Wedding Welcome Board
For my wedding in Japan, my wife and I wanted a rustic hand-made welcome board near the entrance to the venue. We didn't mean to join a trend, but we ended up choosing a design that is very common now. The wood was pre-painted in white and red, and we glued and screwed it into the shape we wanted. Then my wife sketched by hand the letter shapes for the font we wanted. We used Posca paint pens to fill the letter shapes, and in the end we were really happy with how it came out.
My Guitar
In 2011/2012 I decided to make a hot rod inspired guitar that I'd designed the year before. It's a neck-through maple wood electric guitar with PAF style pickups, a Bigsby whammy bar, and it can be coil split between single coil and humbucker sounds. It was my second home-made guitar, so it's a little rough in some places but it's basically perfect for me. It can do every sound I want, and it's got a thick neck.
Even when I was in Japan for 2 years, it sat unused in my house but it didn't warp or twist, and the strings were still in tune when I got back, amazing. I'm planning on making a bass guitar next, which will be much more of a challenge for me because of the increased string tension, it means I need to be very exact when making the neck.
Floor Sofa
At home we use a low table like in a Japanese home, and we sit on the floor on cushions. In the past, and for 2018, we've had a regular sofa of some kind behind our backs, generally as a backrest. With a strong desire to make the small house more liveable, we wanted to get rid of the regular sofa and replace it with a floor sofa, like the kind they sell in Japan for our situation. The regular sofa took up so much room, and wasted space vertically too. Also it blocked the window some, which made the entire room darker.
Starting from plans for a single seat floor sofa on the internet, I designed a two seater couch and prototyped it in Unity (the fastest and easiest way for me to prototype simple 3D shapes). I eventually changed from a more complicated and potentially less strong 4 part design, to a solid 2 part design with dowels used to hold the bottom and back in place. The whole thing is made from pine, and has no screws, dowels only.
Kitchen Island
In 2018 we will be getting a new kitchen, and although most of the kitchen will be built by professionals, I will be building a kitchen island. The benchtop might not be the same as the actual kitchen benchtop because of availability, but it will match. I plan on using bit caster wheels attached to large posts on the legs, because we'll need a really study surface for food preparation. We're still planning the kitchen and the island, but I'm looking forward to using my table building skills again.
