Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The Workshop: "The man is obsessed!" (2)

My wife knows the way to a man's heart is through his workshop, and on Christmas Day she presented me with a $50 Home Depot gift card. My first two thoughts: Give that girl a big warm hug. ASAP buy five pieces of barn board, 8-foot length, for more log cabin birdhouses.

["I bought five boards and two were cedar"]

I was on a roll (still am) in the workshop and the barn board would get used up quickly because I already had a log cabin recipe that was easy to follow. But before buying any lumber I attended a London Knights hockey game, and my seat-mate, a friend who was happily following the same recipe, suggested he was going to buy cedar deck boards for his next birdhouse or two. Oh, I liked that idea and I beetled it out to Home Depot the next day with the intention of looking at cedar as well as barn board.


I came home with some of each and immediately went to work. I laid a cedar plank upon my bench, measured it this way and that, and began to draw a plan for its most economic use.

Eventually I discovered that I could get two birdhouses from each plank as long as I used other cedar I had on hand for the roof slats.


["I knew I had cedar scrap for slats hanging about"]

And because I had a finished cabin in the shop, made from old white pine siding I'd taken off the house five years ago, I was immediately interested in seeing how the cedar would compare in appearance.

["The old pine is a pleasure to use. And the cedar?"]

So, I grabbed a shovel.

Photos by GH

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Please click here to read The man is obsessed (1)

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