My workshop in our 1918 Seattle farmhouse needed a new door, so I embarked on my most ambitious project to-date which involved designing the carriage doors, building them, and then rebuilding the exterior frame and concrete floor to accommodate the carriage doors. The doors themselves are held together solely by 256 dowels. The 24 window panes (double panes) are hand-cut and held in place by 96 beveled wooden inserts and weather strips, secured by 192 screws. I ultimately chose screws for ease of future glass replacement.

Our Seattle farmhouse desperately needed a new driveway gate. We also had quite a bit of reclaimed wood from dismantling a deck and privacy fencing. I researched, designed and constructed what ultimately was a 700 lb gate using new wood for the structural members and reclaimed wood for the aesthetic fill. I also designed and welded the attachment points for the automatic gate opener.

My first cutting board and matching trivet was a gift for my daughter’s 21st birthday, knowing she loves to cook. It taught me much about precision angles and cutting, glueing, plus keeping it all flat.

I wanted to challenge myself to make more refined, aesthetically beautiful useful items out of wood. This 2nd. cutting board pushed my abilities in precision woodworking.

Dewayne, Craig and I decided to use making these spatulas out of maple firewood as an excuse to get together. What a magical experience to take arbitrary fire logs and transform them into stunningly beautiful spatulas that had a shimmering finish similar to tiger eye stones.

We loved our hexagonal home at Trillium Hollow Co-housing, with one exception – the peninsula kitchen was microscopic. The thought of creating landfill was not exciting, so we decided to do a minimal remodel that can re-use the cabinets. We demolished the peninsula, patched up the newly exposed concrete floor plumbing holes, reconfigured the cabinets, built a new corner cabinet, and cut a new eco-friendly PaperStone countertop and backsplashes.

Originally, my plan was to replace the subfloor under a loose toilet in the community hot-tub bathroom as part of my community contribution. As that project progressed, it became obvious other parts of the floor had rotted out, to the point of being an imminent safety hazard. By the end of the project, I and my co-housing neighbor Anthony had completely removed and rebuilt the entire floor.

Our smallest bedroom in our hexagonal house in Trillium Hollow was truly microscopic. The floorspace was dominated by stairs to a tiny loft just big enough for a twin bed. To make better use of the space we converted the stairs into a ladder attached to the wall, and added a half-height “Elf” door to access the loft from the larger loft overlooking the living room. We also added a cat door since JoJo loved to visit Kai.

One of our favorite family pastimes is playing Dominion. To make this easier, Kai and I designed and created a 3 level organizer out of Lego. This involved many trips to the 2nd hand Lego bricks store to get flats. We used this organizer for 6 ½ years, then gifted to the new owners of our Seattle home, also Dominion enthusiasts, when we moved to Norway.

I needed a workbench, and had a giant pile of wood I didn’t know what to do with. I made a composite top from a bunch of planed down 2×4’s and the legs from the original posts holding up the workshop before it was rebuilt to be structurally sound. I designed the workbench to be the exact height of the SawStop table saw so it can be used as extra workspace. It also slid exactly under shelving I added so that a row of tools such as soldering iron can be at bench height, but stay behind when bench is rolled out.

We had opened access to the space under the stairs and used it as a pantry, but never figured out how to get the best use of the space. I’d wanted to learn how to make dovetail joints and this was the perfect project for that.

Constantly on the lookout for projects I can get Kai interested in, I suggested a collaboration where I did the hardware and make it possible to program it in Scratch. I took a robot kit, used its computer simply as a controller, then added a RaspberryPi and a bunch of ToF sensors. I then wrote a plugin for Scratch that made it possible to control the robot from within Scratch. I mentored Kai on writing a maze solving algorithm and processing the sensor data to the point where Scratch showed a “digital twin” of the maze as it learned what the maze geometry was. After a bunch of trial runs and tweaks, we did successfully have the robot solve the maze.