My on-and-off hobbies, apart from blogging, include woodworking and cooking. In this post I’m going to show you some of the things I’ve bashed together out of wood over the last few years.
My most recent and most advanced project was this small stand-alone bar on wheels. I designed the bar from scratch, after making a sketch on the back of a receipt in a real bar (Molly Malones). Part of my inspiration came from bars I had seen previously, similar to this one.
My bar features a curved MDF top, angled sides with plywood panels on the front, and at the back has a shelf and 2 cupboards with invisible magnetic locks. This was a great project for me because I hadn’t done curves, angles or enamel paint jobs previously. I also did it without a router or mitre saw, using instead a handheld jigsaw, a circular saw and a homemade mitre jig with my handsaw for the angled cuts.
Apart from the the shelves, which were store-bought MDF, and the plywood for the front which I scored from my friend Dominic, all the wood in this project was obtained free from dumpsters. There is a lot of free wood around Wellington if you look for it!
Note the plastic container recessed into the benchtop – this holds ice when the bar is in use. The stainless steel contraption under the benchtop is a permanently mounted beer-bottle opener. On the inside of the open door, you can see a white and red object – this is the incredibly clever magnetic lock which was actually the single most expensive part of the bar. 
If I was making the bar again, I’d do three things differently: make the base larger (deeper) to make the bar more stable, put polyurethane over the paint to preserve the integrity of the paintjob (there are a few stains/marks on the enamel paint), and redesign the top or other parts to fold down – my non-folding design takes up a fair bit of space!
The chopping board (for the bar) began as a random plank with a coathook screwed onto it which I found in a dumpster in Wilton. I cut it in half, glued the halves together to make a wider piece, rounded the ends off with the jigsaw and sanded the whole thing down to a beautiful finish (much easier with an electric sander!) For the handle, I screwed the screws into the handle, hacksawed their heads off, then glued their shafts into holes with JB Weld. A coat of cooking oil later, it looks totally sweet.
I’ve also made numerous bookselves out of (bought) MDF. My first bookshelf was made with a handsaw, including 60 cm long cuts for the shelves (it’s pretty hard to make straight cuts that long with a handsaw!). It came out surprisingly well. It currently functions as Leanne’s behind-computer desk-extension bookshelf.
This substantial bookshelf has very large and deep shelves (30 cm). It was very easy to make as I used pre-cut MDF which was already the correct dimensions (thanks Mitre 10!). It is quite strong as the top two shelves have a back plate which forms a solid box.
Real wood, like this small pine bookshelf I made for Phil’s wall, is much nicer to work with than MDF and comes out looking more professional. The pine was scrap from a theatre – it looked like technicians had been making sets for a play. I really enjoyed making this shelf, and it looks great. I’d love to make more wall shelves, perhaps a set of matching shelves. If you look closely, you can see what Phil has been reading.
Another ‘real wood’ project was this toolbox. It’s quite rudimentary – I hadn’t gotten the hang of the jigsaw at the time, and I couldn’t be bothered getting all the cuts perfect – but it’s quite solid, looks OK and it’s actually much more practical than the Warehouse plastic-box type. The wood was once an old shelf, which had been lying forgotten in a shed after being ripped out of my flat during renovations. Then I rescued it.
I found this large round piece of MDF in a dumpster, it had probably been used a router jig. I took this as a sign from the Gods of Dumpster Diving and now it’s a coffeetable. Making an object with legs was very educational. One of the legs was non-identical to the other three, which I forgot to correct for. If you look very closely, its a bit wonky. Luckily, the wonkiness is too small to be easily visible. And you learn more from mistakes than from when you get things right.
This little MDF cupboard is actually one of the most useful things I’ve ever made. It holds all my medicine (asthma, eczema, hayfever) out of sight. It was the first time I had used hinges, and I went slightly overboard with six sets. This door will stay on even in the event of nuclear war. The ribbons, BTW, belong to my girlfriend.
Behind the cupboard you can see my homemade “sink” with running water. It is surprisingly handy having running water in my room! The water container was scored free from work. They usually threw these containers away … so I had to rescue it … from the dumpster.Â
My very first woodworking project was converting an ancient desk into a set of drawers. The drawers, as you can see, currently serve as our coffee and tea-making area. The drawers hold recipe books, eggbeaters, aprons, cake tins and other baking/kitchen miscellany.
Dad and I sawed off the desktop and trimmed to the right size, then I stripped off the old paint job (my sister did a terrible job ), gave it a new coat of paint and some brand new handles. I paticularly like this style of handle. I discovered a cheap source of handles at the $2 shop – that’s why you can spot these handles on three other projects above.
On top of the drawers is a little set of shelves I made in 3rd form woodwork. They are actually too small to hold anything really useful on a wall, but are the perfect size for holding tea, milo, coffee, cinnamon, sugar and teaspoons. I highly recommend having a dedicated bench like this for making tea and coffee, BTW.
The single most useful tool for all of these projects was a cordless drill. Actually, two of them is even handier.
In a future post, I’ll show you the hanging platform and swinging chair I made two summers ago. They were made entirely from dumpster wood. Again, if you look for it, it’s amazing what you can find people throwing away …
Heh. This post makes the “Legalise” slogan rather prominent on the front page
I painted it specially for Clubs Day at Vic, hoping that it would help recruit students to the Libertarianz. It was eye-catching, at least, but several people mistook us for NORML!
Making furniture like this out of junk and wood pulled out of dumpsters is very resourceful. Shows how cheap it can be to live, with a bit of ingenuity. As fewer people know basic skills like this, our society becomes less resilient. If you rely on technology and consumer goods too much, how would you cope in a real crisis?
Left by Phil on May 13th, 2007