We have a ‘drink station’ in our kitchen which is a repurposed DIY tool chest that I built a long time ago. It works - but it’s far from great. The biggest shortcoming is that the top surface sags because I didn’t better when I built it originally. We keep a toaster oven and a water boiler with 5L of water on the top: this isn’t enough sag to be dangerous but more so an annoyance. I’ve been wanting to rebuild this station for a little while now and finally decided to just do it.

I wanted to give the backdrop for Skype Station a bit of a refresh to both add a bit of cool factor but also, to expand it’s coverage so that I would have a bit more flexibility in where I could place the camera and thus, define the [camera] framing. This was supposed to a be quick ‘weekend project’…

I recently bought a ‘quiet’ wet-dry vac so this was a great opportunity for a quick weekend project to revisit my bulky dust collection cart.

Our office floor has a pretty substantial slope — on two axes — right where I sit. This is something that’s been bugging be since I got set up here, and I’m finally getting around to doing something about it.

In this dust-collection update, I wanted collate a few of the improvements I’ve made to the shop in an effort to reduce the amount of time spent cleaning up. I tackle this from two fronts: collecting more dust at the source and an since there will always be some dust that escapes - making that dust easier to clean up.

I was running into the capacity limit of my previous drill rack, so this was a great opportunity to build a new drill rack. This was also a great way to use up some extra material I had kicking around.

I was looking for a retractable power reel for the shop with one specific criteria: to be able to mount the reel on a flat surface (like a shelf) and not have it flop around. With a bit of annoyance and DIY, I was able to find/retrofit a reel to suit my needs.

A quick turbo project to make a raised bed [stand] for the dog bed - this elevates him so he can stare out the window in sheer panic and anxiety without bothering me about it. From a project perspective this is great: it’s a quick turbo project and it uses up scraps.

A raised garden bed/planter/box is just a glorified rectangle right? If it’s built for the outdoors, using outdoor lumber and we don’t expect fine woodworking joinery, how long could it possibly take to build?

In my case, almost six months it seems. YouTube timelapses lie. Read on to see how I put this together and maybe why it took so long.

Using your smartphone for music and navigation is a no-brainer, but getting it properly (and conveniently!) mounted in the car is needlessly complicated. I finally got tired of trying to make ‘universal’ mounts work and went for vehicle-specific mounts from ProClip.

We’ve tried growing things outdoors in the past, but we’re just not very good at consistently watering them. To address this, I wanted to use self-watering planters but store-bought self-watering planters are expensive and not only that, they are usually small table-top sized and/or have tiny water reservoirs.

I wanted a planter that I could put a thirsty plant out in the all-day summer and only have to water once every week or two. Oh and I wanted it to be relatively cheap.

We’re looking to grow some vegetables and herbs this year and I had a stack of materials that I had reclaimed from previous projects that I had kicking around “just in case I use it one day” (it must be the woodworker’s creed). It just happened that I had nearly the perfect pieces lying around to make an indoor grow station.