New side project.

Melissa needs a new writing desk and workbench for the craft room-library.I had a bunch of 1*3 that I was going to build storage in the garage out of but didn’t end up using them and went a different route and neglected to return them.  The idea was to work on it while Melissa was in class, then put it in the room and see how long it takes for her to notice. No she wouldn’t have seen it in the garage.

So I’ve been planning this for a few months, but haven’t really felt up to snuff on the warm days, and there were only two so far this winter. It’s been cold.  Today for some sick reason I had lots of energy. Cleared off the roof, shoveled some of the walk, went to Lowes… So since Melissa said something about cutting down her current desk, I decided to pull the cars out and at least get the 8ft boards cut down to the desk size. Amazingly I happened to get relatively clear boards. The whole idea is strong, fast and cheap. This means no hand planing like I did for my workbench. Power tools for the majority of the labor on this project.

Desktop start

So I got the boards rough cut into 4ft and 3ft pieces. It looks like I will end up having to go out and get a few more boards to do the base.

Two sides straight and square

Then I ran them through the jointer to get two square faces to rip them down with on the saw.

I thought it best to let them acclimate again as the boards were pretty straight for building stock, bot the faces were not very flat for furniture stock.

the not straight and square bits

There were a lot of Not Square and a lot of Not Flat bits. This big pile came from just two sides of the little stack. So I thought it best to let them stabilize and see if they warp it the next day or two.

Stickered for stabilizing

All told it took me only an hour including pulling the vehicles out, setting up the mitre saw and jointer, and then reversing the whole mess to pull the van and car back in.  I went in sat on the couch and then decided to sketch up a draft of the desk. Not bad for a lazy Sunday.