First day up and trying to do some woodworking in my dad’s shop. I wanted to have a quick warm up project, and decided to make a kitchen tower stool for my son. It’s at best a temporary piece of furniture–not exactly an heirloom piece–so it’ll be fine if I make some mistakes.
My goals got a little railroaded though because my parents needed some work done on the house. They’re shower plumbing fixtures were apparently lemons, and they had a plumber out to repair it. But that left a quarter sheet sized hole in their den closet that needed fixing. A very easy starter project.
After cleaning up the hole a bit, I added some crosspieces to the existing studs with some scrap plywood from the garage. That gave something to which I could attach the new sheetrock. Then cutting down the sheetrock to the right size–we had some spare old sheetrock already–and attaching it to the crosspieces.
It was a bit of a pain because of the non-uniform hole size. And even the studs weren’t quite square, so there was a lot of rework, going back downstairs, back out to the garage to trim down pieces. Measure twice, go up and down the stairs once. But in the end, there’s a well covered hole with some unpainted old sheetrock.
I would like to learn how to do this right, floating and taping the sheetrock so it’s seamless in the wall. But at this point, the unfinished cover was all they needed and wanted. (They still worry that they’ll want to go back and open it back up.) Maybe in the future I’ll go back and fix this properly as a good learning project.
From there, we picked a kitchen tower that we’d build. The Wood Whisperer has some plans for the kitchen tower and I decided to go off of this. It’s a bit overwrought for what I need. (It’s likely going to end up painted in our kitchen.) But I like the idea of learning some of the joinery. And we’ll take some shortcuts:
- We’ll use plywood for the standing platform instead of glueing together the milled boards
- We won’t use the crazy expensive Festool domino joiner, and go with the dowels instead
- We’ll use something cheaper than cherry. Probably poplar.
Finally, we went by Home Depot to look at the hardwood selection there. Using poplar, it’d end up costing around $120 for lumber costs. That seems a bit high. I’m going to go by a hardwood specialty store to see if it’s cheaper, because they can cut things to precise lengths.