Some of Nate's Woodworking Projects

Since we bought this house Nate has gotten exponentially more handy. He bought a table saw and keeps trying to find projects to work on. Since we aren't ready to tackle any major interior projects, he has kept himself busy with outdoor stuff mostly.

I think either the first or one of the first things he built was this picnic table. It may have ended up costing more to build than one of those prefab ones from home depot, but it is really big and made out of pressurized lumber so it should last a long time.

We have gotten a lot of use out of it already. This was one of the first meals we had on it (turkey burgers with avocado and turkey bacon) and we have had countless more meals out there since then. I'm pretty sure we have sat down to eat a meal at the picnic table more times than we have at our dining room table.

I really wanted a fire pit for the back yard. My dream fire pit would have been the cast iron fire bowl from DWR but $465 was a little out of our price range. I also really liked the revolver solid base fire pit especially because it had a wooden top so you could use it as an outdoor coffee table when not in use as a fire pit. $250 was still a little more than we wanted to pay. So we ended up buying this square fire pit that still has a nice modern look to it, but was a little more in our price range. The only problem was, no wooden top. But Nate managed to make this top for it out of super cheep fence boards. It has two holes drilled through so you can lift it out.

Our house has this weird little wooden shelf on the front of the house under the window to my office with a frilly decorative lip on it. I'm assuming that it was intended to hold a planter box and it seemed pretty silly without one. So Nate built this planter box to fit the dimensions of the shelf. He drilled drainage holes in the bottom that matched up with the space in between the boards so water could drain directly into the planting area below.

I pained the box white to match the trim on the outside of the house (the former owners left a gazillion cans of paint in the garage and it is always a challenge figuring out what color goes to what part of the house). And I planted the planter box with potted succulent plants that I brought from our old house. Amazingly I didn't buy any succulents for this thing, I had way too many little pots filled with succulents.

Hopefully someday we will replace the frilly edge on this thing, or maybe eventually the succulents will get long enough that they will cover it.