Sometime after the Fourth of July weekend, I noticed that a staple had come out of the skinny dowel that holds the small American flag I stuck in the ground along the walk leading to the front door.
Typically, I put out small array of the little flags on the national holidays, especially the Fourth, Day and Veterans Day. And because I’m way more cheap than I am patriotic, I tend to keep the flags for years and years.
Or at least until they fall off their miniature flag poles.
While rummaging through the closets to move the clothes matching the coming season to the front and those for the fading season to the rear, I uncovered the unmistakable evidence of the dreaded wool predators: silverfish and moths.
The bad news, is that some pricey garments were unsalvageable. The silver lining to the silverfish-moth problem was that it provided an excuse for a useful woodworking project.
Aromatic cedar is the natural enemy of silver, and it smells better and it smells a lot better than mothballs. As I’ve noted in past posts, I’ve made quite a few cedar chests and gave away or sold most of them. I still have the first one I made, but it’s jammed full. Continue reading
The idea to start this project emerged when I snapped the handle of the spade shovel that’s been in the backyard through each of the four season for each of the past dozen or so years.
But the root of the project goes back more than 30 years when my Dad gave me a tool box he had built out of some pretty nice Douglas fir 1X6. It wasn’t like a gift for a birthday or a rite of passage. As I recall, I said something like, “Hey nice tool box.” And he said, “Take it. I can build another just like it in about a half-hour.”
I’m not sure if he did build another one — or anything else, for that matter. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with the disease that would claim his life. Continue reading
Not long after her husband died, my friend Lisa sent me what she described as an out-of-the-ordinary request.
“I know this is unusual,” she said in a Facebook message, ” but how do you feel about making a wooden funeral box for Dennis’ ashes?”
She didn’t specify exactly what she wanted, but she reminded me that when they got married, I built them a cedar chest similar to the one I made for my mom a year or so before. I messaged her back telling her I’d be honored to the make the box. It occurred to me pretty much right away that it should complement the wedding gift, which I’m happy to report is still in use. Continue reading
In the post last week about pallet lumber, I called the projects I made whiskey racks instead of wine racks because the bottles stood upright, and that’s no good for corked wine.
As it turns out, there was enough lumber leftover, plus a couple of other weathered boards I had laying around, to make another rack that would allow the bottles to lay on their sides. And to add a feature for hanging the wine glasses.
This one holds three bottles and four glasses. The top two shelves sit at 5-degree angles front to back to keep the bottles from rolling out and smashing on the floor. The bottom shelf is level, but I added a strip of leftover wood to act as a stop. Continue reading
Each morning on my way to work, I tool down a two-lane farm-to-market that separates an endless collection of hillside cedars from a finger of Lake Travis near the Cypress Creek Marina.
On the Friday before Christmas, I spotted in the right-of-way at the base of the hills a wooden pallet that might have slipped off a flatbed or jettisoned by someone who wasn’t in the mood to go to the landfill. I thought to myself, “If it’s still there tomorrow morning, it’s mine.”
It was. So I pulled over and pulled the pallet from the weeds and tied it to the roof-rack on my Ford Escape. Continue reading
The chest after the restoration
I have only the vaguest recollections of the cedar chest that was in my grandmother’s house in New Jersey where she and my grandfather lived when I was a kid.
Maybe it was in the guest room that siblings and cousins used when we visited from time to time in the summer. Or maybe it was in the finished-out portion of their basement they used as a game room and second living room. Maybe it was in their bedroom.
My first firm memory of it was in Grandma’s bedroom when she moved into my mom’s house in Texas in the early 1990s and stayed there until she died in 1994. The chest stayed in that room until we emptied out the house after Mom died about a decade later. Continue reading
One of my dad’s favorite scenes from the movie, Patton, came during the iconic opening scene with George C. Scott as the general standing in front of the giant 48-star American flag addressing his unseen troops before some unnamed battle.
“There’s one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back home. And you may thank God for it,” Scott as Patton says. “Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you: ‘What did you do in the great World War II?’ You won’t have to say, ‘Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.'”
My dad served under General Patton in “the great World War II.” And some of his stories from that time did mentioning taking a shovel to the mud of Fort Polk before heading overseas. And a few of them recalled some disturbing images, such as the liberation of the camps at Dachau and seeing the bodies of fallen GIs before men of the graves-registration units could take care of them. Continue reading
The split-level planter’s table and the container garden.
For awhile several years ago, I kept a vegetable garden in the back yard. I had lousy luck with tomatoes, better luck with peppers and cucumbers and terrific luck with yellow squash. Later, I was told someone who had perfected the art of backyard gardening that any dope with with dirt and a shovel could grow squash.
In time, my enthusiasm for the hobby waned, probably coinciding with my aversion to the increased soreness that accompanied stooping over plants knee-high from the ground.
But even though my green thumb has a pretty wide yellow streak, I still enjoy planting stuff in soil and watching it grow, but on a smaller scale. So this spring, I decided to a modest container garden. And rather than having the containers scattered willy-nilly on the back deck and back yard. I built a little split-level planter’s table that sits neatly on the deck. Continue reading
Nearly all of the birdhouses I’ve built over the years were the basic four walls with openings representing doorways and windows, a little ledge out front and a pitched roof.
Typically, they were made from weathered cedar fence pickets that had to be replaced and hung from backyard tree limbs. After tossing in a handful of birdseed, it never took long for the birds to come. Some even built nests that would be used year after year.
The downside was that only a bird or two at a time could eat, and each spring the new leaves would obscure the house. And feeding the birds is pretty much an out-of-sight, out-of-mind deal — at least for me. Continue reading
