Playing with Power Tools

So, I decided that I'd skip the sorting of the basement if favor of playing with B's power tools.

While the cat's away the mice will play!  At least, that's what I've always been told, and it sure seems to be true.  While he's home, I'd defer to him in the power tools and carpentry department.  After all, his dad was a carpenter and woodworker, and B worked with him a lot.  This makes me feel like my paltry experimental attempts at cobbling something together are probably gone about bass-ackwards and crookified.

But, since he wasn't here to tell me how to do it better, I played around with scraps of stuff, and I think it turned out pretty good.  The only gripe I've got is the feet are a bit uneven, but I'm not about to stick my hands close enough to a spinning blade to shave off the itsy bits that would even them up.  He can do it when he gets home if it bugs him.  :-P

I save everything... you know this.  So does it really surprise anyone that I save the scraps of wood leftover from B's carpentry projects?   While I was going through some boxes today, I found some old upholstery foam that I'd bought ages ago.  It came in a four pack, and I only needed two of them.  So, naturally, I socked the other two away for some other something someday.  I also had a scrap of gingham check fabric that I kept meaning to turn into a kitchen curtain, but kept putting off because B hasn't gotten around to making the rest of the curtain rod brackets, yet.  I found a rectangle of what I think is birch, and a couple of ends from some 2x4s in the shed.

Wouldn't you know, each end of 2x4 was 36 inches long?  four 18 inch legs, just waiting to happen.  But, I got to thinking, I know I'm not great at working with wood.  I've had no practice at it.  So I thought it might be more stable if I used 8 legs, like L's by splitting the 2x4 in half.  I didn't do such a great job at that, because 2x4's are not 2x4's anymore, so I was off by about 1/4 inch or so.  I also didn't want to have to try to match up the corners and all that stuff, so I just put two legs kitty-corner on each corner.  When I got the legs on, I realized it was going to be way wobbly, so I used the leftover strips from where I cut the 2x4's long-wise as braces.

I cut my foam to the size of the seat, and had two scrap pieces left that just happened to be half the width of the seat.  Triple layer cushy awesome :-)

Then, I just wrapped the fabric over the padding and the seat, tucking the corners sort of like hospital corners when making a bed but not so neat, and used my staple gun to tack down the fabric.  When the fabric gets too dirty or worn, it'll be really easy to pull of and change out.