-The Bangles
Yesterday, it rained.
Again.
(Insert exasperated, I-am-so-damn-DONE-with-spring sigh here.)
Okay, can't bottom paint the boats. No paint, no splash. No splash, no fun.
Crap.
Alright, I might as well spend the day cleaning up the workshop. Okay, maybe "cleaning up" might be a generous description of sweeping up sawdust and putting tools more or less where they belong in the dungeon of clutter in which I putter, but it makes the space almost usable, it occupies a rainy Sunday and keeps me, more or less, out of SWMBO's hair.
After enjoying a wonderful breakfast of hot, tasty, SWMBO-made-from-scratch biscuits, coffee and scrambled eggs, I descended to my lair.
(Speaking of lairs, at this time we pause for a gratuitous, completely off-topic Mutt Moment:
Every Thursday, I walk down to our local farmer's market and, in addition to yummy victuals for the humans in the house, pick up soup bones for Inky and Finnegan, thereby creating very happy dawgs. The two dogs have different approaches to bone enjoyment- Inky will devour the meaty goodness on the exterior leaving a polished piece of bovine anatomy, while Finn can occupy himself for hours on end gnawing out the marrow and just generally reducing a bone to pieces of slobbery calcium. Thus, when Inky has done her thing Finn takes the hand-off, and, because he is a paranoid greedy little mutt, scurries off with his booty to gnaw in privacy. He has a "cave" in the footwell of SWMBO's desk, and it is there that Finn's Gollum-like bone-hoarding habit is evident:
The "expired" bones got cleaned up before I started on the workshop.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled drivel.)
So I get to sweeping, and putting-awaying and I start sorting through my vast selection of off-cuts. As I mentioned in an earlier post I am not a great woodworker, and therefore end up with large amounts of wood that are the wrong length, width, thickness because no matter how many times I measure and cut, they still ended up too short, narrow or thin. I have waaaaayyyyyy too much of this stuff for the size of the space. So, I think to myself, some of it has to go. But, I further think to myself, there is some nice wood here. Maybe I can do something with it. Okay, my first self argues with my second self, what are you going to do with scraps of 1/4" mahogany ply, 16" of leftover pinrail, a bunch of bruised and battered 1x6 pine, 7 feet of assorted mahogany moulding and 4 feet of cedar battens in varying thicknesses?
Four hours later, with design and labour assistance from SWMBO, we had:
2 V-berth bookshelves,
1 Galley knife rack
1 Spice rack
1 Magazine rack
and the folding flappy galley extension also got a last coat of shiny stuff.
Total new material cost: $0
BTW, any industrial designers out there viewing this, here's a free million dollar idea. Start selling chest freezers with durable workbench tops. I think the venerable Firestone freezer that came with our purchase of stately Jones manor is used more as a workbench than the workbenches in the shop.
Next up: installing all of the stuff we built, building a removable helm seat for Whiskeyjack, and getting the boats splashed. Hopefully the weather will improve this week, and we can get in the water before next Friday... the 13th.
Thanks for taking the time to follow our adventures. Feel free to "Talk the Dock!" Link us, follow us, or just tell your friends.
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