I Wood

I know you’ve all been sitting on screws and nails, waiting to hear all about my first attempt at bench construction.

Well, let’s see. I wanted my finished project to look like this picture on the left here, only in wood and not a cartoon.

We carefully measured twice and cut once. Ok, sometimes we had to measure and cut several times because no matter what my tape measure said, the piece didn’t fit. I don’t pretend to understand it. Careful, JW!



Then JW used his new framing nail weapon to shatter some wood....ooops, put some pieces together, sorry. That nail gun scares me. I’m glad I didn’t hear about this poor guy’s nail gun accident until after we were done.



I was seriously beginning to doubt our completion of this project when we experienced severe difficulties in assembling the box portion. My husband and I are both intelligent people. You wouldn’t have known that yesterday afternoon. Finally, we assembled something that appears to be a box. From the outside anyway.



A few more cuts, nails, screws, a trip to the hardware store, a new high powered screwdriver (oh yes, the motor burned out on ours) and a rubber tree plant later, it looked like this!



WOW! We did it! It looks great from across the yard. If you get close, you can see that it was completely crafted by people who had no idea what they were doing. I’m very proud of it as a first try, but don't worry Big BahUna, we're not giving you up anytime soon :)

I did learn quite a few things yesterday.

2x4’s do not measure 2” by 4”. Why? Why would they call them something they are not? Had I known this, I could have saved hours trying to figure out why a 57” board attached to two 2x4’s would only measure 60” across.

No matter what project you do, it will require at least seven trips to the home improvement store of your choice. It is impossible to get everything you will need in one trip.

Something will break during your project requiring you to purchase additional tools in order to finish.

Plans are great, but why don’t they state in what order to assemble these pieces of wood or is this something that I’m supposed to just know or have learned in school? I must have been absent that day.

Before you leave the home improvement store, check the little tags on the end of the wood that state the size they are pretending to be, like 1x6x8. Don’t trust the sign above the wood in the store.

Those are just a few things I’m pondering today, along with some of the questions on my buddy Malcolm’s weekly trivia game.

All in all, JW and I had a lot of fun building this and laughing at ourselves.

Would I do another project like this? You bet I wood! :)