Community Brag Posts

This has probably been done before but here it is for consideration by my fellow woodworkers. If you're anything like me I get pretty impatient waiting for wood glue to work its way out of the tube. So using some scrap wood, I drilled 1.5 inch holes in a small 1x4 board and elevated it about 3 inches. A small board under the glue tubes catches any unwanted drips. Makes a perfect caddy for my glue tubes and no more waiting for my glue. Its always ready to go!

My wife asked for a homemade votive candle holder for the holidays. Searching online, I found that the general design concept is a board with holes in a straight line. Since the desired design is for a holiday centerpiece on a table, I chose an octagon shape. We think it turned out very nice! My kids even gave it a "that's pretty cool" which is an upgrade over their comments on my previous projects :). 

This was my first building project! The bed is built almost entirely out of found wood. I modified the Hailey Platform Bed plans to suit the dimensions of the wood I had, and my very small work space.

I did most of the building in my living room and my apartment's miniature courtyard, which is much narrower than a bed. Because of this, the bed had to be able to be disassembled until after it was stained. The modified plans use brackets on the corners - even these were found! Most of the wood came from discarded pieces of other beds, found in the yearly big garbage collection. The centre support strut can also be disassembled, and is attached with a joist bracket.

I think the actual assembly and finishing of the bed could be done in a day, even for a beginner like me, but I spent many hours sanding the old finishes off of my found wood so I would have a uniform finish.

I found the Workbench Console plans on this site and thought it would look great behind the sofa.

The length was extended to make it comfortable for 3 people to sit at and also to span the length of the sofa. I cut out a section at the back and lowered it to hold some glasses. This fits 4 beer glasses, 4 wine glasses and 4 shot glasses. The towel holder is a cast iron key that I found on Amazon. On the other end is a cast iron bottle opener found on eBay.

I would like to take credit for the chairs, but I cheated and got these from IKEA.

We love using this while eating dinner and watching a movie and is especially handy when guests are over.

This was a time intensive gift made for the husband for Christmas.  Found a really cool Mars Map that's in print here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/387457074/mars-map-8x8-letterpress-redwhit…
That we saw in store at the amazing Boys Fort in Portland.  Decided it might be cool to make a wood wall hanging from it, and woodburn the image.  

Traced image onto wood with graphite paper, then took versatool from Michael's and woodburned for the next 20,000 hours : )  It was a ton of work, but in the end, a completely one of a kind, personalized gift that I know he'll love on his office wall.  Real conversation piece.  Cool stuff!

This was a rack I helped my dad make so he could give it as a wedding gift. This is an attempt to build from plans that Ana posted here:

http://ana-white.com/2011/11/wall-mounted-wine-rack-dont-forget-erase-y…

We took 2 long long cherry boards with bark still on the sides, and ran them through the planer. Then we ripped them down the center to be able to use bark ends on each side and book-matched the cherry colors, but most people wont have to worry about that since they wont be using "found" cherry.

The back board is made up of four 1x7s cuts at 28.5 inches long. You can use whatever width you want, we just wound up with 7inch pieces. Then we used a Kreg Jig to screw those together flush (see picture of back). Once those 4 pieces were together we sanded the edges down to make the backboard smooth and flush.

The 8 mini shelves were 1x3.5s cut at 10 inches long. The middle and bottom shelves were 1x5s cut at 24.75 inches long. Again, we were using limited wood and had to adjust our measurements to make it work.

We spaced the bottom shelf flush with the bottom of the backboard and then would space 4.5 inches between the top of that and the bottom of the next shelf. Make sure there is still room for your wine bottle to fit between the floating shelves. ALSO, MAKE SURE YOU KEEP THE FLOATING SHELVES ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER LEVEL WITH ONE ANOTHER. You don't want your shelves to look lazily placed.

The way we placed the shelves on backboard was...involved.
- Clamp the shelves in place on the front of the board and trace them with pencil.
- Remove the shelves.
- Marke holes to drill within center of the trace.
- Drill those holes from the front of the board to the back.
- Reclamp the shelves back on and use the holes in the board to mark the clamped on shelves from the back.
- Unclamp the shelves and fully drill the shelves by themselves while they were not attached. (BE CAREFUL TO DRILL STRAIGHT and never come through the top or bottom of the shelf)
- Sand off your pencil marks after your drilling.
- Re-clamp the shelves to the backboard.
- Use 3" screws straight from the back into the shelves.
- Use 8 screws per big shelf and 3 screws per little shelf.

Then it was just slow and steadily clamping, tracing, drilling, re-clamping, drilling, sanding, re-clamping, and screwing the shelves on... You have to follow that pattern for each shelf or you risk ruining your shelf and if you have limited wood (like we did) that is not an option.

We also put very small pieces of wood to keep the bottles from rolling off their shelves. These were just scraps we had lying around and tapped them in with small finishing nails.

Good luck!

Anna, thanks for your project! I only strengthened it a metal plate in the center, extended sitting on 4" and feet connected bolts.

It’s not done yet, but I wanted to share my coffee table with y’all. I made it with the same proportions as Ana’s fancy x kitchen table just 3ft wide and 16 inches high. It’s going to be the same finish as Ana’s too. Dark walnut with satin polyurethane.

This is from the "Workbench to Get the Job Done" plan. Instead of using plywood for the shelves, I used 2x4s cut to length which made the piece extra sturdy. I also left a little overhang on each of the ends for clamping things (I wish I left at least 3" on each side, but I think I left about 1 1/2").

We really liked the design of the console table. We built an entry way table and a coffee table to match. We did change some of the measurement to suit our particular needs. We are very happy with how this one turned out. Next we plan on making some end tables to match also.

Built this for our 6yr old. She has decided she wants it to be pink so we picked out a beautiful Aubrey Hepburn worthy shade and will update our photo. 

This is my first project. I had to shorten the width of the shelf to fit the space I had for it. The board on the back is also a 1x4 instead of the 1x3 that was in the plans. This was a great first project for anyone.

This was my second build, very easy with the plans. I wanted it flush with the wall so used a jig saw to cut notches in the bottom to fit around the baseboard. I was also covering an air vent, so I built a simple air diverter out of 1x's and bought a decorative vent cover of Amazon for $10...worked out much better than I thought it would. Painted with a flat black then a few coats of poly.