Here is a project I finished this past week. I bought a mortising attachment for my drill press and wanted to try it out, my wife has been asking me to make some mission style picture frames. She loves to spend time in her craft room and drawing on the computer, and she needed some picture frames to display her work. This is a link to her website.

Designing

Layout

Rough cut

Finish cut

Mortising

Assembly

When I was building my house 6 years ago and we were picking out our interior doors, we were a little disappointed with the choices on garage entry doors. The door had to be fire rated and we could not find anything that would match or look good with what we picked for the rest of the house. So this is what I came up with. The door skin is 1/4” thick, made of white pine and all the joints are rabbit joints giving the door a paneled look. The panels are glued to the metal fire door…. and the most important thing is they match the interior doors I bought. I also needed a small or short door for my attic. So I built the little door in the same way as the skin but thicker, and then glued them to each other (basically gluing two skins back to back) with the grain going in opposite directions in order to stop any warpage.

Here are some signs I made with leftover material from my log home. I band sawed the 10” log into two pieces on my Grizzly G0555 bandsaw. Then I used my Radial arm saw to cut the notches for the posts. My wife designed some templates in Inkscape and cut them out using her Silhouette Cameo….. her website is http://www.eyedrawit.com/ I traced the letters and pictures and then hand painted them. The smaller log posts are from our original little cabin that was on our property and used as our vacation home while our kids were growing up. I sealed the sign with Cabot spar varnish.

Here is a toddler bed I designed and built for one of my granddaughters. I love working with birch…. it machines well and when stained it looks a lot like cherry. This project was fun and easy to do from the simple design to the finish. It takes a baby crib mattress and can be easily taken apart and stored away or moved.

Houses often have wasted space under the eaves. Here is one way you can utilize that space. This cabinet is built from solid birch which was cut from my property when clearing the land for the build of our home. The wood was rough-planed after one year of drying. The following year I built the cabinet. The stain is MinWax Cherry with 3 coats of varnish.

End table / Lamp table for my 5th wheel.

*This is a kitchen island built for my 5th wheel. Since we spend all winter here, we decided the kitchen needed a little more counter space.

I built some wood skins for my garage doors. My garage has 3 doors and there are 114 pieces in each door. This project took me all winter to do, but it was worth it. It has been 3 years and they still look great.

Several months ago our son…. aka javajake.... asked me to build a dollhouse for his 3 daughters as their Christmas present. Since those 3 princesses of his are pretty special to this Papa, I knew I wanted to create something extra nice. I decided a 1:12 replica of our log home would be a good reminder for them of “Papa’s house”, since the miles between us keep them from visiting as often as we’d like.

For this project, I used White Pine cut from our property and left over from the build of our house. I did purchase birch plywood for the “tongue and groove” flooring. The grooves were made with a modified saw blade, which after stain was applied, gave a realistic look. The pine ceilings were grooved in this same way.

I gave my wife the responsibility of designing and cutting the roof shingles and the fireplace insert. The fireplace was drawn in Inkscape. The shingles were cut from heavy, textured card stock which I painted green before adhering to the roof. She used her Silhouette Cameo (plotter/cutter) for cutting the 600 plus 12 inch by 1 inch rows of shingles. For more on this you can take a look here.

As is often the case, the project took longer than I anticipated. I had originally planned to furnish the dollhouse with furniture and kitchen cabinets. However, it took a full 3 months to complete, and believe me… I spent some very long days (and nights) working on it. With my wife helping the last couple of days of gluing shingles on the roof, I finished the project at midnight the night before we had to leave to deliver it.