Today, I’m diving back into the world of woodworking — or as I like to call it, a surefire way to avoid the boob tube. Ironically, I spent a solid chunk of time on YouTube just to pull this project off.
Let’s rewind a bit. My parents are both retired now, with Dad joining the club pretty recently. The man’s a handyman legend — he ran his own home improvement business for years. These days he’s got all this free time and I’ve noticed he hasn’t been working with his hands as much as he used to. That just didn’t sit right with me.
On my end, I’ve always enjoyed tinkering in the garage, basically channeling my inner Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor. You know the drill: measure once, cut three or four times… LoL.
Fast forward to the present. My parents were coming for a visit, and Sunshine and I are always on the go while they prefer a slower pace. I wanted something we could actually do together. Since Sunshine dreams of a proper garden and I love any excuse to build stuff, we landed on making some planters. A match made in heaven — kind of like Sunshine and me.
Before they arrived, I did some research and we settled on building planters from fence pickets. After watching a bunch of videos, I was impressed by the ones from WhosTheVoss on YouTube — solid instructions and a clear cut list. So I made the 40-minute trek to Home Depot and grabbed the materials. Perfect excuse to finally pull the trigger on that table saw I’d been eyeing.
Each planter needed 7 pickets. YouTube made it look like we could knock out two in an afternoon (they claimed an hour or two). Turns out they probably started with a full workshop, materials already on hand, and a table saw ready to go. Dad and I spent the first 30 minutes just unpacking the new saw, hunting down nails for the nail gun, and getting the glue prepped.
After unloading the truck, gathering every tool in sight, and a fair bit of fiddling, we finally started cutting. This was my first table saw as an owner, and it had been years since I’d used one (we’re talking kids-have-grown-up-and-had-kids years).
We followed the cut list for the first planter, made a few tweaks along the way, and still felt pretty proud of ourselves. No fingers were lost in the making of this project. We finished the first one in a record-breaking 3 hours flat. The second one went much smoother — about an hour. I’d bought extra material just in case we screwed up… but we didn’t need it. So we did some quick math on the fly and designed a third planter that ended up just a smidge shorter.
Here they are — check ‘em out and let me know what you think. If you’re feeling inspired to try something similar, go look up WhosTheVoss on YouTube. The guy’s entertaining and his builds are top-notch.
Thanks for stopping by Tronster.net, I hope your next parental visit (or family project) turns out just as fun as ours did.
Quick disclaimer: This post was written with help from Grok and Apple Intelligence. Also, full transparency — I do not know WhosTheVoss personally