This year has been a little different then most. The pandemic had me spending a whole lot of time at home doing projects and also moving people. I have never purchased so much packing tape, wood, and cardboard boxes in my life. But what really took my attention was two very different but really cool home projects. I found that when I had extra time on my hands and that I was going to be stuck at home that it was really nice to accomplish fun goals every few weeks at home. This pandemic I ended up making a live edge coffee table and also took two sets of deer antlers from past years and made them home decorations. SO I want to go through some of the processes and give some ideas for taking your random home projects and making your pandemic a little less bland. My first task was to take this really old and beat up slab of wood in my garage and make something fun out of it. Originally it was a pretty bad slab and it had dead and rotted wood all over it. I knew a good portion of it still looked fresh. Just a heads up deadwood is flaky, wont take any wood treatment at all and will simply break off with any weight on it. So I had to work really hard to separate those sections from the main piece. This was done by taking a chisel, hammer and a knife. Those tools and many hours took the majority of the bad pieces off the table. The end process was that a 3x6 foot table ended up getting trimmed down to 2x4 feet. After that I had to sand it for hours. I did this with a circulation sander and also lots of hand sanding. This took another two evenings of work to get it all smoothed out and to get the remainder of the dead wood off. The live edge turned out to be a wild and beautiful mix due to all the sanding and chiseling. It made the piece really unique. Then I had to protect it and used multiple coats of polyurethane. I sanded in-between each layer and in the end the wood table looks amazing. The next project was a bit more involved. I had two sets of buck deer antlers that I had taken in the past. I originally only went hunting for the meat but decided to keep the antlers in hopes of hanging them some day. It turns out that the skull cap that was attached was a whole lot of work. The antlers were still partly attached to the skull which had been cut. This also still had dear fur and brain matter all over it. To my surprise this is a very hard process to remove all the fur and brain matter. I started by getting a large pot and boiling the antlers for hours. Then I had to pull off all the fur and brain matter. This literally took hours because it is so hard to do. I then got a bleach and let them sit in it for a day. Then I bough a deodorize and all the while lining my garage with layers of cardboard boxes to protect the floor and keep smells contained. Then finally I was able to cut the skull cap down to fit in a mount for the wall. It took about 15 hours of total time to finish that project, which under normal circumstances I would not be able to do. But the pandemic allowed me extra time and motivation to make cool things by hand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWriter sharing expertise about boxes Archives
September 2017
Categories |