimate Workbench / Miter Station project, I became both inspired and motivated to organize my workshop bench equipment and power tools. I was tired of moving equipment around in my small shop area to use it and the amount of time required to clean up the saw dust during and after project work.

I modified your plans to allow me to incorporate the use of a solid maple shop table that I have had for over 30 years and provide a means to have my main benchtop equipment (miter saw, table saw, and drill press) be readily available for use. I substituted the 3/4 inch plywood top with a 3/4 melamine top with a popular edge trim to allow the workpieces to freely move through the miter saw, table saw and assembly stations. In addition, I added a removable miter saw fence using the Kreg Precision Trak system to facilitate miter saw work setup and to make multiple repeatable cuts. I made the fence easy to remove and store by using 5/16-16 inserts on both the work surfaces and on the he overhead material storage rack allowing full use of the workbench surface.

I also incorporated a separate rolling cart that served as an assembly table, table saw outfeed table, shop air compressor and pneumatic nail gun storage, router and router accessory storage and Kreg Cutting Guide Storage.

I wanted to have ready access to my cordless tools, so I built a separate wall mounted cabinet that holds my drills, impact tools and drill bits. Of course, that lead me to build a wall mounted battery charging station to consolidate and organize all the different battery chargers and spare batteries. Tried to make all things Easy to See, Easy to Get and Easy to Return.

Finally, I spent quite a bit of time researching how to design and add a dust collection system. I ultimately went with a simple, but effective system that incorporated the use of a Dust Deputy Pro, 14 Gallon Rigid Shop Vacuum, Powertec 2 1/2 inch Clear PVC tubing, Blast Gates, Flexible Hose along with Dust Rite Hose and adapters to connect my portable wood working tools. The dust collection components work work well together capturing about 85% of the generated saw dust, but I want to give a special shout out to Shop Nation which supplied a custom 3D printed dust collection adapter for my Hercules Miter saw. It is really amazing how much of saw dust generated by the miter saw is now being channeled directly to the dust collection system.

I now smile every time I enter my workshop :)

The toy room needed some attractive storage for the books and puzzles instead of the floor! Enter this plan. I shortened the shelves to 36" and fastened the shelves to 1x2 stretchers that I fastened to the inside of the sides. I hid them by nailing a face frame to it made of 1x2s. I used beadboard for the back, which I painted before attaching it.
I had a hiccup when I forgot to use my square and had to backtrack some, which made this project longer than I anticipated.

After building the farmhouse table, I got really excited about doing another project. While I was on spring break (nice benefit of being a teacher) I put together this toybox for my son. It's great to finally get the toys out of the laundry basket we had them in and into something more appropriate. We decided to make the lid a chalkboard for a little added fun.

Built this at the request of my pregnant wife, got to crunch time with baby and sliding doors will have to wait until the craziness of the baby dies down. Prioritiezed and built the changing table first.   Cut it down from 4 openings to 3 due to size of our wall.  

I made a small version of the truss farmhouse table for my grandkids at Sunday dinner.

Westley Cooper

These are super simple and easy to build. The stained ones are in my dining room and the blue ones are in my craft room. Not sure how much they cost since I used scrap wood.

We needed a table for the breakfast nook in our new home that we will be moving to in June. We were so excited about this table that we built it ahead of time and sold our other dining room table. We love this table! Thank you so much for the awesome plans.

I modified the table to be a little smaller for a space. it came out beautifully. Love this build as it allows for a very large yet stable table that allows for seating on the ends as well. 

Side note i found notching out the x brace and using only two solid pieces to a be a more effective way of creating both a solid joint as well as well as a smoother looking joint. 

This is my first build. I found the plans for it almost perfect but made a couple of adjustments.

FYI- if you do the 5 crossboards on both platforms, you will need to buy 3 more 2 x 4's to get the cuts you need for everything.

I also added posts in the center to ensure that there is no future sagging.

To get it into my closet sized laundry room that is right off of my kitchen, we painted it before assembling it inside the house. We attached the posts to the bottom and installed that first, then added the top. The clearance in my space would not allow it to be completely assembled before we put it in.

The extra posts don't allow for 3 baskets, but it does still allow for two. I'm also thinking of doing some pull out drawers or something in the bottom.

We painted with metallic silver spray paint and it worked great.

I found the plan for a small vanity and fell in love! I really wanted to build it for my 3 year old. With her room being small and all of her toys having separate spaces for each her room was getting crowded! So with some thinking I came up with a plan to double the whole plan and got myself a media center that took up less space than everything else while still looking pretty! My little girl loves that she can store all her toys, still have her desk and be able to watch movies from her bed.

Cheap and easy. My cuts weren't the best on this one so it has a slight wobble. I plan to have match the finish of my adirondack chair

I built this using the sturdy workbench plans. I hesitate to call it a brag, as it is my first project, and I used some 2x4s from Home Depot. Premium... Yeah right!

Despite my crooked cuts and warped wood, the sum of the parts is actually pretty sturdy!

I did modify it a bit. As I'm 6'2", I made the legs approximately 35" and used 2 3/4" Sheets of 24x48 MDF as the top. This gave me a total height of about 36 1/2" of height, which is pretty comfortable.

I would have preferred more workspace, but I'm limited to a portion of my one car garage, so 24x48 will have to do!

Finally, though this was definitely an hour or two worth of project, it took my about 2 weeks to complete, working in increments as small as 15 minutes, sue to having a 4 month old son!

Now to decide what to build next!

This is my first furniture project I wanted to replace my cheap computer desk that was falling apart. The build was pretty simple, the only problem was finding a good project board and finding a good stain. Tried several different stains an a piece of scrap before deciding on red elm gel stain. Project took longer than I anticipated but most of that time was in getting the finish right, the build part was pretty quick.

After undertaking many home improvement projects over the past few years, my garage was getting a little out of control. I had too many bulky tools taking up space, making it hard to get work done efficiently. I decided to build a storage shelf, but looking for more of a challenge, I wanted to add sliding shelves to provide easy access to items in the rear.  Check out my blog post at JustMeasuringUp.com for all the details.  I documented the project from beginning to end with lots of pics.

http://www.justmeasuringup.com/blog/creating-more-garage-storage

The shelves are 3 ft deep and stores a lot of stuff now.  When I need something at the back, rather than wading through the stuff at the front, I just grab a handle and slide the whole shelf forward.  So if you're looking to improve upon the pretty standard garage shelf design out there, check out mine!