233 Wine Credenza Design

The last piece of the living room is a sideboard / credenza / wine rack to hold our various glasses, placemats, and show off the wine collection. This is a first concept, but the idea is a walnut slab with the legs mitered from the same piece as the top, and the live edge running up the sides and across the front.

233 Dining Table

New apartment, new furniture set. I set out to build a dining room table, bench seat, and coffee table for starters. To guide the design language, I decided to use Jen's TV table as a starting point... now it's our bar:



The table is 101" x 42", built from solid walnut with lots of knots. Here it is under construction:



Finished:



Dinner party time!

Truck Tailgate Bench

After a nice afternoon kiting in the Delta, I was sitting on my tailgate checking out people surfing, and decided wanted a more comfortable seat for this type of scene. Here is a photo from that afternoon:



In typical fashion, I got carried away and built a teak bench for the tailgate...

Along with a flagpole and some custom cushions...




This is going to be EPIC for Stanford football games.

Sandy Patio Set

I always looked at the trapezoidal alcove on our patio and imagined a big table there. After giving it some more thought, I divided it into two tables to make it easier to fit in the basement in the winter, and to make access easier to the center inside seats.

Built from solid Cedar. Many fun meals to come!

1991 Ford F350

Ever since I started doing carpentry, I have wanted a truck. Actually I wanted one even before that, but this gives me a good excuse.

So now I am the proud owner of a 1991 Ford F350 XLT Lariat, single cab full bed, with the 7.5L engine. 400 ft*lbs of torque... and plenty of towing capacity to move a boat around. (Someday.)

Sandy Way Dartboard Frame

My family's place at Squaw used to have a terrible dartboard over the fireplace upstairs -- it was worn down, at the wrong height, in one of those bar-style mini-cabinets with doors.

I finally got around to tearing that down and replacing it with a new board from New Zealand company DMI darts. It plays really well, and has a super skinny "spider" (metal frame that divides the scoring regions). Highly recommended.

The frame is made of vertical-grain Douglas Fir, with a water based dark brown stain. The carved letters are the natural color of the fir.

The chalkboard is genuine slate that used to hang in a San Francisco School District classroom. I found it at a spot in SF called Andreas Stone & Marble, some old Italian guys who took down a bunch of schoolroom chalkboards and put in new white boards around the city. I like the thought that generations of people (many older than me) learned from that stone.

More importantly, this project nearly used up the enormous trove of wine corks that people have been giving me for the past few years (since I started making trivets). Not sure how many are there in total ... maybe sometime we're snowed in with a blizzard we can count them.

I used the same method I used on the dartboard in my SF pad ... scroll down to see that one.

Sutro Tower coat rack

Aliph's walls are cast concrete, making it tough to hang things like coat hooks on the wall. After a few months of setting my clothing and backpack down on a crowded desk or distant floor, I decided some kind of standing or leaning coat rack was in order.

I ended up using a structural column to locate the lean-to, which is made of solid padauk:



The edges are routed with a sine / radio wave design and the graphic was carved from a vertically stretched photo of the Sutro Tower, the 762-foot antenna that stands atop central San Francisco: