After the wedding, I felt bad because there was nowhere in our cramped DC apartment for my wife to display her gifts. As a matter of fact, it would be over a year before we even took most of them off her parents’ hands. There was one tiny corner in our place where we could put another piece of furniture, if only we could find something small enough to fit in the awkward space. As you might expect, I ended up building it. Here was the design:

Even though this looks like a simple build, I was worried about making some of the 45° cuts on wobbly sawhorses with a circular saw form the 1970′s.

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I always wanted to build a grandfather clock. Maybe it’s just not my style, but I’m not a big fan of furniture that drips with ornamentation. I prefer the simplicity of the colonial and mission styles. With that in mind, I put together a clock a few years ago when my sister and her husband bought a new house. It was to be a simple design that incorporated an electric clock, and it was to serve as practice for the day when I build my own clock. To start, I bought this 50-year-old wall clock off of ebay:

It’s an ugly wall clock that’s supposed to look like a pocket watch. But I didn’t care about the casing; I just wanted the face and clockworks.

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I’ve always toyed around with building and carpentry, but most of my projects were small in scope or fairly simple in design. The first project that I would consider a real piece of furniture was a computer desk I made a few years ago.

When my wife and I moved in together for the first time, we tried to replace as much cheap college furniture as possible. Since we lived in a tiny, one bedroom, basement apartment, there was nowhere to hide the computer. Nothing looks more ‘dorm room’ than having a computer/printer set-up sitting next to your bed or kitchen table, so I decided to make a unit that would look antique and completely hide all traces of electronics. This was the design:

It was meant to be like a large secretary desk that would hold the monitor in a drop-down position, and the cabinets below would house the tower, printer, and a file cabinet.

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I got the idea to build a bar for our little backyard patio in DC from a magazine article where a cheap potting bench was transformed into a serving station. I liked the idea, but thought I could do a little better than a converted work station. This was my design:

What was difficult with this piece wasn’t the building; I threw it together in two days and painted it on the third. The hard part was knowing that it wouldn’t really be finished for years. I tend to get a little obsessive about my projects, and it was hard to accept that I had to quit after 90% of the work was done.

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When I bought my house, it had these built-in cabinets in the dining room area. They look good from far away, but a closer inspection revealed how warped and worn they were:

They must have been thirty years old, and it looked like every owner of the house since then made some kind of change to them. My wife and I decided to demo them, but we realized too late that the hardwood floors had lightened considerably since the original built-ins were put in. Since the floor we exposed was darker than the rest of the house, and since there was no way we were going to refinish the floors after moving in, we reluctantly decided to build new ones.

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My in-laws were enamored with these rocking chair footrests at Mast General Store:

They dropped a lot of hints that they wanted them for Christmas, but I didn't feel like paying $43 a piece for these tiny things.  Plus, the store only had them in stained oak, and my in-laws have white rocking chairs.  So I decided to make my own.

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Last Christmas my wife and I took the Handmade Pledge and were largely successful. She made ornaments, stuffed animals, and tote bags to give away, and we tried to buy handmade products whenever possible. I made seven of these wine bottle holders for Christmas gifts:

They seem to defy gravity.

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I can’t stand the thought of paying for firewood. It’s like paying to water your yard even though rain falls from the sky for free. Anyway, I’ve noticed that people give away firewood for free on Craigslist throughout the Spring and Summer, and I could season it myself if I just had a place to put it. So I decided to build this firewood rack:

It holds about 1/3 of a cord of wood and will give our yard a little more privacy.

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I’ve been meaning to build a coffee table for years. I wanted it to look like something store-bought, since it was going to be in the middle of our living room. I’ve come close to building it a few times over the past few years, but never could pull the trigger on it. I’ve actually gone to buy the wood and walked out empty handed because of a lack of confidence. Last weekend I finally got around to building it. This was the design:

It’s more complex than it looks, since almost all the boards have to be routed in some way. Sometimes it’s hard to remember the exact order in which everything has to be cut, sanded, glued, and assembled when everything is scattered around a messy garage.

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I wanted to use some scrap wood from around the garage for something useful, so I made a box to hold our firewood on the front porch. Ironically, I ended up buying new wood for almost the entire thing. It was fun to build, though, since I got to play with my new router.

I’ve decided that the difference between an amateur-looking piece and a professional-looking piece is ten minutes worth of routing around the edges.

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