Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Why buy when you can build

I'm going through a quarter-life crisis. Yup I'll be 25 in a few months and that is kind of crazy to think about. I've started examining my face for wrinkles and have had "everything is going to be downhill from here" type thoughts. So what am I going to do about it you ask? Well I've decided I'm going to spend more time pursuing my passions and less time napping and watching television. My beautiful wife now works on Saturdays and has to wake up around 7 in the morning so I've been getting up with her and beginning my day then. It kind of sucks but when you've been productive for 3 hours doing what you want to do and it's only 10, it sort of makes up for the suckiness. So what am I doing with all of this time I've been spending on being productive you ask? I'll include a few pictures to show you. First I built this. I've been wanting to work with slices of wood for a while and I noticed what I think was an elm tree cut down and stacked neatly in someone's front yard. Long story short I commandeered it and threw as big of one as I could carry in the back of our car and then grabbed a slightly smaller one. Then I chainsawed it with my dad's old electric chainsaw and put three legs on it. It definitely isn't perfect but I think it turned out looking really cool. I'm going to do some more and use four legs instead of three but this was a great prototype. I saw something similar to this on wonderful Pinterest and decided I would try my hand at a chevron. I bought some 4x4x8 cedar posts and 5 cedar fence faces and chopped them up. I build the frame from the posts and used the fence facing to cover the box. It's a trellis for a grape vine I bought while in Austin, TX. Then I painted it and sanded it down to make it look weathered because bright and new doesn't work with a garden in my opinion. Then I added the vine and am storing it in a friend's backyard until our rent house is ready to move into. I am really happy with how it turned out and the thing is solid. I'm pretty sure it could go to Oz and back and be just fine, but we'll see. Then I used some extra wood and some old bicycle wheels I had and built this trellis. This was inspired by a woodworker/backyard Gardner that I located on the internet. His name is Christopher Gleason and he lives in Salt Lake City and I basically want to be him now. He raises chickens and edibles in his backyard and builds things out of wood for a living. I can see myself getting really into our garden and backyard area and I've already gotten the go-ahead from the wife to build an outdoor table and chairs for it and I can't tell you how excited I am. My father made me build stuff with him when I was a kid and I've been doing it ever since, more so out of my own free will as I get older. It's so much fun to make something that you imagine in your head and see the end result after the sweat and labor of it all. I'm not sure if it's something I want to do for a living but definitely something that I could do on the side. I plan on making some more tables and improving on the one I have made as well as maybe some herb and planter boxes. I'm going to hopefully blog about my processes through setting up our garden and growing vegetables and the things I build. Maybe it'll turn into something maybe it wont, but I've got to give it a shot. I'm at least a quarter of the way dead after all. There's not time like the present to make a life change and I don't want to waste my youth while I'm young.

3 comments:

CStoll said...

My dad has been doing cedar furniture for a while. Check out some of his. He doesn't keep a blog or anything, just posts the pictures to flickr. Anything cedar or wood he probably built.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rstoll45/sets/72157625757560375/with/5393885510/

Andrew said...

Have you considered making a coffee table using layered pieces of your tree stump. I know I just did. How would you do that, you ask? I'll be glad to show you, if you can tear yourself away from all that fantasy reading...

DAve said...

Ian your dad's stuff is really awesome! I especially loved the bar top he made. And Andrew I've got lots of log left so show away.