Last entry for this project. Again, for those of you that have followed the other two posts “Crib for my son – the beginning and somewhere in the middle” I have finally finished crib… well I finished it after he turned six months old and just in time for the new year. I took the last 6 weeks of the year off from work to be with my son. This was actually good timing because I was finishing up my Master’s, a crib, and was able to bond with my son.

A little more about the crib since I have yet to give any details on it. I purchased and followed the heirloom crib plans just as other LJ’s have done. I made a few modifications to the overall look and changes to the hardware. Instead of the rod hardware typical to the heirloom crib I went with white hardware found on most cribs today. I was able to purchase part of it through Rockler using the crib hardware set and since I wanted to be able to have both sides of the crib move up and down, I purchased additional matching products through a company called Products America.

I definitely learned an enormous amount about woodworking, patience, and providing for your family. I am happy I did this project and can’t wait to learn more on future projects. I need to run as my son has just awoken from his morning nap in his crib.

Cheers!

Okay… if you read my first post “Crib for my son – the beginning” you have an idea as to what I have and haven’t been up to. My son was born in June and I was now consumed with being a father for the first time. Every waking hour I spent as much time as I could with him. At this time school had finished and I was now on break until the end of August, but still working full time. I was able to get in the garage, can’t really call it a shop, and make some sawdust. I found time when I could, but my wife insisted there was no rush on finishing the crib. The reason being the longer I took… the longer he slept in our room in a portable crib. Time passed and finally school started again, thankfully my final semester. By the beginning of September I had finished the ends of the crib, which I felt was a great accomplishment since this means I made it past my first set of mortise and tenon joints. The pictures posted along with this entry show a dry fit with the mattress frame.

The crib building process started in May of 2007. My son was due the following month in June, but a full time job and at that time working on my Master’s degree during the evenings and weekends left me little time to tackle any woodworking projects, let alone my first woodworking project since 8th grade. What that means is it’s been roughly 17 years since I crafted anything out of wood. So I did some research, read through a good amount of projects on LJ, viewed most of Marc Spagnuolo’s podcasts, asked questions of fellow LJ’s that had constructed cribs, recorded and viewed Norm religiously… and then finally bought the wood. I decided to go with poplar because my wife and I wanted white furniture in the nursery. The pictures shown on this entry give you a view of my working area, some tools, and the freshly purchased wood for the crib… and yes I over purchased.