Before “The Beginning”… The Woodworking Bug That Bit

When looking at what gets people interested in woodworking, it’s probably a true statement that many of us get “bit by the bug” with DIY projects around the house. I’m not an exception here. One of the bigger projects thus far in our house was when we had to get the other upstairs bedroom ready for our son. Of course, I didn’t have the foresight to take “before” pics, and wished I did. After all was said and done, it would have been nice to put the before and after pics side by side. The room also took longer than planned since my son had to be born 10 weeks early, which meant the room had to be finished after he came home – a two month hiatus where our routine was going to the NICU daily at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston – certainly no time for projects.

And now here we are a few years later and thought it would be cool to document one part of this project that used some basic woodworking concepts. Our house is old, as mentioned in a previous post, built in 1860. Old houses have their challenges, but also opportunities to be creative in solutions. In his room were a couple of doors leading into crawl spaces and there was a TV from probably the 1950s or 60s built into the wall! The TV was non-operational and useless. For the door openings to the crawl spaces, all I could imagine is what sort of trouble he could get into in the crawl spaces when he got old enough. The room is small too, so any extra storage spots would come in handy. So I came up with some basic boxes in the wall. They would seal off the openings, yet use what would otherwise be wasted space.

Materials used were 1/2″ birch plywood, and moldings to face off and hide the ply layers. Joinery was simple as well – butt joints reinforced by brad nails. All in all a simple project but one that helped add some needed storage space and it’s one of the projects I can honestly say I can point back to as one that really got me interested in more woodworking!