As woodworkers we many times get very snooty about furniture. “Ikea? I’d never put that crap in my house” “MDF? That cardboard crap is only useful for making Jigs”. I am just as guilty of this as the next wood snob.

While I love the path of heirloom quality furniture that my transformation into a woodworker has lead me down, it has left a number of the rooms of our house quite empty. (Maybe someday we will actually have a table and chairs in our diningroom). Recently our neighbors have been updating a few of their rooms and cleaning out old stuff. This has lead to some wonderfully usefull hand-me-downs. When they ask me if I could use a white set of bedroom dressers I didn’t even hesitate or ask the wife…. “Absolutely!”. I was sure they would be useful in one of our many empty rooms.

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I’ve been fairly active in the online woodworking community for a while but have never really produced anything I would classify as furniture. I began working on this table about 7 months ago but got sidetracked with priority shift of renovating 6 rooms in our house. A few weeks ago, I was finally able to dive back into the project and managed to finish it. Read more…

Most woodworkers I meet always started the same way; you need to do a project or two around the house, so you buy a tool or two and it just escalates form there. Thats how it started for me and I’m guessing that if you are just starting out that’s how it is for you too.

One of the most basic projects that always seems to be made are frames. Whether it’s for a picture or a mirror it’s a great starter project. Personally around our house right now we have 4 rooms under renovation. One of these rooms had an old mirror with no frame that had just been glued to the wall. Water from the sink had worked itself up under it and ruined the edges of the reflective material. Additionally years of sloppy painting has left the edged looking distinctly tie-died.

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I usually only blog about woodworking, mostly because I personally find that far more interesting than the daily monotony that is homesteading (weeding, collecting eggs, trimming hooves, etc…). This has been an interesting couple of weeks though.

I don’t consider myself a violent person, I’m very slow to anger, and make it a point not to pick fights. And I dont like to kill anything, and try very hard not to do it unless it’s for food. Now thats not to say I can’t apply violence when it is absolutely necessary.

I grew up hunting a bit with a trusty BB gun, like many boys, and am actually a pretty consistently good shot with a rifle or shotgun. During college I did start training as a martial artist and kept it up for about 5-6 years and earned a black belt (I recently started training again, mostly for fitness). Those skills served me well on the farm this week…. Read more…

Half of woodworking with power tools always seems to be making jigs that help you make that actual pieces you want to make. Turns out the cooking can be that way too. So here is how today went:

4:05pm – Realize I dont have a dinner plan

4:10pm – Decide fish tacos sound good, but all we have are wheat tortillas. (ewwww)

4:12pm – Decide I need to try to make corn tortillas again (they didn’t turn out that great last time, crumbly and not thin enough).

4:13pm – Remember that I ment to go buy a tortilla press as some point, but never got around to it. Decide I could just make one (it can’t  be that hard). Read more…