After making coasters to go with my desk, I had the idea to make some as gifts for my Automattic team members, since we had a meetup coming up. Brandi also wanted to make a couple for a gift, so she helped a lot. Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures during the process.
With our new house having a big walk-in closet we won’t need dressers, so we’ll be selling our bedroom set, which meant it was a good time for new nightstands. Here’s a photo dump of the build.
These will be floating on the wall in the new house, with about five inches of space under them. I did a lot of things in this build I’ve never tried before, so I learned a lot. I love how the decorative grooves turned out on the drawer fronts, which was inspired by something Michael Alm did on his kitchen cupboards. The oak handles were made with inspiration from a couple we liked on Etsy (1 & 2).
I can’t wait to get moved in this summer and mount these on the wall!
I’m loving my new desk. There are a couple of needed improvements though. First, I always have a water bottle, coffee, pop, or several on my desk when working, so I had grabbed this coaster from the living room. It bugged me all week.
Can you believe I’d never made a set of coasters? Time to fix that.
This was a simple project and a lot of fun to knock out something small. I’ll keep two of the coasters in the office and put the other two in the living room.
It was time for a new desk for my home office. I ordered this TOPSKY desk base on Amazon for $220.99.
Over the years, without success, I’ve tried to stand some while working. Hopefully a motorized adjustable base will encourage me to stand for certain tasks and even if I can do a couple of 20-30 minute sessions each day it’ll be a big help.
I got to work processing walnut boards and white oak flooring.
There was a lot of jointing, cross-cutting, ripping, planing, more ripping, and trimming. I’m excited to use that box of off-cuts to make an end grain cutting board or two! I felt like the key to this build was going to be the glue-ups. I started with sections of 9-10 pieces and ended up with eight of those.
I ran each section through the planer, with the help of some shimming for a couple, to flatten them. I made a temporary sled to square up the sides to the faces.
To help assemble the sections, I used a couple of biscuits on each glue joint.
I glued up two sections at a time, which gave me four bigger sections. Then I glued up two of those at a time and one final glue up.
I drilled and put in all of the bolt inserts, which will attach the top to the desk base.
I took three passes with the router to put a big chamfer along the bottom edge.
With a jigsaw, I rough cut out a spot in the back to pass cables through. Then I did some sanding to smooth it out and added a chamfer with the router. Here is it, viewed with the desk bottom facing up.
Due to the base’s cross support, there’s was limited depth for drawers, but there was width for them. I took some old kitchen cabinet drawers, chopped them in half, and closed them up with scrap plywood.
Then I worked on what I’m calling the drawer box even though it’s not a box. I also cut top rails from hardboard and oversized drawer faces from walnut. Grabbed strips of walnut for face-framing and glued together pieces of oak to make drawer pulls.
All the sanding! I went through 80, 120, 180, and 220 grits on the top and sides of the desk.
Time to put some finish on, which is always a favorite step to see how it’s really going to look. It was my first time trying out a hard wax oil and I used Bee Nooba Wax from Bumblechutes. It was very easy to apply and I’ll definitely be using it on future projects. I applied one coat to the bottom and three coats to the sides and top.
Then it was back to the drawers. I stained the “box” black and ended up having to trim some things to fit better around the rail of the desk base. I sized the drawer faces, made oak handles with 10° angles, assembled everything, and applied finish.
It turned out great! I can’t wait to see it in our new house later this year!
There were more posts for 2023 than I remembered.
January
February
March
April
May
November
December
It was a good December for making when I was able to catch up on a lot of electronics kits. I’ve been working on a new desk for my office since November, which I hope to finish soon. Then I’ll be starting to build other things for the new house.
Check out previous recap posts for 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
I was given a replacement AC adapter for an Acer laptop, which isn’t compatible with the Dell Optiplex micro PC I wanted to use it with. The output is close enough to work, so I looked for an adapter to convert from the 5.5×1.7mm connector used by the Acer to 4.5x3mm used by the Dell. I couldn’t find an adapter anywhere! I did however find a pigtail adapter on Amazon for about $8 I could wire in. Here’s the original connector and the new cable.
I opened up the power brick.
Then I made sure to test the output voltage and the polarity of the wires and connector with a multimeter. I noticed an unused spot for LED1 on the circuit board, so I figured I’d see if connecting a second LED would provide some other status indicator.
All it seemed to do was take over and disable LED2. So I removed it and left the original green LED. I desoldered the original cable, which only had positive and ground wires. The board had a spot with an S, which I assume means “signal,” so when connecting the pigtail, I soldered the blue wire there.
I checked the voltage on the new connector and it was as expected.
I plugged in the Dell and everything seemed to work. I cleaned the old thermal paste off the 3 components that screwed to a big metal heat sink and put on new paste. When I went to close everything I realized the black wire was too short, preventing the cable from reaching the hole in the power brick. I had to solder on a short extension and cover it with shrink tube.
Tucked everything back in the power brick, snapped it together, and it’s good to go.
We’re having a house built next year and it’ll have ethernet ports all over. I’ve already started gathering equipment and setting up a network rack cabinet (from Amazon), so I can start playing around with the stuff in our current house over the winter. The rack will do the job fine, but it’s not super high quality. Since the components usually only mount to the front rails, the heavy equipment can sag quite a bit in the rear. I cut and stained a couple of pieces of scrap wood.
The UPS is the heaviest piece of gear, so it’s mounted at the bottom of the rack. I used a couple of pieces of VHB tape to stick the support beam to the rack floor. The rear of the UPS simply rests on that piece of wood.
The other support piece mounts to the rear rails with washers and screws, propping up the back end of the switch.
Simple and effective improvements.
A friend wanted some forms created, so I dug through my scrap wood, cut to size, and assembled with glue and a nail gun.
He used spray foam to hold the pots in place, which will hopefully solve his problem of the Christmas trees blowing over all the time.
After getting married in October, of course we were going to center our ornament around that this year. We took some leftover pieces that didn’t get used for the kitchen backsplash, glued two together, cut it to size, rounded the corners, softened the edges, and added a couple of screw eyes.
We bought two different colors (hard to tell in this photo) of twine and tied a square knot. Obvious symbolism.
After having a Cricut for almost two years, we finally cut vinyl on it.
A little super glue gel to attach the knot.
Then we sprayed three coats of lacquer to help set it and hopefully hold on to the vinyl better.
We also have some bonus ornaments this year. I drilled a hole through one of the golf balls Brandi had made for some twine. The other two were Huichol art we did on our honeymoon in Playa Mujeres. Can you guess who did which one?
Making ornaments is a yearly tradition for us. Check out 2021 and 2022.
We had the idea to convert one of the spare bedrooms in to a closet for Brandi. Here’s what the room looked like after clearing it out.
After pulling out the carpet (and maybe painting?), we decided to design and build (not ourselves!) a house. Very exciting and we’ve been working through the process for a few months now.
So plans changed for the room. We painted the walls and inside of the closet with a white to brighten things up. Here you can see a bit of how dirty it looked in the closet.
We painted some shelving (the actual shelves are missing here) in the corner of the closet instead of installing new stuff. Here’s a look after paint.
With the upcoming move we bought cheaper flooring from Menards instead of getting the stuff we’ve used from Sam’s Club. The cheaper stuff is definitely harder to work with and I did the room by myself in about 6-7 hours.
The room didn’t have any ceiling lighting, which I’ll never understand. So I installed a ceiling fan and rewired the switch, which previously controlled an outlet.
I cleaned up and restained the trim instead of buying new stuff. There wasn’t any trim in the closet, so I bought white PVC trim for simplicity. I still need to get some quarter round for the room since a few flooring edges show.
I don’t like the floor style, but the next owner’s can worry about it. This was cheap and did the job. If we hadn’t already tore out the carpet, we would have left the room alone, saving a bunch of time and money.
Nick Momrik 