Community Brag Posts

Staying at home during this pandemic pretty much inspired a lot of families to build, discover a new hobby or have their own vegetable garden. Built this ladder garden recently but had to cut it a little short because fences here in California are not as high, at least most I think. We use it to plant different kinds of herbs that we actually use like basil, Thai basil, peppermint, cilantro and parsley and loving it so far.

My wrist has not taken well to the work at home requirement of the pandemic. So, I decided to replace my desk with a similar one that I have at work. Only, this one is much prettier.

Essentially, I built two desks using the farmhouse desk plans. One of them I made less wide than the plans by simply making the horizontal pieces 36" instead of the plan's 47 1/2".

For the middle portion of the corner desk , I based it off of the Office Corner Desktop plans. I made just the middle portion for those plans, but made the edges 46" instead of 38" for a deeper desk as well as to allow more room for my legs not to hit the uprights of the farmhouse desks. I made the corner desktop detachable, so it was easier to fit down the stairs to the office, using some small ~2" cubes placed on the bottom. They just serve to keep the desktop from moving around on the frame. The base of the middle portion I made up using the same ideas used to create the farmhouse desk frames.

I made plenty of mistakes along the way as I'm a software engineer, not a carpenter. I think next time I'll buy a miter saw, most of these cuts were by hand and aren't as straight as I'd like them to be. But, I like to work with my hands and this has made my day job less painful while I'm working from home.

I took Ana's Farmhouse potting bench plan and made it a workbench with some mods. I added the tool storage and adjusted it for different widths depending on the tools. I added some support under the tabletop to attach the tool storage piece. On the ends, instead of the X detail I built shelves for each end for added storage for screws and paint. Finally the pegboard back allows for more storage! The height is consistent with the height of my chop saw on my other workbench for when I need to chop longer boards. I am very happy with how this project turned out and it is now full and in use!

Love this new piece in our game room. It was my husband's first time using the Kreg tool and it went relatively smoothly!

I built this in an afternoon and painted the next day. It was quite fun. BIG TIP!!! Paint BEFORE you build!

This was a great last minute Christmas gift. Took me a little over two hours. Made completely out if pallet wood.

Followed the instructions in the original blog. I would like to thank Ana for the blog. It was the inspiration I needed. This project was challenging for a rookie like myself. The plan is basically the same as the original post from Ana.

Materials:
4" Vertical MDF primed boards
3" Horizontal MDF primed boards
Our wall has texture so we had to use tempered board to make it nice and smooth.
Half inch plywood for under the bench seat.
2x4 for the bench frame
I ordered furniture quality Black American Walnut from a sawmill for the floating bench (not cheap but worth it). I stained it with one coat of Watco Black Walnut just for protection (took 10 minutes to do super easy) let it dry for 24 hours at least.

Challenges:
1. The wall on the right side of the bench did not have a stud just a corner stud, I was not going to risk this bench support so I put the bench support on the one corner stud and installed a hidden strong tie: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Simpson-Strong-Tie-CF-4-15-16-in-x-6-in-Con…
This provided the support that the missing stud would've. Now the bench is structurally sound.
2. Walnut uneven cuts from the sawmill, I had to use a plane to bring the planks closer together didn't want huge gaps.
3. Outlet in the way. City code mandates to remove outlet leaving access to it. We decided to build above the outlet making the bench a bit higher than we wanted it but still worked out, now we still have an accessible outlet under the bench.

I used Ana's plans for the Rustic X Desk and made it a little longer to add the second side of shelving. I squared off all the edges of the 2x4s and 2x6s, so had to figure new measurements. I also widened the space between the shelf towers. I used drawer slides on the bottom shelves on each side for easy access to the printer and other items. I used whitewash stain for the body and Early American for the shelves and desktop with wipe-on poly.

Base was completely made from reclaimed 2x4's. Desktop made from Oak plywood