Monday, April 4, 2016

Wall Hanging

Okay. I give up. I admit being wrong about myself.

I will swear, up and down, that woodworking is not a hobby of mine. I'm not that good. I don't care to become very good. I just make things out of necessity and to give me purpose during the winter months.

So how do I explain this?



After a couple weekends doing nothing I had to make something. My winter project was done. It was too blustery to do much outside. Flipping through a magazine I saw something hanging on a wall and thought, "I can make that." I was a square frame housing pieces of carpet tiles.

I have carpet tile pieces.
I have a two-foot-square of unused plywood that has some water rot along one edge.
I can frame it with solid wood.

So off I went to the BORG to see what I could find. I could make the frame from pine and paint it. I could make it from poplar and stain it. Or I could make it from oak or...walnut. Walnut. That way, I don't have to stain it (always a plus) and it would look really nice. We don't have walnut, so this is an accent piece. It will help tie dark mahogany piano with the finished basement.

Construction was pretty easy, really. Here are the photos.

Materials: 1 x 2 walnut, 2 x 2 cherry plywood, carpet strips

Pocket holes around perimeter

Sand the bottom

Mark the solid wood for cutting

Cut pieces to length

Dry fit pieces to make sure it will come together correctly

Assemble frame

Polyurethane the frame

Then it was merely a matter of gluing the strips in and hanging this thing on the wall, between the piano room and the basement.

My wife is tolerant of this. I won't go so far as to say that she likes it. But I did remind her that I've seen worse. I've seen a bunch of broken dishes and cups glued to a board that had all been spray painted black hanging in a museum, so there's that. I remember the framed piece of graph paper titled "Tree" that adorned a museum wall. So just call this "Rainbow Field; Jungle Highway" and pretend to be a modern art snob.