My (now) wife and I moved in together and were able to rent a place with a fairly large 1-car garage. First order of business was making this garage functional – so I built a series of shelves for storage and a bench to do some projects. I still had a washer and dryer from a previous house that I wanted to save for when we purchased a home, so I built the bench over top of them (a little higher than I would have preferred as a result) and covered the appliances in plastic.

I also picked up another very important tool for my collection: a mitre saw. I got pretty much the cheapest one I could buy at Home Depot – a Ryobi. I still have it four years later so it must not be that bad of a tool. My only real complaint is that it doesn’t have a telescoping arm and so can only cut wood with a width of up to ~6″. After that you have to turn the board over and try to match up the blade to cut it level. Also the height of the deck on this saw is not an even number (like exactly 1″) so it’s hard to line up support blocks for cutting long lumber.

I also picked up a proper drill at this point. I did some research to learn that Makita was a pretty well respected tool maker and their drill(s) was recommended on quite a few websites. Buying this drill also sort of “locked” me into the Makita tool line since they all use the same battery type. I know this is part of the manufacturer’s plan to get repeat customers, which I don’t love, but in this case I’ve been very satisfied with all the Makita tools I’ve purchased and in fact if I can afford it I prefer to buy Makita tools. Anyways, it turns out there are a handful of Makita drills that all look nearly identical – I bought the model Home Depot had in stock at the time (XFD10).

  • Sorry these pictures are not from 2016 =(

My wife and I were looking for a piece of furniture to place right inside our garage door. The function of this piece would be to hold coats and shoes for when you come in the house. The dimensions we required were pretty specific because the wall it was to be placed on was pretty narrow. Additionally, there was a door adjacent to the space that pretty drastically limited how deep the piece could be. Everything we saw online was too large in one of these dimensions and/or was too expensive. I proposed to build one, but my wife was pretty doubtful that we could just build one that easily. I was perhaps too naive so I went about designing one. These were my original design drawings and measurements.

I unfortunately didn’t take any pictures in the middle of this project, but because I didn’t have a table saw I was limited on the choices of width, based on the denominations of “1 by” boards that I could buy at Home Depot. I think the total width was three 1×12’s (34.5″). The long upright side piece (running the total height of the piece) was a 1×8 and the bottom section was made wider by putting a 1×6 next to it for a net depth of ~14″ (includes the 3/4″ backboard). The backboards being solid wood 1×12’s was definitely a bit beefier than is necessary. If I were doing this today I would probably have used some 1/4″ plywood to cut down on the weight and cost.

The lower shelves were measured and built based roughly on our shoe sizes. The drawers are on just simple soft wood slides. I took a major shortcut here because I was a bit daunted by trying to figure out real metal drawer slides (I still am a bit daunted by these and how exact you have to be). The upper shelf contained a little box (made from 1/4″ birch) with dog poop bags as these were often required as we were going out the door to walk the dogs. The dog poop bad holder had a missing section on the side so loose bags could be loaded and was held in place by little birch pieces. I assembled the box with staples. The whole piece is held together via Kreg joints and regular screws as I had little knowledge or expertise in joinery at that time (not sure I do even now).

We finished the piece in a dark Jacobean stain (from Minwax) – no pictures, sorry.