Hey everyone, I just made my first YouTube video. I'd love to hear what you think of it! In this video, you'll learn how I built this mosaic cutting board out of scrap wood!

You've got to start with photos of the finished project right? Well, this is it! This project was a lot of fun, but incredibly stressful at times. There were a lot of firsts for me and it challenged me in ways I wasn't expecting. Want to see how I made it? Scroll on down the page, I've got detailed instructions on how I built it as well as a bunch more finished photos. OH WAIT, before you do that though, do me a favor and check out my Instagram page (even follow me if that's something you're into :) ) at https://www.instagram.com/zacharyms/. I post frequently with new projects and DIY tips. If you like my work, Instagram is the platform where I'm the most active and put out the most content. Ok now that I've got my social media plug out of the way, let the scrolls commence! Like I said before there were quite a few stressful moments with this build, but I've got to say I got a lot of positive feedback along the way from people on Instagram (I usually post progress pics to my stories) and it really helped keep me motivated. Similarly, I get a lot of feedback from people on Imgur and Reddit when I post projects and I really appreciate anyone who takes the time comment and asks questions. It keeps this process interesting for me. So I'd to give a big thank you to anyone who has commented, or even just upvoted, one of my posts in the past and a big thank you in advance to anyone who upvotes or comments on this project :) Do you love herringbone patterns? Because I know I do! I've been obsessed with it ever since I saw a tile floor done in a herringbone pattern a couple of years ago. I've been trying to find the right project to use a herringbone pattern on for a little while now. I actually had a false start a few months back where I started doing a coffee table with a herringbone pattern but abandoned the project because I didn't like how it was turning out. Not all of my projects end up working out, unfortunately. Sometimes it's best to just abandon a project you aren't passionate about. Since this post is coming out so close to Christmas I thought it was only appropriate that I decorate the photo shoot with some Christmas lights. From me to you, happy holidays, no matter what it is you're celebrating around this time of year. Alright, alright. Enough of the fancy controlled photos. Time for some grimey progress photos taken in my workshop under the harsh fluorescent lights. This wheelbarrow full of wood scraps is where I started this project. A friend of mine works for a company that does much larger wood projects. He messaged me one day to say that they were throwing out a bunch of offcuts and I was welcome to come and pick through them. Needless to say, I wasn't too discriminating, I backed up my truck to their loading dock and started tossing in every scrap of wood I could get my grubby hands on. I am definitely not too proud to dumpster dive. Getting all the wood for free really brought down the cost of this project. I spent just a hair under $100 dollars to get it all done. The first step was to mill all of the wood down to a uniform size and cut off any defective bits (like knots and cracks). Remember this was all scrap wood, so it wasn't in the best of shape. With most pieces, I had to cut 2 sides of the wood before I was left with anything usable. All of the pieces I used for this project were cut to 1" x 3/4. Again because they were all scraps they all had different lengths. The pieces I ended up using for this project were between 20-30" long, but I've still got tons of shorter pieces left for another project. To form my tabletop I had to glue all those pieces freshly cut pieces of wood together. The trouble is to properly glue wood together you have to clamp it together while the glue dries and the herringbone pattern is really annoying to clamp together due to all the angles involved. To make my clamping a little easier I screwed the first two starter pieces to my work surface. That way when I go to clamp everything together I have a strong, immobile base, that I can clamp everything to. When you're doing a herringbone pattern it's really important that each piece is exactly 90 degrees perpendicular to each other. I used a big framing square to make sure my starter pieces were a perfect right angle. Somehow I still managed to screw this up, and my starter pieces were slightly out of square. This caused me some headaches later on, but we'll get to that in due time. Once I had my two starting pieces locked in position I started the gluing process. Each piece of wood got a generous bead of carpenters glue. I made sure to apply glue to the side and the end grain of each piece. The butt joint where the end of one piece meets the side of the next piece is integral to holding everything together in a herringbone pattern. All of those butt joints running down the center of the table top are really the only thing that holds the two halves of this project together. You might also notice that I've covered my table in a layer of plastic. I do that because once you clamp the wood together it squeezes out a lot of glue. Things can get sticky quick. If you aren't careful that glue will adhere whatever you're working on to the table. The carpenter's glue doesn't really stick to plastic so it makes it a lot easier to release once the glue dries. Also, it keeps my table sparkling clean so I can eat my lunch off of them later. Once I had 16-18 individual pieces laid out I clamped everything back to my two starters pieces. I tightened down the clamps until I saw some glue squeezing out from all of my joints and then gave the clamps another half turn and left it for an hour so that the glue could setup. Originally I wanted to make the whole table top in one big glue up, but, during a test layout, I quickly realized that wouldn't work. Even in this photo, you can see that the clamps are pretty far from the center of the herringbone pattern. The more pieces I tried to clamp at once the further it pushed the clamps to the wings of the pattern. Fun fact: This photo is actually a dramatic reenactment of my original glue up. I had an SD card fail on me after the first day of this project. So I had to go back and recreate a lot of the lost work. For what its worth it was a Samsung Evo 128gb Micro SD card. Completely corrupted everything on it and I only had it a little more than a year. Samsung then denied my warranty claim because I bought the card from Amazon, which isn't an approved retailer. Screw you Samsung. In case you can't tell I'm still a bit salty about the whole experience. Glue, clamp, wait. Rinse and repeat 3 times. I'm not going to lie, this part of the project was pretty boring. I spent most of my time sweeping up, organizing my incredibly messy shop and wasting time on my phone. As you can see from most of my photos though I probably should've spent more time cleaning and less time on Reddit. Eventually, I had these 3 smaller intermediate pieces of herringbone pattern. The last stage of this giant glue up was gluing those 3 intermediate pieces together. I applied glue to the joints between them and clamped everything with this elaborate web of clamps. Just as I finished tightening the last clamp I heard a loud crack. Shit. Remember how I said my starting pieces were slightly out of square? Well, the 3 intermediate pieces didn't fit perfectly together. When I clamped them together it applied quite a bit of force to the seam down the center. You can see, right at the bottom of this photo, the center seam ripped itself apart. Thankfully this didn't affect the final build since that part pattern was always going to get cut off. I got really lucky here, if it had cracked at the other end I would've had to start all over again. Let that serve as a lesson to you kids at home, always double and triple check your angles haha. After the glue was dry and all of the clamps were removed I was left with this giant chevron shaped piece of wood. Pretty cool, but I needed something a little bit more rectangular for this table. To accomplish this I started by finding a centerline through the pattern. That might sound easy, but the herringbone pattern can play tricks on your mind. Finding the centerline was a trial and error process for me. Pretty sure I got it, but I'm sure some people will let me know if I missed it in the comments. Once I had my centerline figured out I measured all of my other lines off it to keep things nice and symmetrical. The rectangle I drew ended up being 22" wide and 36" long. I choose 22 inches because I felt that fit my living room/couch the best and I used the golden ratio to work out the length of the rectangle. You know about the golden ratio right? Just in case you missed that day in design class (not that I've ever taken a single design class) it's supposed to be the ratio between the width and length of a ratio that is the most visually appealing. In other words, it looks the most "rectangle-y". That's a word, right? Rectangle-y. Ya, I'm pretty sure that's a word. Using a track saw I cut along the lines I just traced onto the wood. Track saws are like circular saws that ride along a track so you get perfectly straight cuts every time. I use the track saw whenever I don't trust myself to freehand cut a straight line, so as you can imagine I get a LOT of use out of it. It's quickly becoming one of my favorite, and most used, tools for these furniture projects. As you can see, the offcuts from this step were quite large, rather than throwing them in the garbage I saved them for another project I'm working on. You might want to sit down for this. Believe it or not, my glue up wasn't 100% perfect. I know, you must be shocked. It was a lot for me at the time too. There were still some small gaps and uneven joints in the table top. It's ok though, that's what we have wood filler for. Using a 2" putty knife I pressed some colour matched walnut and oak filler into any open crevice I could find. I'd be lying if I said I got them all the gaps and crevices in the first pass. This step was repeated several times. Turns out my track saw is good for cutting bevels as well as straight cuts! While I was waiting for the wood filler to dry I grabbed the track saw again and cut some 10-degree bevels on the two ends of the tabletop. The bevels were necessary in order to make the tabletop fit into the legs I was about to make. I wasn't originally planning to do this detail, but I realized my table top wouldn't fit tightly into the legs I had sketched out if I didn't. I'm glad it turned out to be necessary though, because the bevel became one of my favorite details in this build. It's funny how these things happen, and it's a good example of how my designs evolve during the course of a build. I rarely end up build exactly what I planned on building, there's always a few small changes along the way. I really wish I had a giant planer. It would save me so much time. Alas, my planer is only 13" wide, and not nearly big enough for this table top. That left only one option for me, the belt sander. I did my best to make sure every piece of wood was properly aligned before I clamped everything together in the glue up, but invariably, there's always some pieces that stick up a little higher and some pieces that sit a little lower. To remove that variation between pieces I sanded them off with an 80 grit sanding belt and a bit of patience. Ok, more like a lot of patience. Oak is not the easiest wood to sand! This process took me at least a couple of hours. The belt sander is great for removing a lot of material quickly, but it leaves the wood with a pretty rough feeling finish. To give my table top that silky smooth finish I crave I needed my random orbital sander. I started with 80 grit sanding pads and slowly worked my way up to 220 grit. 220 grit leaves the wood with a really nice smooth feel to the hand, but there are still enough micro abrasions and surface imperfections that the varnish will adhere to it nicely. Sanding is time-consuming, and frankly, not that interesting. But it's a job that needs to be done and since I work alone, that means I've got to do it. To help pass the time, I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while doing these projects. While I worked on this table I listened to "Solaris" by Stanisław Lem. It's a polish (translated to English) science fiction book from the 60's about a human expedition that makes contact with a form of alien "life" that is almost completely beyond their understanding. I say "life" because I feel like the book is an exploration of what it is to be alive and conscious. The entity that the expedition meets really challenges our human conception of those two ideas. I won't spoil anything else but It was a really enjoyable read. Outside of a few outdated technological references, you'd never know it was published almost 60 years ago. After sanding and before applying the varnish I gave the table top a wipe down with blue shop towels. The shop towels are really good at collecting dust and other dirt that gets stuck to the surface and doesn't leave behind any of its own fibers. Trust me, you don't want any dust or dirt to get trapped beneath your clear coat. It'll drive you crazy. You'll just stare at it for hours and contemplate all the bad choices you've made in life... Or least I assume that's what someone in that situation would do. I wouldn't know... If there's a better feeling out there than rolling clear coat onto raw wood, I sure as hell haven't found it. I love how the color and texture of the wood is instantly transformed. The tones and shades of the wood just immediately pop! I love it. For this project, I used a satin floor varnish. Satin is a nice middle ground between a glossy finish and a matte finish. It hides flaws better than a glossy finish would, but it's also super easy to wipe stuff down and clean if it ever gets dirty. Which is important to me because I eat most of my meals at my coffee table and I'm a known spiller. The particular varnish I used also dries really quickly so I'm able to do multiple coats relatively quickly. To save time, and avoid cleaning my tray and roller between coats, I stick them in a garbage bag, squeeze out most of the air and then seal the end. This helps to prevent the varnish from drying and clumping up in the tray. If you just leave your tray and roller sitting out, uncovered, it'll probably be filled with half-dried snots and gunk when you go to use it 20 minutes later. Once the varnish starts to dry like this, it's basically unusable. After applying the first coat of clear the grains of the wood have a tendency to swell and stick up ever so slightly. This will make the surface of the wood feel even rougher than before you applied the clear coat. Don't worry this is perfectly normal. It just means you have to sand before applying the next coat. I gave the whole table top another good sand with 220 grit sanding pads. In fact, many workers will "raise the grain" by applying water to the surface of their wood, letting it dry and sanding the wood again hours before applying any clear coat. That being said I usually skip this step. I seem to get good results by sanding extra diligently between the first and second coat. Your mileage may vary depending on the type of wood you're working with. I ended up applying 4 layers of clear coat to my table top and I sanded between each coat to ensure a really nice smooth finish. Anything more than that though and you probably wouldn't be able to see the texture of the wood through the clear coat, and that would just be criminal. The other major component in this build was all of this steel angle iron. I've never really thought about it, but angle iron is a bit of a misnomer. Steel is largely composed of iron, but it's far from the only component. They should start calling this stuff angle steel. Anyways, it's 1/8 thick, 1 1/4" x 1 1/4" angle iron. It's basically commodity-grade steel, I bought 40' feet of it for this project and another project and it cost me approx $75 CAD. I bought it from The Metal Supermarket, which I thought was only a thing here in Toronto, but as it turns out they have locations all across North America. If you need any metal for a project I highly recommend them, it's WAY cheaper than buying steel at Home Depot or Lowes. They were also nice enough to cut all my pieces into roughly the right lengths, so if you don't have the tools necessary for cutting steel (and I know most people don't) it's a great option. Once I finished the table top I was able to finalize the size of my legs. As I said, my angle irons were cut to ROUGHLY the right length but I still had to some measuring and cutting to do back in the shop. My legs were going to be a trapezoid shape, and that meant I had some angles to figure out. I haven't had to figure out the angles of basic geometric shapes since 9th grade. Come to think of it, I'd like to take a second and apologize to my 9th-grade math teacher. When I told you I'd never need to know geometry in the real world I was wrong. Sorry Mrs. Glenn. That being said, I still hold that calculus was a waste of my time haha. My trapezoid legs had 4 inside corners. The two at the top were 100-degrees and the two at the bottom were 80-degrees. To make a 100-degree inside corner I needed to cut a 50-degree miter onto my angle irons. I set my handy digital angle gauge (seriously, everyone needs one of these, they are really cheap!) to 50 degrees and then traced a line onto the angle iron. With an angle grinder and a cut off wheel, I freehand cut my miters. I was a little worried about this step, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Still I would've preferred to make these cut with a metal miter saw, but I don't own one of those. I took it slow and traced the line I marked with a shallow cut. Once I was satisfied that my shallow cut was straight and followed the traced line I applied more pressure and cut right through the angle iron. As long as you take it slow, it's actually pretty easy to control an angle grinder cutting through steel like this. Just make sure that when you start the cut you keep the blade straight, it's very easy for an angle grinder to bind up on a cut like this. I then repeated both of these steps for my 80-degree corners by marking 40-degree miters and cutting them. Wood that's been properly glued together is normally incredibly strong. Like, stronger than the natural forces that bind the fibers of wood together. My herringbone pattern though has a weak joint that runs right down the middle of the table top due to the limited surface area binding the two sides together. It might've been fine, but I'd really hate myself if the table I spent days building split right down the middle as soon as I got it home. To quell the worried voices in my head I decided to reinforce the underside of the table with 3 pieces of angle iron that I cut while cutting my legs. I attached them to the tabletop with some #10 3/4" pan head screws. These angle irons effectively stitched the two sides together and gave me a lot of peace of mind. As an added bonus they should also keep the tabletop from warping over time too. This is what my miters looked like after I was done the cutting. They aren't perfect, but they're not bad for freehand cuts. With all my miters cut and cleaned up, I was ready to try some welding. I say TRY, because this was my first time welding anything. I was pretty intimidated by the process, but I pushed forward. I practiced on a few scrap pieces until I felt comfortable proceeding onto the legs. I clamped my angle irons to the table so the miter I wanted to weld was overhanging the edge of the table. I also made sure that when I clamped the two pieces of steel in place they were at exactly the right angle. Once I started welding there wouldn't be much room for adjustment! As scared as I was to start welding it's something I've really wanted to add to my skillset for a long time, so I'm glad I finally got around to doing it. Hey looks, it's a really ugly weld! Oh well, what do you want for my first time haha? Not the type of weld you'd want in a race car or something, but for a coffee table I think it ought to do. Using an angle grinder and a grinding disc I cleaned up my welds. Grinding discs are abrasive discs that you can use to slowly grind away at metal. Much like sanding, except for metal instead of wood. I worked each of my welds until they were decently flat. I've found the best way to get good at doing something quickly is A) practice and B) be the guy whos responsible for correcting any mistakes. Grinding all these welds flush gave me a lot of time to reflect on how I could do my welds better next time :) The angle grinder helped to smooth out my crappy welds, but to finish the job I used the random orbital sander with some 180 grit sandpaper. After I was done sanding around my welds I did the rest of the legs for good measure. I also used the sander to round some of the hard edges every so slightly. To secure my table top to the legs I decided to use the same mounting system my old coffee table had. Carriage bolts! Something feels so deliciously old-school about carriage bolts. It's probably just the word carriage in the name now that I think about it... Anyways, that meant I had to drill 4 holes in each leg slightly larger than the 5/16th diameter carriage bolts I was using. Drilling through metal is actually easier than you might think. All you really need is a halfway decent drill (I used a 12v DeWalt cordless drill, so nothing crazy powerful), some sharp drill bits and a lot of downward pressure. Use the slowest speed you drill has, and apply as much downward pressure as you think your drill bit can withstand. For bonus points you can use a little bit of cutting oil too, though it isn't strictly necessary, it will help keep your drill bits sharp. I clamped the legs in a vice grip and drilled some small starter holes. I started with a 1/8th drill bit and worked my up to a 3/8th drill bit. The more drill bits you have between the first size and the final size, the easier the job will be. Now my table top needed a set of corresponding holes drilled in it. Sure, I could've measured the holes on the legs and transcribed their locations onto the table top, but the tolerances here had to be really tight. I didn't trust myself not to screw this part up. Instead, I clamped the legs to the table top and drilled through the holes in the legs and down into the tabletop, thereby ensuring perfect alignment! Moments before this photo was taken I thought I was basically done. I had just done a test assembly of the table, bolting the legs to the table top, and was inspecting my own work. During this thorough inspection (which consisted of my pushing and shaking various parts of the coffee table) I found that the table had a little too much "wobble" for my taste. With nothing linking the legs other than the tabletop, they had a tendency to wiggle around. To help correct for this I decided I'd install some flat stock steel between the two legs along the ground. By locking the two legs together at the top and bottom I was hoping to add some rigidity to the whole structure. I measured the distance between the two legs at the top of the coffee table and cut the flat stock steel to the same length. I set the legs up similar to how I had done the welding previously. With the joint I was actually working on hanging over the edge of the table and proceeded to log some more welding practice time. By this time, I was basically a welding pro and flew right through this part. Oh, you didn't think I was being serious, did you? These welds were possibly worse than my first welds. Still, I struggled through the process and eventually got it done. I welded the top side of the connection and then flipped the legs over and welded the bottom side as well. I don't know if this is proper procedure, I was basically just winging it. Annnnd again I had to spend some time grinding away at my ugly welds to make everything nice and clean looking. Just more time to enjoy my audiobook though :) Time to strap on the old respirator and shake up that rattle can. I sprayed on a quick coat of metal primer and then 2 coats of the finest flat black spray paint Lowes had available for $6. I picked black because it's a nice neutral colour, but my intention is to live with the table for a little bit and then re-think it's colour scheme in a few months. Maybe I'll stick with black, maybe I'll do something crazy and paint it bronze. This is the face of pure determination. You can see that I'm ever so slightly biting my upper lip, something I do when I'm exerting maximum force haha. With the legs painted and the clear coat dry, the only thing left to do was crank down the nuts on the carriage bolts with a socket wrench. And crank I did, as hard as I could. Well not really as hard as I could because I likely would've snapped a bolt, but pretty damn hard! With the bolts sinched down, the only that was left to do was to load the table into my truck and take it home! Welcome to my living room. Perhaps you've been here before in one of my other builds. Don't mind the Christmas tree to the right, that's just a temporary fixture for the holiday season. This is the coffee tables new home. I think it'll be at home with all of my other furniture. My welds on this project aren't perfect. Far from it. I never really wanted to have perfect seems though, I like the unpolished industrial aesthetic. There were a few times when I considered going back and filling these small imperfections but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Remember how I said satin was a nice compromise between glossy finishes and matte finishes? Here you can see that it still looks quite smooth and glossy, it just has a little bit of that edge taken away. It's not a mirror finish, but its still pretty reflective. Am I the only one that thinks nuts and bolts are way too expensive at the hardware store? These carriage bolts, nuts, and washers cost me close to 10 dollars. Which feels like a lot for just 8 of each. I think they're much cheaper to buy in bulk, but that would require foresight and planning on my part so it isn't likely to happen. The nice thing about making this project out of solid wood is that you can look at it from underneath and all of the patterns and grains are still there. So much furniture these days is made from fake particle board with printed wood stickers wrapped around it. If you look closely it's always super obvious that it's fake. Grain patterns that don't line up or continue on the other side are always a give away for faux wood. That's it for this build. This was a long post and if you stuck it out until the end, good for you. I hope you learned something along the way. I also hope that you like it more than Bing does, she seems more interested in the lights I used for the photos than the table itself. Hit me with any questions or comments below. And again if you want to be one of the first people to see my next build follow me on Instagram. The link is in the first post. Cheers everyone, happy holidays!

Hey, guys and gals, I'm back with another build! As I've said a lot lately I'm trying to build out my Instagram following and my Facebook group, so I'd really appreciate if any reading this could check me out on those networks! Thanks! Ok onto the build! Do you have this problem: no proper place to put your sunglasses and jewelry in your bedroom? It's basically the epitome of a first world problem. None the less I was tired of looking at my bedroom dresser with sunglasses, watches and various other pieces of jewelry strewn across the top of it. I decided to build this jewelry stand as a way to reduce the clutter and organize my room. You know the format, let's do a quick tour of the finished project and then I'll walk you through exactly how I made it! I suspect if I was single and lonely this is a problem I wouldn't have. Here I am though, with a romantic partner and all the paraphernalia that comes along with that (mostly jewelry and elastic hairbands). I got the inspiration for this project while I was at the lumber mill recently. I was picking up the walnut I used in my bedframe project when I spied some smaller pieces of live edge olive wood. I didn't know what I was going to use it for when I bought one, but I figured it out pretty quick. I was going to organize that pile of jewelry and sunglasses on top of my dresser damn it! Best of all, it only cost me 20 bucks! Here it is completely decluttered without anything on it, completely bare. This was a fun project that I did in an afternoon. It was a nice reprieve from the multi-day projects I've been doing lately. It feels good to walk into the shop with a bunch of materials and emerge a later in the day with a complete project haha. The left side of the rack has 3 taut bungee cords that I like to use to hold sunglasses. The lowest bungee cord, however, is kind of useless. I realized this pretty early on, but, I decided to keep it for symmetry's sake. I also thought there was an off chance that I could find something to fit down there, as you can see from the photos that did not pan out. As it turns out the middle bungee also makes a great watch holder, so that's nice. The right side of the rack has these cool gold "T" shaped drawer pulls that you can hang jewelry on. Mostly chains here, but a couple of earrings too. All belonging to my girlfriend. I really don't have any jewelry outside of a single watch that I'm always wearing. So this is what I started with: A 1" thick live edge slab of olive wood, some cheap bungee cords, and a couple of old knobs that I had left around in the shop. Keen-eyed observers will realize that I replaced these silver knobs with the golden "t" shaped drawer pulls. I didn't care much for the knobs from the get-go and I needed some pulls around the house for other projects so I bulk ordered like 20 of the golden T pulls from Amazon for a little over $1 each. I think the total cost of this project came in at about $40. Plus of course, my time, which depending on who you ask is either priceless or worthless :) To start I had to decide how big I wanted the sunglass stand to be. I thought 24" would be plenty of space, but after loading up the finished project with all of our jewelry and sunglasses I wish I made it bigger. Perhaps the smaller stand will force my girlfriend and I to pare down on needless materialistic trinkets (haha, ya right). Using a straight edge I pencilled on two parallel lines that were 24" apart. Because I was working with a live edge piece of lumber I had no square edges to work off. My first line I placed more or less arbitrarily and then I measured my second line off of that first line. Using my chop saw (I know the correct name is mitre saw, but I like antagonizing woodworking purists) I cut along those lines I just pencilled on. Because I was working with a live edge piece of lumber and had no straight edges (yet) I put it against the back fence of the mitre saw and adjusted the angle of the base until the angle of the blade matched the angle of the lines I had sketched onto the surface of the wood. Once I had my piece of olive wood cut to 24" inches I used a sharp (ish) chisel to debark it. Really wish I had a draw knife here, but, the chisel got the job done so I can't complain. This got me about 90% of the way to de-barked. This must have been pretty fresh olive wood because it still had green moss in the bark. To get the last 10% of the bark off I improperly used my random orbital sander. I threw an 80 grit sanding pad on it and got to work. I also used it to round off some of the hard edges. This probably isn't the best for the sander, but this particular sander is on its last legs anyway so I'm not too worried about it. While we're on the subject of using power tools improperly..... I wanted to cut a 15-degree angle onto the base of my stand. So I traced a line along the bottom edge of the piece of wood, set my table saw to 15 degrees and then free hand pushed it through the table saw. I wouldn't advise anyone to do this at home, especially if you aren't comfortable using a table saw. Most "wood workers" will probably lose their minds looking at this picture. Anyone who works in the trades probably wouldn't even think twice about it. It's a very common practice among trim carpenters and guys who install hardwood floors. A much safer way to do this would've been to use some toggle clamps to attach it to a sled, put that against the fence and then push it through the table saw. Do as I say, not as I do! Now I have something close to the finished photos. Here you can see how the 15-degree angle on the bottom edge slants the whole stand back and helps present its contents to whoever is looking at it. Unfortunately for me, my sunglass stand won't defy the laws of physics and stand upright on its own. I was left with no other choice but to cut some feet that I would attach to its backside to keep it upright. Using my digital angle gauge I traced out some feet onto an offcut of the olive wood. The angle of the feet are the same angle as the base of the sunglass stand, 15-degrees. After all the cutting ugliness was out of the way I was left with 2 of these feet. They measure 2 inches wide across the bottom and they're 4.5 inches tall. I countersank and pre-drilled 2 holes on the back of each block to prevent them from splitting when I screwed them to the stand. I used a soft clamp to clamp the feet to the backside of the stand and then screwed them in place. Fun fact, I used a 1 1/2" #8 screw at the top of the block and a 2 1/2" #8 screw at the bottom because of difference in their thickness depending on where I was screwing through. Is that a fun fact? Not really. But it may be helpful for anyone hoping to recreate this project. With the feet installed I was ready to move onto mounting everything to the surface of the stand. So you remember those bungee cords that were holding the sunglasses? Well, I needed a way to mount them. I figured the best way would be to drill some holes, pull them through and then tie knots at either end. The first step in that process, before I even drilled the hole was to layout my hole locations. I traced out two parallel lines (hmm I'm doing that a lot this project...) and then measured the hole locations up from the bottom of the stand. I then basically did the whole thing over again for the knob locations. Except I didn't need to draw a parallel line. What a time saver! Enough planning, time for action! I grabbed my cordless drill and got to poking some holes in this olive wood. The trick to drilling holes for drawer pulls and knobs is to pick a drill bit that's slightly larger than the mounting screw. As you're drilling be careful not to apply too much downward pressure on the drill. If you do, you run the risk of bursting the drill bit through the backside of the wood and leaving a nasty crater. Enough planning, time for action! I grabbed my cordless drill and got to poking some holes in this olive wood. The trick to drilling holes for drawer pulls and knobs is to pick a drill bit that's slightly larger than the mounting screw. As you're drilling be careful not to apply too much downward pressure on the drill. If you do, you run the risk of bursting the drill bit through the backside of the wood and leaving a nasty crater. After I glued it I used a set of soft clamps to hold the cracks shut while the glue dried. You'd be surprised how fast some wood glues dry. The glue I was using dried in 20 minutes according to its bottle. Part of the reason I picked olive wood for this project is that it has wild textures and cool grain patterns. Unfortunately, that also meant it came with a lot of pitting and knots. Not to worry though, I grabbed some walnut coloured wood filler and smushed it into any and all of the open crevices. Looking pretty good if I do say so myself! But who got all these pencil marks and wood filler smears all over my beautiful slab of olive wood? The nerve of some people. To remove all of the aforementioned blemishes and to smooth the surface of my stand I brought the random orbital sander out of retirement. I started with 80 grit sandpaper and worked my way up to 180 grit sand paper. Normally I like to sand my projects to at least 220, but the clear coat I was using recommend that all surface be sanded to 180 grit. I'm guessing this helps with adhesion. Using the sheers on a pair of needle nose plier I removed the metal tips on the bungee cords. I don't really have any use for them so if anyone wants 6 little metal hooks, send me a DM :) Ok sorry for the quality of this photo, but it was hard to get a photo of me tying a knot. I just did a simple double knot on one end of the bungee, threaded it through the holes and then tied a second double knot on the other side and cut off the excess. This is what it looked like on the back side. Because the bungee cords are under quite a bit of tension this simple knot should do quite nicely. The next step was to add the knobs. I threaded the mounting screws through the stand from the back side and then screwed the knobs onto them. Again these knobs aren't the ones I ended up using in the end, but the process for attaching them is the same. I countersank the backside of stand primarily because the screws provided with the drawer pull weren't quite long enough to thread through the stand, which is almost 1" thick. It's also kind of nice to have the screw heads recessed into the stand though, makes for a slightly cleaner look from behind (like that really matters haha). I thought about trying to sand out this light surface pitting in the olive wood, but I decided against it in the end. I really like some of the natural textures in the olive wood so why not leave them? It helps give the whole stand the feeling of real wood. My girlfriend definitely has a soft spot for gold. Replacing the silver knobs with these gold drawer pulls definitely matches her aesthetic much better. Any extra slack on necklaces can simply be tossed over the backside of the stand. Bonus cat picture! Bing is not impressed with me taking photos instead of playing with her! (she looks very angry in this picture, but she's actually the sweetest cuddly cat) Alright! That's it for this one. Hope you enjoyed it. If you liked what you saw here, please check out my Instagram and join my Facebook group. If you have any questions or comments hit me up below! See you next time!

Time for a new build! It’s a pretty big one too, at least by my standards! My friend just bought a new place and was looking spruce up his bedroom with a new bed frame. After checking a few store he was having a hard time finding something that he really liked, so naturally he turned to me, his friend who runs a DIY website, to help him build a custom bed frame. He plied me with compliments and offers of free food. I caved pretty quickly because I needed new photos for my Instagram and content for the site. My only condition was that he had to join me in the shop and help me build it, which he begrudgingly accepted….. Just kidding, he really wanted to help from the start. So lets start with the finished photo, here it is: We went back and forth and came up a few times and eventually came up with the design you see above. It was a fun process to design something with someone else. Usually I have complete creative control but because I was building this for someone else it was more of a collaborative process. Alright lets get into how we made this beautiful beast. We started our project with a very expensive trip to the lumber mill. We tried to economize as much as possible, but in the end it cost us almost $800 in lumber alone. The majority of the lumber you see here is 6/4 Walnut and a couple of piece of 4/4 walnut too. The widths vary from piece to piece but most are in the range of 6-8″ wide. Most pieces were 6-7′ long. We also used some regular spruce 2x4s and a single 2×8, but they aren’t pictured here because spruce is boring and no one wants to see that. Step one was to use my planer to plane the surface of all the walnut. The planing process removes thin layers of the wood for it’s highest points thereby flattening and removing any cupping from the wood. Each piece of wood had to be run through the planer 10-12 times, so this took a couple of hours. This walnut was pretty rough and needed a lot of planing before it was usable. It really helped having another person to do this though. I’d grab a piece of wood, feed it run it into the machine and he’d receive it on the other side. If I had been working alone this would’ve taken me a lot longer. Here’s an example of what the wood looks like after being planed. What a difference right?! It’s awesome to see all of the patterns and colors start to emerge as you remove a couple of layers of rough surface wood. With both sides of the wood planed we had 2 of the 6 sides prepped and ready to go, but we still had 4 sides to go. As you can see from this picture the pieces of walnut were still far from straight. Most of them had pretty significant curves to them. How did we deal with that? Glad you asked. Using a simple plywood straight edge jig I pushed each piece of wood through my table saw. The straight edge jig ensured that I made a single straight cut through the piece of wood. Once I knew I had one straight side I could ditch the jig, flip the piece of wood over and run it through the table saw again to straighten out the opposite sides. Again this took a little bit of time but it was an important step. By the time I was done, most of our piece of walnut were between 5.5″ and 7″ wide. The name of the game here is to remove as little wood as possible while still straightening out the wood. Keep in mind just how expensive this walnut was, you want to waste as little as possible! Using a jointer is more fun with a friend! This step removed any small imperfections that were left over after the table saw. After jointing each piece of wood we laid them onto a table and test fit them against our last completed piece to make sure they made good contact with each other. Anything bigger than a 1/32″ gap meant it had to get another run through the jointer. Whewwwww, all the prep work is over. It took us the better part of a day but all of our wood was planed, straightened and ready to glue together. The pieces in the foreground make up the head board and the piece in the background make up the foot board. We spent a lot of time picking our favorite pieces of wood and planning where they would go so as to be as visible as possible. The boring pieces were relegated to the bottom of the headboard. The best pieces went to the top of the headboard and to the foot board. All of the piece were aproximately 72″ long at this point. A little longer than we needed for either the headboard or the foot board but we’ll cut them to exact size once they are all glued together. Once our layout was finalized I took a T-square and made 5 vertical lines. These vertical lines would mark the location of the biscuits that would help to hold the head board together and keep all the pieces of wood aligned. What’s a biscuit you might ask? Glad you asked. Biscuits are wooden ovals, usually made of compressed wood pulp and glue or beech wood. I used a biscuit joiner to cut groves in each piece of wood and then inserted the biscuits into them. I then cut corresponding grove on the next piece of walnut, lined them up and slotted them together. When properly glued this makes for a very strong connection. Glue time! We are applied copious amount of glue to each piece of wood. Each biscuit grove was filled with glue, then the biscuit was pressed into it and then covered in glue again. We also liberally applied glue along the whole length of each piece of wood. Each of the 5 pieces of walnut got the same treatment. After we finished each piece we attached it to the last until we had something that was starting to resemble a headboard. Not sure what we’re laughing about in this picture, but if I had to guess one of us probably made a bukaki joke while applying the glue. We’re not exactly the most mature people, especially together. Once the glue was applied and the wood was loosely fit together it was time to bring out the clamps! Normally its a little bit of a race against time to get the clamps on before the glue sets up, but having a helper really made this a lot easier. Of course, because its good practice, I still pre-set all of my clamps to the right width before we started gluing. When you’re working alone doing this can save you precocious seconds and make the difference between a good glue up and a sticky mess. Don’t worry, I’m not so irresponsible that I would just clamp the headboard like that and leave it. In this photo you can see that I also clamped it around its perimeter to the table below (which I know is very flat). We also biscuited, glued, and clamped the foot board at the same time. I’m pretty sure captured in this one photo is every single clamp I own! Once we had de-clamped the headboard and footboard I used my track saw to ends off of the headboard. Once it was all said and done we were left with a headboard that was 36″ high and 68″ wide. The footboard on the other hand was 16″ high and 64″ wide. Right, now that that’s all sorted I wanted to add some structural support to the headboard. I was a little worried that over time the wood might have a tendency to warp and twist. To counteract this I decided we should add some 3/16″ thick 1×1 angle iron to backside of the headboard. Queue the sparks! I cut two pieces of the angle iron to 32″ inches long using my abrasive chop saw. Disclaimer: I should’ve been wearing more protective gear here, I have some tiny burns on my forearms to prove it After I cut the angle irons to length I had to tap some holes into them so I could screw them to the headboard. I made sure that I tapped 2 holes per piece of wood on the headboard, 12 in total. That way the steel would help to prevent the whole headboard from cupping, as well as each individual piece of walnut. Hows that for a cinematic shot? I’ve gotta have some fun with the camera work when I do these projects, otherwise I’d go crazy. To attach the angle irons to the back of the I used some big #12 1″ wood screws. Of course I pre-drilled each hole in order to avoid snapping any of the screws. Also I was careful to set the angle irons back from the edge of the headboard, both along the sides, and at the top and bottom. I did this to minimize the appearance of the angle irons. Out of sight, out of mind. With our headboard now fully assembled it was time to do some serious sanding. No matter how good your glue up is there will always be some sanding. It was right about this point when I was wishing I had a giant planer I could run the whole headboard through. Guess I’ll just settle for a belt sander Again having someone else working with me really helped to speed this process up. We sanded until the whole headboard was silky smooth. Headboard done. Footboard done. Side boards? Let’s get into it! The 4/4 walnut we bought was for the sideboards. We planed it earlier with the rest of the wood so all I had to was table saw it down into usable sizes. I cut 4 pieces that were 4.5″ x 1″ x 80″. The side boards are what link the headboard and the foot board together and determine the length of the bed frame. Since we were make the bed frame for a queen bed our side boards needed to be 80″ long. I wanted to add a little bit of reinforcement to the sideboards as well so I got 2 piece of 2×4 spruce and cut them to 80″ long. Once that was done I then cut a 3/4 x 1″ grove into each of the piece of spruce. These grove will end up being what support the slats that the mattress will rest on when everything is all assembled. To assemble the side boards I both glue and screwed the walnut 4/4 boards to the spruce 2x4s. No glue was spared in this build. I really hope they don’t still make glue from horses…. On a brighter note if this whole carpentry thing doesn’t work out for me I think I have a bright future as a Subway sandwhich artist. Just replace the glue with mayo and I’m 90% of the way there. Once the glue was laid down I clamped the spruce to the 4/4 walnut and screwed them together using #8 2″ wood screws. I also took my time and pre-drilled each screw hole to make sure I didn’t split the walnut or snap any screws. Then I glued and screwed another layer of walnut 4/4 onto the sideboard I had just made and ended up with this monstrosity. I know its a little weird looking, but it works and it’s very strong. These mating plates are what we used to attach the side boards to the headboard and the footboard. The side with the teeth, the male side, gets attached to headboard and foot board and the female side gets attached to the side boards. I started by screwing the female plates to the side boards. Unfortunately I quickly realized I was going to have to mortise out some pockets behind the plate to make some room for the teeth of the male plates. I grabbed a sharpie, traced out the area that would need mortising and then removed the plates. I used a 1/4″ drill bit to do most of the dirty work, then I cleaned it up what was left with a hammer and chisel. Lucky for me the mating plate covers up most of ugly work See! Almost looks like I know what I’m doing when you throw a plate on top of it. Ok cool, but what about the male plates? I’m getting to it, chill! I figured out the locations of my male plates and then traced them with a black sharpie (not sure where I put that red sharpie from a couple pictures ago). Anything that was inside the sharpie lines had to go. I grabbed my plunge router and got to work. I wasn’t sure exactly how deep I needed this mortise to be so I did it 1/16th of an inch at a time. After every pass with the router I would test fit the side boards. Eventually I got a nice flush fit. Again not a picture perfect mortise but it was serviceable and would be covered up by the sideboards once they were installed. And just to preempt all the internet critics that space above the plate is actually functional, it provides clearance for the female plate to latch onto the male plate. With all of the cutting, drilling, and sanding out of the way it was time to start finishing. I used a satin hybrid oil and water varnish to clear coat the bedframe. This is my standard finish that I like to use on a lot of furniture. It’s tough (because it’s meant to be used as a floor varnish) and gives a nice easy to clean finish that has just a hint of gloss. It also adds a nice warm tone to the wood. Sanding between coats is very important to get a good finish. We did 3 coats on every piece. Between the first and the second coat we sanded with 120 grit sand paper. Between the second and third we sanded with 220 grit sand paper. Probably should’ve done this earlier, but, oh well. In the center bottom of the headboard I installed 2 angle brackets that would hold a center beam that would help to transfer some of the load to the bed to the floor. The center beam is just a 2×8 that I cut to 80″ long. Sorry for the crap quality picture here. Must not have focused the camera right before I hit record. One last thing I had to cut before assembling the bedframe was some 1×6 spruce slats to go between the two side boards. The slats will support the mattress and rest on the center beam. Each slat was 57″ long and there were 12 total. Hope you guys like fisheye! I needed to bust out my super wide angle lens for this part of the build. Here we are back in my friends new condo and assembling the bed frame. The sideboards simply click into the headboard and footboard, so this part was pretty much just plug and play. Quick break for some yoga. Ok just kidding, I was putting the center beam in position. And then I used some big #12 1″ wood screws to attach the center beam to the angle brackets on the headboard and footboard. Sorry to disappoint, but no plumber crack here ladies and gentlemen. I didn’t really consider the fact that I’d basically be mooning the camera while assembling the bed when I was setting up the camera. Last part of the assembly was installing the slats between the sideboards. Each 1×6 slat got 6 screws in it. 2 per side board, and 2 into the center beam. Probably overkill but I wanted to build this thing to last. Hey that’s it! It’s all assembled. Guess it’s time for my friend to make his bed. Let’s take some finished photos Mattress: Check Duvet: Check End of bed extra blanket: Check Lights: Check Background Plant: Check Ahhh thats better. Looks more like a real bedroom now. The bed actually has a little bit of storage that’s easily accessible underneath it. Enough spaces for a couple of pairs of shoes or some spare blankets. Originally I wanted the sideboards to go all the way down to the floor but my friend insisted we keep them up to avoid having a dust catch. In the end I think he was right, but I’d never tell him that. There a few places with slight “defects” like this in the wood. I offered to fill them with a colour matched wood filler, but my friend liked the look of them and wanted me to leave them as is. I think they really help to drive home the idea that we used real solid walnut to make this bed. Had we used a walnut veneer ply or something similar every surface would’ve been perfect, and frankly, a bit boring. Here’s a (semi) detail shot of how the sideboards connect to the headboards. Nice and flush and you can’t see any of the mounting hardware. It’s a really secure connection too, no wobble or rattle. You can slightly see the metal angle irons that reinforce the headboard if you look at it directly from the side or above, but practically they are invisible. I offered to paint these for my friend, but he wanted to leave them as raw steel. Like I said earlier in the build we spent a lot of time trying to figure out which piece of wood was going to go where. We tried to put the most “interesting” looking pieces at the top of the headboard and on the footboard because those were the most visible spots. This little knot actually came out while we were finishing the wood. Nothing a little wood glue and quick clamping couldn’t fix. Again I really like that we left details like this one because it shows that we actually used real wood. Originally we had planed to do this build with two different types of woods, but my friend really fell in love with walnut at the lumber mill. We decided to make the whole thing out of walnut, but there so much variation in the different piece of wood that it almost looks like 2 different types of wood! All in this project cost close to $1,000 dollars in materials, and probably closer to $1,100 when you properly account for all the snacks we consumed while making it. True that’s a lot of money, but my friend was looking at bed frames that easily cost that much money, if not more. Plus this is exactly what he wanted and he now has a hand made piece of furniture in his home that he can point to and say “I made that”. It took us 3 days in the shop to complete it start to finish and that includes the time it took us to gather materials. That’s it for another build, thanks for checking it out! Close the door on your way out! Also I’m really trying to build out my Instagram following, and Facebook group. If you could follow, or at least hit the like buttons a couple of time it would really help me out! Thanks! See you next time! Hit me up with any question or comments you might have below and I’ll do my best to answer anything and everything.

This floating corner desk was a project I recently built for a friend. It's my first project building a piece of furniture for someone else and it was a lot of fun! I'm starting to run out of places to put the stuff I build! My friend wanted a computer desk and had a vision for a corner desk. From there we went back and forth and brain stormed a few ideas. Eventually we settled on this minimalist floating look. It's simple, but the wood mosaic keeps it from ever looking plain and boring. Here's a look at just the desk with no computer to distract you. This is also one of my first projects that has a glossy finish. Generally I avoid glossy finishes because it's such a pain in the ass to get them perfect, but that's what my friend wanted so who was I to say no! I was just the hired gun who made it. Truth be told I think this looks really good and I'm glad we did it. The finish is so glossy it's reflective! This is the 3D model we worked from. It really helped to model out the whole room to figure out how the desk would fit in. It also helped me describe exactly what I was going to build for my friend. As you'll see later I was able to pull a lot of measurement out of this 3D model and use them in real life. My friend was also concerned about how his monitor would fit, luckily someone had already 3D modeled his exact monitor and posted it online, so I was able to easily download it and import it into the project. The list of materials used in this project is short. Just some wood, some glue and a glossy varnish. It's made of red cedar and yellow pine. The pine is moulding grade pine which is generally used for interior trims, like baseboard, mantels and etc. It has minimal knots (but obviously still some) and comes pre-dimensioned. The cedar is just regular old cedar like you might buy to build a desk with, though I took care to buy it from a mill I know stores their cedar inside and out of the elements. I bought 1 - 2" x 8" x 12' in cedar and cut it in half and 1 piece of 2" x 12" x 6' pine. Total cost for the wood, varnish and all the misc bits I needed was about $150 CAD. I wanted the desk to be a 1.5" thick. That meant my first job was to cut all of my cedar and pine into 1.5" x 1.5" x 6' rectangular prisms. It was a pretty time consuming and repetitive job, but to help pass the time I listened to an audiobook while I worked. In fact, I almost always listen to audiobooks while I'm working in the shop. It's a great way to catch up on reading, which I rarely have time for these days. While building this desk I was listening to Bad Blood by John Carreyrou about the rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Great read, I'd highly recommend it. These are all the rectangular prisms I cut. It's a 60/40 split between pine and cedar because I wanted the outside edges of the desk to be banded in cedar, so naturally I needed a little more cedar than pine. Next, in 1 foot increments, I cut each piece to random lengths with a chop saw. Most of them are 1' long, but I included a good number of 2s, 3s, and even a couple of 4s. I wanted to keep it visually interesting without looking too busy and I felt this was a good compromise. Let me know if you agree in the comments! Making a desk like this involves working with glue, and because you have to work fast before it dries it tends to get a bit messy. I didn't want to get glue all over my nice work tables so I grabbed a roll of house wrap and covered it. House wrap is normally used as a protective membrane that sits between the siding and the exterior sheathing of a house. This particular brand of house wrap is remarkably similar to wax paper in terms of look and feel so I knew the glue wouldn't stick to it very well. Basically it was a big baking sheet for desk glue up haha. Here I am dry fitting all the pieces so that I could find a pattern I liked the look of. I didn't want any of the seems to line up with one another, so it was a bit of a jigsaw. Glue time! You've got to work quickly here otherwise the glue will start to dry before you can finish and you'll be stuck (pun intended) with a sticky mess instead of a nice desk. I dumped some carpenter glue into an old coffee cup and used a cheapo paint brush to apply it. In order to extend my drying time a bit I added some water to the glue. My final mix was about 25% water and 75% glue. It definitely helped to extend my drying time, but it also thinned the glue. To compensate for the diluted glue I was very generous while applying it to the wood. Before I even started gluing I already had my clamps set to the size they would need to be and laid out ready to go. The time saved per clamp might be measured in seconds, BUT, when you're using as many clamps as I did that time adds up. It's always a rush to get these setup perfectly before the glue starts to go off. My working table is perfectly flat so I used a C-clamp in each corner to keep the desk from warping or cupping while the glue dried. Go ahead, count the clamps, I dare you! I'd like to pretend that as soon as I took the clamps off the desk it was perfect and ready to go, unfortunately, that just isn't the case. After every glue up there is bound to be some variation in the height and alignment of the pieces of wood. To smooth out the desks surface I spent hours sanding it with my belt sander and an 80 grit sanding belt. The 80 grit belt offered a good balance between speed and "oh shit I didn't move the sander for one second and put huge gouge in my wood!" Again thankfully I had my audiobook to keep me company during this boring stretch. After I had done the bulk of the work with the belt sander I switched over to a random orbital palm sander. The palm sander was nice because it freed up one of my hands for texting and browsing the internet. Just kidding kids, don't text and sand. I used 180 grit sand paper first and then progressed to 220 grit to get a silky smooth finish. After hours of sanding I ended up with something that looked like this. I really love this stage of the project, I spent so long sanding these separate pieces of wood that they've become seamless to the touch. It really felt like one single surface. "Butttttt Zaaaaacccccccc the picture you opened with showed a desk shaped like an isosceles trapezoid and so far all you've shown is a rectangular desk!" I know, I know. I didn't trust myself to glue up a perfect trapezoid though. So I made a rectangular desk and now I'm going to cut it into a trapezoid. These are the measurements for each side that I pulled from the 3D model. Using my handy digital angle gauge I marked some 45 degree lines on the surface of the desk... and then using my track saw I extrapolated and cut along them. After I had done both sides I was left with the isosceles trapezoid shape from the first few pictures. Now it was time for the part of the project I was most anxious for. Normally I clear coat most of my projects with some sort of varnish, but I generally avoid glossy finishes and stick to matte and satin. Glossy finishes tend to highlight small imperfections and even the smallest piece of dust can be visible when caught beneath a glossy clear coat. Predictably my first coat was a mess of small hairs from the mini roller I used. So much for the "lint free" label. That's ok though, this was never going to be a one coat project. Using a fine 320 grit sand paper and a sanding block I sanded between each coat of varnish. I was careful to vacuum up every little bit of dust between coats too. Because like I said before, even a small piece of dust trapped under the clear coat will be visible in the finished product. I've got to admit though, this glossy finish is starting to look really sweet. Finally after 4-5 coats I finally got one that I was happy with. I found it helped to work quickly and to apply thinner coats. My first few coats were too think and ended up drying slightly un-evenly. The desk surface might have been done, but I still had a couple more cuts to make. I needed to make 2 mounting cleats that would secure the desk to the wall. Because I didnt want to get a bunch of saw dust in my still drying clear coat I rolled a miter saw outside and set to work. I cut 2 piece of cedar that were 24" x 3/4" x 1.5" I drilled 3 pilot holes from the bottom of the cleats. Once I install the cleats on the wall these holes will allow me to screw the desk top to cleats from below. Done! Just to keep things consistent I also applied clear coat to the cleats too. Using a laser level as a guide for both level and the location of a stud I installed the cleats onto the wall. I used 3" wood screws to secure them in place. Only thing left to do now is a quick test fit. Small variations in the wall kept it from fitting PERFECTLY but it did fit really nicely. I offered to use a little bit of clear caulking to hide these discrepancies, but my friend opted to live with them to make it easier to remove the desk in the future. My friend held the desk down with all of his weight while I screwed through the cleat from and into the bottom of the desk. I used number 10 2" wood screws for extra bite. Woof! The cleats are admittedly a pretty simple design, but it works and feels sturdy. They're not quite a French cleat, but maybe a French Canadian cleat? I love the contrasting grains and colours of the cedar and pine. They compliment each other nicely. The varnish also adds a nice warm tone to the whole thing. I tried to select a piece with some interesting knots for the front band so that when you look at the desk head on it's visually interesting. Now I know what you're thinking: "Where are all the cables?!" And yes, it's true, we basically just mocked the desk up for the photos. We didn't have the time to fully hook up his computer that day. That being said it won't look all that different from this once the computer is setup. My friend is planning on using a wireless HDMI transmitter to have his computer on the other side of the room. So really the only thing missing here are a power cable for the monitor and the wireless HDMI transmitter. Isn't the future wonderful?! The gap at the back of the desk allows for easy cable management, though like I said before there won't be much of that going on! When we first started discussing the idea of making a desk here I was really skeptical that it would be big enough. There's a door frame on the right side of the desk that limited how big we could get, but after mocking up his desk it turned out to be more than enough space. It's nearly 6 feet wide across the front, which to my mind is plenty big for a desk. Thanks for checking out my build and again, if you liked what you saw hit the subscribe button so you can be notified next time I post a project! If you have any questions please feel free to ask away!

As always, I'll start with the finished product! Here it is setup in my living room with my TV and all of my home entertainment stuff loaded onto it. Looks like I'm missing a couple of things, right? More on that later. Thanks for checking out my project! If you like it I have a website of full of DIY building projects I've done in the past. All with full photo guides explaining exactly how I did it. Check it out at http://zacbuilds.com If you don't, no hard feelings either, but I've gotta get my plugs in where I can :) I've been wanting to build an entertainment unit/TV stand for a while now. After months of crawling pinterest and looking for inspiration I finally settled on this design. The horizontal shelves are made of solid 8/4 walnut (my poor wallet) while the vertical "legs" are made of solid 4/4 maple. Weight wasn't really a concern when I was picking my materials, but after lifting this a few times maybe it should have been! It's got to weigh close to 80lbs and that's before I added electronics to it! After my last project got so much flak for exposed fasteners I'm expecting it again here. I like the look though, so tough tits internet critics :) Normally I design my projects on the back of napkins with chicken scratch writing. This time however I decided to learn how to use Sketchup and actually 3D modeled my design before building it. Modeling before hand was great, it really allowed me to experiment with a lot of different looks and styles before I decided on one that I liked. It also helped me more accurately gauge how much lumber I needed to buy (not that this was a hard one to figure out). Here's where it all started. I got the 8/4 Walnut and 4/4 maple from a local mill. Each piece of walnut must have weighed close to 40lbs before I milled it all down. All told it cost me ~$290 CAD and I already had a lot of the materials in the shop. Here's the breakdown: Walnut - $200 Maple - $90 Fasteners - FREE (for me) - $10 (retail) Plywood - FREE (for me) - $150 (this is the retail cost of a full sheet, I only used a small piece though) Varnish - FREE (for me) - $20 (retail) This was far from my cheapest project, but to buy something of similar quality in a store probably would've cost me many multiples of $290. So in someways I got a real bargain haha. Come to think of it, I don't even know where I could find something comparable. All of the retailers near me are only selling particle board based furniture. Step 1. Plane that walnut. The planer removes a thin layer of material from the surface of the wood, removing high spots and leaving you with a nice smooth finish. Which is important because the walnut I bought was quite rough and uneven. I got lucky here, my planer is only 13" wide and one of my pieces of walnut was 12 1/2" wide. Talk about pushing it to the limit. Oh, I also planed the maple too, but I thought 2 pictures would be a bit redundant, so you'll just have to use your imagination. After planing the wood down, I ran it through the table saw to remove it's rough sides and make sure all my lumber was the same width. Because I buy semi-rough lumber it isn't all the same width. The difference between my two pieces of walnut was about 3/4". Meaning I had to remove 3/4" from the wider of the two pieces. In the end I cut the walnut down to 11 1/2" wide and the maple to 3 1/2". Again, because it's semi-rough lumber, all of my pieces were different lengths and the ends are a little bit uneven. Mitre saw to to the rescue! I squared up the ends and cut my walnut to 72" long. It'd be remiss of me not to use my mitre saw for a couple of mitred cuts as well. This is how I achieved the angles in my u-shaped legs. Here's a rough lay-out of the legs. The longer pieces are 24" long, and the shorter pieces are 11 1/2" wide, not coincidentally the same width as the walnut. Also you can see what the newly finished walnut looks like :) Because I wanted the legs to sit flush inside of the TV stand I had to make some cutouts in my walnut slabs. 12" in from the ends of the walnut I traced the outline of my maple legs. I probably could've done this easier by just using a square and measuring, but I've never been one to make things easy for myself. I'm not one of these fancy carpenters that does everything with super sharp hand tools. I used a normal off the shelf jig saw with a blade that was probably a bit too dull. Remember what I said about not making things easy on myself? Ok so my jig saw method didn't give PERFECT results, I don't see how anyone could've seen that coming! I had to clean things up a bit with a chisel and some sand paper afterwards :) This was actually a pretty time consuming process. Seems easy when it's just two photos in a gallery, but I spent hours making sure these cutouts were as clean and tight as possible. After I finished all of my cutouts it was time to do some test fits. A little persuasion from a rubber mallet and the maple slotted nicely into the walnut. Success! I really was bored of chiseling at this point so I was thrilled it all fit together. To secure the maple to the walnut I pre-drilled some holes in the front of the maple and then used big black lag screws to fasten it in place. You know, the same big black lag screws I'm sure a vocal minority will be very upset about. Ya I'm calling you out wood working snobs! ;) It was at about this point when I realized just how heavy this thing was going to be. I had to flip it over a couple of times and immediately felt bad about my upper body strength. Oh well, no need to go to the gym if you just make super heavy furniture all day long. Almost done, only a couple more steps! Because the bottom of the legs will never be seen it was the perfect place to hide some screws! Not sure why I thought it was important to hide these screws considering I didn't hide any others. Best not to probe too deep into my decision making process, lest I accidentally do some honest self reflection... I screwed into the end grain of the maple, which isn't the best, but then again it's not exactly a high stress joint either. Just to be safe I used 3 screws per leg and pre-drill every hole. As you saw in my finished shots the middle section of the TV stand has a solid back. A solid back that allows me to hide a lot of wires and ugliness. I had this veneer ply left over from a job I did for a client so I put it to use. Using my track saw I cut a piece that was 10 1/2" by 42 1/2". Next I used a router to rabbet out a channel in the back of the TV stand. The rabbet was 1/2" wide and 3/4" deep (same as the thickness of the plywood I had just cut). In order to avoid burning out the motor in my router I had to do this step in multiple passes, taking out approximately 1/4" of material with each pass. This allowed the plywood to sit flat in the back of the TV stand, but I wasn't quite ready to install it yet. No, before I installed the plywood I'd have to take a second and use the carpenters version of spell check. Wood filler. Time to fix all of my mistakes. Like I said I spent a lot of time making sure everything was as close to perfect as possible, but let's be honest, nothing is ever perfect. That's where wood filler comes in. This walnut wood filler is a pretty good match for the walnut I was working with. I squeezed the wood filler onto a small putty knife and pressed it into all the small gaps and cracks I could find. The deeper down into the small cracks you can push the wood filler the better, so I hope you haven't been skipping wrist day at the gym. Once the wood filler had dried I used a random orbital sander with some 80 grit sand paper to sand off any excess. I also took the as an opportunity to give the whole TV stand a good sand with some 180 grit sand paper. This final sand left all of the wood feeling smooth and ready for some varnish. Not pictured here is me frantically vacuuming the TV stand and my entire work area after sanding to prevent any dust from ruining my varnish application. Once all of the dust was removed I used a water based satin floor varnish by Saman to coat my TV stand. I chose that particular varnish for a few reasons: 1) It's tough. It's a floor varnish, so it's meant to take a beating. 2) It's really easy to work with. After 2 coats of this stuff you'd be hard pressed to find any brush marks or imperfections. 3) I already had it left over from another job. Can't beat free! I started by cutting in all my corners with a paint brush. You know, the places you can't reach with a roller. Then after I had cut everything in with the brush I rolled the remainder with a mini low nap roller. I tried to work as fast as possible here. Because it's water based it dries quick, and if you try and roll over something that's half dry you'll muck it all up. If you see an imperfection or a spot you missed just wait and you can pick it up in the next coat. Here's what it looked like after the first coat. Just to be safe I did 2 more coats, sanding lightly with 180 grit sand paper in between each coat. So I got a little sleepy after finishing the varnishing process and decided I'd finish up at home. I packed up a few tools, took everything home and got started the next morning. I piloted out some holes in the back of the plywood and screwed it to the main TV stand. Now it's time to setup my TV and all of the accessories! So here's the real reason I wanted that piece of plywood on the back of the TV stand. It gave me somewhere to mount all of the unsightly crap I don't like looking at. I mounted my PS4, a power bar (with USB charging ports built into it), Nvidia Shield and all of their cables back there. It took a lot of cable ties and double sided tape but I got it done. Both the Nvidia Shield and the PS4 seem function just fine without any line of sight to their respective controllers. Finally I added a YEELIGHT RGB Led strip to the back of my TV. This LED strip is fully compatible with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and IFTTT, which means it should fit right into my smart home ecosystem. The LED strip acts as a bias light, helping to increase the perceived contrast of my TV screen and adding ambient light to my living room. I'll set it up to come on whenever I turn on the TV. Here's what my home theater setup looked like before I started this process. Yikes! what a mess. Far too busy for my taste. I think I'm going to have to build a new bookcase to create a home for all of those displaced textbooks :( Sorry textbooks. Much cleaner looking now! If anything it's a bit too small for that space, but I'm moving in a couple of months so I wanted to make something that would work in almost any space. The Saman floor varnish really accentuates the natural grain of the wood in certain lights. I love it. Also position the Google Home Mini close to the TV so that it never misses my commands for turning on the TV and light. As you can see the bottom shelf is almost entirely devoted to my video game stuff. I'm working on a practical way to rear mount the Nintendo Switch cradle. I used a contrasting white-ish wood filler on the few knots and cracks in the walnut. It's a very close match to the maple and blends nicely with the rest of the stand. The end grain had a few small crack in it too that I also filled with the white filler. Shout out to all the Nintendo Switch Users reading this! On my last project I had my Nintendo Switch in one of the pictures and surprising number of Switch users shouted it out. Only fair that I repay the favor! In the end I got some really flush joints. I'm really happy with just how smooth and clean it all turned out. Here's my little assistant Bing, wondering why her human has been taking photos of the same thing for the last 30 minutes. I'm sure she's also wonder how long until I leave the room so she can start knocking stuff off of the TV stand. Thanks for checking out my build and congrats on making it this far! That's it! Enjoy my girlfriends mini Jeff Koons sculpture on your way out! As always leave any question or comments you may have below! Always love feedback.

I've been wanting a wireless charger now for a while, the problem is they all look kind of lame and cheap, so I decided I need to make my own! Here's the final project back on my desk at home. I'm thrilled with how it turned out. Way better than all of the cheap plastic wireless chargers that are out there. A walnut wireless charger on my walnut desk? Perfect. In total this project cost me $43 CAD. Here's a quick breakdown of the costs: Wood: $10 (Didn't use close to all of it) Wireless Charger: $21 Fancy USB Cable: $12 I used a few other random things along the way like sand paper and glue but I already had those on hand. This is where it all started. The 20 dollar wireless charger off of Amazon.ca, you can find it here: Wireless Charger It's a nice product for the price and chargers my phone quickly. Let's face it though, it isn't much to look at. Cheap plastic. So before I could even start the project I had to crack this thing open and see how it worked. I specifically wanted to see if it would work without its case and if it had any sort of pressure switch. Success! It chargers without it's case on. No pressure switch. By my estimates it looks like it will work when it's 3/8" from the phone. All very good news for this project. Ok, so here's my piece of walnut. I bought this from a scrap pile of wood at my local mill. I plan on using the rest of it for another project. Stay tuned for that! 10 Bucks and enough wood for 2 projects? I couldn't say no to that. It's 1" thick, 2' long and 6" wide. I decided I wanted my finished wireless charger to be 6" wide so I measured that out onto the wood and traced a line onto the surface of the wood. When documenting your steps its always a good idea to make sure your hands don't block the camera! Sorry guys, best shot I had! Next I used a chop saw to cut the wood. Go slow here. Walnut is really hard and you can burn out the motor on your chop saw if you try and cut too fast too often. Also it's good for the blade if you go slow. Time to trace an outline of the wireless chargers PCB onto the wood. I wasn't super worried about making this super accurate. I wanted to have a little bit of play in final cut out. So no need to have the neatest trace in the world. I used a compact trim router to cut out a space for the PCB in wood slab. This was actually my first time using a trim router like this. It worked really well. I carefully followed my trace marks with the blade of the trim router. It was a little tricky to see at times because of the amount of dust coming off the wood, but go slow and you should be ok. Definitely wear goggles. Lots of wood flying off of it. Again I'm always worried about burning out motors so I did this in multiple passes. The first pass I set the router to 1/4" depth and then slowly increased the depth until I was at 3/4". Here's the final cutout. Not bad for a first time. This part of the job made a huge mess, so I had to do a bit of vacuuming here. Remember earlier how I said the piece was 1" thick? Well I removed 3/4" so the thickness inside the cutout is 1/4". When I was testing the wireless charger before I found it operated at up to 3/8" away from the phone. Theoretically I should be good, but I still hadn't tested yet. IT WORKS! I wasn't sure how the wood would interfere with the wireless charging but it looks like 1/4" of walnut is not enough to block the wireless charging. Hurray! Ok, so it's cut, its notched, it works, whats left to do? Well make it look better of course. This is still a rough piece of wood with a ton of splinters. Time to breakout the belt sander with some 80 grit sand paper. Working slowly I sand off all the rough edges and smooth out the flats. Because this is 80 grit sand paper it wont get things perfect, but it'll get me close and the rest I can do by hand. This is what it looked like after the belt sander. Pretty good. Corners are rounded, most sides are smooth, and it's much more pleasing to touch. However the top side has some small holes in it. Enter black onyx wood filler. Time to fill those tiny little holes. I like the black onyx wood filler it's a nice contrast to the dark wood. After letting the wood filler fully dry I sanded off the excess using a random orbital sander. I started at 80 grit and worked my way up to 220. I finished it off by using a 320 grit sanding sponge to sand every surface on it. It felt really smooth after that! Gloves on. Time to use some wipe on poly. It's a satin polyurethane product that can be applied with a rag. This will seal the wood, give it an even smoother feeling finish and keep it safe from moisture. Plus it makes the grain pop and look totally bad ass. 3 coats of polyurethane later and this is what it looked like. Awesome! Now I needed to secure the wireless charger inside the wood. I used a 2 part epoxy to do this. Why? Because it's what I had on hand at the time. Probably not the best choice but more on that in the next frame. I mixed the 2 part epoxy on the side and applied it with a scrap piece of wood. This stuff dries rock hard and I definitely don't have to worry about the wireless charger ever falling out. This is actually probably my biggest regret of the whole project. The application while incredible strong was really sloppy. I should've just used a glue gun. It doesn't really matter because you wont ever really see it. None the less it bothers me. Oh well :( Amost done! It's complete here, it works and it's time to take it home! I was driving home from the shop and kept thinking the USB cable that came with the wireless charger looked cheap and didn't fit with the overall aesthetic very well. So when I got home I hopped on Amazon and order this braided micro USB cable. That's so much better. Also I have a black and red thing going on with my computer so this works really nicely. Find it here: Fancy Braided USB Cable That's it! Go try it! Did I forget something? Ask me any questions you might have in the comments.

Hello everyone! Welcome to one of my build guides :) In this guide I'm going to show you how I made my own smart lamp. The lamp is made of solid mahogany that I had left over from another project. I can never throw away nice wood so I always try and find projects for my scraps. Not only does the lamp look good (to me at least) but it's fully voice controlled through my google home setup. It can change colors, come on during certain hours of the day and has a whole range of other functionality I'm still exploring! I've been wanting a desk lamp for a while that I can hook up to a smart light bulb. I wanted something that I can control with my google home and would integrate easily into my "smart home". I had been looking for something I could just buy, but didn't find anything I actually liked enough to spend my hard earned dollars on. So I decided to make my own. Outside of the wood I only used off the shelf pieces so if you wanted to recreate this project it would be as easy as possible. Also I only really know how to work with wood :) I wanted my lamp to be 7" x 7" x 4". Which worked out nicely because I had a 14" long piece of wood left over that was 2" thick. Using my miter saw I cut mahogany a couple of times until I was left with.... Two pieces of mahogany that were 7" x 7" x 2". If only I could find a way to combine the two piece of wood into one. Hmmm... Because the pieces of mahogany I had were actually quite raw and slightly cupped I ran them through a thickness planner to remove the top layer of wood and flatten them out. This process removed about 1/8" from the thickness of each piece of wood. I guess I'll have to settle for a lamp that's 3 3/4" thick :( The wood comes out of the planer looking so nice and fresh. I love it. Now that the wood is nice and flat I can finally join the two pieces together. As you saw in the first couple of pictures the fasteners holding these two pieces of wood together are fully exposed and actually part of the design. This means I had to actually put a little bit of thought into where they were going to be located. I also had to make sure that all of the fasteners were symmetrically located. I ended up using Headlok screws by Fasten Master. They're painted black and have a cool torx head. Because the screws are long and going into a relatively dense wood I pre-drilled each screws hole with the pictured drill bit. I clamped my two pieces of mahogany together after aligning them as best as I could, as you can see in the picture it's not quite perfect. Don't worry, I'll fix that soon. For now lets just pre-drill our holes. Try and keep the drill bit perpendicular to the block of wood as best you can. Now it's time to insert our Headlok screws. I used my impact gun to sink them until the head was flush with the surface. When this step was done I was left with a very solid feeling block of wood. Now came for the really fun part! I setup my drill press with a 4 3/4 hole saw. My hole saw wasn't exactly the sharpest so I can't really say I cut my way through the block, more like burned my way through it. Oh well, sometimes you have to use the tools you have at your disposal to get the job done. See how badly burned the inside of the wood block is here!? I'll fix that after I give the outside of this wood block a good sand. Mahogany sands pretty easily. Using my random orbital sander I was able to fix the small alignment issues from before by simply sanding them out of existence. I started with a 80 grit sanding disk and worked my way up to a 180 grit sand paper. I also used the random orbital sander to round all of the corner and edges ever so slightly. Ok lets get rid of those unsightly burn marks inside the block. I hadn't forseen this issue so I didn't have a good plan for dealing with it going into this build. I thought I was going to have to sand out the burn marks by hand at first, but that quickly proved to be a pain in the ass. So I came up with this method. I had these sanding drums kicking around from a dremmel set (I think) so I hooked one up to my cordless drill, set the drill to its highest speed and went to town on the inside of the block. This method still took quite a bit of time, but it was way better than doing it ALL by hand. That being said, I still had to hand sand the last little bit to make sure everything was smooth. The sanding drum saved some time, but if I wasn't careful it would've been very easy to sand a divot into my block of wood. The lamp is starting to come together! Now it's time to locate the hole where the light socket will go. I measured out the exact center of one side of the wood block. Then I used a 1 1/4" hole saw combined with my cordless drill to cut a hole through the wood block. My lightbulb socket has a diameter of exactly 1 1/4", so it fits snuggling into this hole. No burn marks on this hole, because I used a hole saw that actually had a few sharp teeth left on it. Many of you may have noticed that my mahogany didn't have its rich red signature colour. That's what this danish oil is for. There's that rich red colour mahogany is so well known for! I poured the danish oil out onto a rag and then rubbed it into the wood. The oil will help protect the wood from moisture, but more importantly it brings out the grain and color of the wood. Here's the lightbulb socket and cord I ordered off amazon.ca I'm a sucker for braided cords and vintage-y looking sockets. Funnily enough it has two power switches, one on the socket itself and one inline in the cord. Since I'll be using it in my smart home setup, I'll probably never end up using either of those power switches. The only other component in this build is this Yeelight smart bulb. Two thing attracted me to the Yeelight, it's price and it's looks. I think the Yeelight is probably the cheapest smart bulb made by a reputable company. I paid $35 for it which is almost half the price of a comparable Philips Hue or LIFX bulb. It's fully RGB, has its own app, and integrates nicely with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Outside of the price, it's just the best looking (subjective) smart bulb I could find. It's got a cool grey body and a matte lens. I'll do a full review of the Yeelight on my site in the near future. Test fit time! Yay! Everything fits and it fits well! Here it is back on my desk which will be it's home for the time being. I've got a red accent thing going on my desk so I made it red for this photo, but usually I actually have it set as a warm white colour to match the rest of the lights in my room. This is the Yeelight app, it's not bad, not great, but not bad either. I wish it had more options for day and night cycles. For instance my LIFX smart bulbs have options to change the colour temperature based on the time of day. Nothing like that here. I've had it crash on me a couple of times, but the light never stopped functioning. Overall I give it a B-. If you don't like the look of exposed screws, you can just flip the lamp over and use the other side! I'm still experimenting with different positions and orientations for it. I really can't decide which one I like best! Thanks for checking out my build everyone! Feel free to ask me questions or leave your comments below!

Hey guys and girls, in this post I'm going to show you how to turn a piece of live edge olive wood into a stylish serving board. This is a fun project I did recently and took me only a few hours. So here's everything I used in the project. A slab of live edge olive wood that I purchased from a local mill, some left over wine from a dinner party, and 2 rose gold handles I bought from Lowes. The first thing I did was cut 3 sides of the board. I wanted to keep the front edges original character so I left that unchanged, but I wanted the other 3 sides of the serving board to be square with one another. I used a large framing square and a pencil to mark out the lines and then cut them with a circular saw. There were some small cracks in the board I used so I filled them with wood filler. Once the wood filler dried I used my random orbital sander with 80 grit sand paper to sand off the excess wood filler. Now it’s time to rub in some red wine! I generously applied the red wine to a rag and wiped it down onto the board. I repeated this step about 3 times. Each time I let the slab of wood dry fully before reapplying. If I’m completely honest, I was expecting a deeper red stain, but I still really like how it turned out. There’s a light pink hue to what is already a very deep and interesting grain pattern. Here’s what the slab looked like right after I applied the 3rd coat of wine. Next it was time to layout the handles. I played around with the positioning of the handles for a bit and ended up settling on this arrangement. The handles are inset from the edge 1". This provides a nice stable and comfortable way to hold the serving board. Next it was time to layout the handles. I played around with the positioning of the handles for a bit and ended up settling on this arrangement. The handles are inset from the edge 1". This provides a nice stable and comfortable way to hold the serving board. This photo is a good example of how the board looked after the wine completely dried. My girlfriend picked out these rose gold handles and given the overall pink hue of the serving board I think they fit it perfectly. Best of all they were only 5 dollars including the hardware. Not bad at all. With the handles positioned on the slab I marked the center line of each handles arms. I then drilled a small hole the same diameter as the machine screw supplied with handle into the wood. I was careful to make sure I drilled the holes straight down. If you drill your holes at an angle the screws may not thread properly into the drawer handles. After drilling the holes its important to flip the board over and counter sink the holes on the other side. This allows the head of the screws to sit below the surface of the board. If I skipped this step the screw heads would protrude past the surface of the board and be the first thing that makes contact with any surface the board is resting on and potentially lead to scratches or dents. After the holes were drilled I gave the whole board one final sand and then rubbed it down with raw linseed oil. Raw linseed oil is natural sealant that will protect the wood and help seal it against moisture in the future. If you’re following along at home make sure you use RAW linseed oil. Raw linseed oil is perfectly safe if ingested, however, boiled linseed oil can be quite toxic to humans. Make sure you know which you have before using it to seal a surface that you’re going to use to serve food! Linseed oil takes a while to dry, up to a few days. My first coat dried after a few hours, but the second coat took 48 hours. Take your time and don’t rush things. If you do you’ll end up with a blotchy finish. After the linseed oil finally dried, it was time to re-attach the handles. Here’s the final product in all of its glory. I’m so happy with how this project turned out and I know we’re going to get a lot of use out of it. Hope you enjoyed the project and are able to follow along at home. Feel free to leave any feedback or ask any questions! For more info on this build feel free to checkout my site at: https://zacbuilds.com/2017/10/31/wine-stained-live-edge-serving-board/