Woodworking

Here are some of the woodworking projects that I've built.

Cookbook Stand

For Christmas, I made my mother a stand to rest cookbooks on in the kitchen. It's red oak with walnut accents, and is finished with a food-safe, shop-made wax & mineral oil blend.

The shelf portion slides in and out so it can be adjusted for bigger and smaller books. You can also take it out completely so that the two pieces can be packed away flat if counter space is needed for something else.

PS I made a cardboard mock-up of this to test out the dimensions make sure the center of gravity would be in the correct place when it was "fully loaded" with something hefty like How to Cook Everything. It simplified things so much later on that I'm shocked I've not heard of other woodworkers making this a routine part of their process.

PPS I also made my step-father a Roscioli apron since that;s his favorite restaurant in the world. I have pictures of that on the page I'm putting together with some of my print-making work.

Disassemblable Desk

I recently started a new job at Amazon which will allow me to work from home a day or two a week. That will require a space to actually work from, so I decided to take some of the time between leaving Booz Allen and starting at Amazon to build a desk.

The result accomplishes several goals:

1. It's big: six feet long by two feet deep.
2. In keeping with the spirit of the Amazon Door Desk, it was less than $100 in materials.
3. I can completely dissassemble asnd flat pack it when I move.
4. It uses no metal fasteners.

You can see more pictures of the build process here.

Framing tool

I make custom frames for a lot of the artwork in my house. I have a batch of prints that need framing, and I was getting tired of planning the sizes by scratching out my options on graph paper.

So I did what any Data Scientist would do: create a Jupyter notebook. You can download it here or see a preview here.

I quickly realized I didn't want to haul my laptop down to the saw-dust coated garage every time, so I should make a web version I can use from my phone. You can find that here.

Step Stools

I made some step stools for toddlers to use to reach the bathroom sinks.

Not much to say about these really. Some cheap pine, held together with dowel joinery. They're no heirlooms, but at the rate the bairns are sprouting up, they'll only need a steel stool for about three days more anyway.

One thing I did learn from doing this is that swiffer sheets work amazingly well for the wipe-on poly that I mix up. Incredibly smooth application, and so far able to stand up to all of the spills you would expect from toddlers learning how to wash their hands.

Entryway Bench

This is a simple bench to put near the front door for my kids to sit on when they take their shoes off/on.

It's far from the finest thing, but considering I turned ~$18 of pine into something functional for my family I'll count it as a win.

Nursery Wall Signs

To be added.

Frames

To be added.

Cutting Boards

To be added.