Projects

Since my day job requires me to spend hours upon hours sitting at my desk, my back tends to get into really bad and uncomfortable positions. To help keep a decent posture, I’ve built myself a small stand to raise my keyboard and mouse so I could work standing.

My girlfriend has started doing some water color painting and has been doing it on the kitchen table. I don’t mind, I just think she’d be more comfortable working at an angle, so I thought I’d make something comfortable and portable to work with.

Our old house is really neat, but there is little to no storage. In fact, the whole basement is open, no walls or anything, and we just have plastic bins laying everywhere, somewhat piled up, not really organized, or anything. There’s no way I could leave it like this.

We have a relatively small shed: it’s 8 x 12 feet. Empty, it was quite large, but it became obvious it was smaller than we imagined. Like everyone, we put some time on Pinterest and found someone who stacked their lawn mower and snowblower and so we set out to do something similar.

To me, there’s nothing like spending the summer outside. Granted, I don’t do it nearly enough, especially given the short summers we have, but whatever time I do spend outside, I wanted to make it better. Our backyard has a large terrace and I wanted to spend as much time outside as possible, so I came up with some small objectives for my (ambitious) build:

• Space for a cooler to store drinks and keep any food cold before dinner;
• A counter-top to prepare food;
• Both a trash can and a recycling bin;
• Casters so I could move it around if needed.

Mind you, I’ve never done any of this, so calling this an 8/10 is really underselling how hard I made it, but probably being harder on the project than it really is. But hey, I’ve only been woodworking for about 2 or 3 months, and only on my free time, so I guess it’s all relative.

Disclaimer: The project was done with wood purchased before the Covid-19 pandemic, so wood prices were considerably lower. At the time of writing this, prices have nearly doubled and are expected to rise much more. I hope it doesn’t because this is truly something I enjoy doing and hope to do much more in the upcoming weeks and months!