Nice work! Actually, I think the crib (cot?) looks every bit as complex as the desk.

I'm still looking for a place to buy hardwoods here in Guadalajara. The desk is just made from whatever I could find at Home Depot, but I'd love to do some projects like your coffee table with some quality wood. Not sure if they would have the same stuff as we have in the US, but they have different hardwoods that are quite beautiful.

I'm also thinking about trying my hand at some raw wood furniture projects. I've been a little jazzed to try it since we bought our dining room table, which is a big piece of mesquite. I'll have to see if I can dig up a picture.

Found one. Just ignore the child at the end of the table.

I had this custom made for $5500 pesos or roughly $275 USD. I'm thinking a piece of mesquite this big would be worth a bit more than that in the US.

You guys continuously amaze me.

The other day I was impressed that I used an impact driver correctly, didn't lose a digit, didn't bring the house down, and managed to remove and then reinstall a set of blinds clips successfully.

I am about to become part-owner of a wood supply business, and one of their specialties is large slabs like that one. They have a couple of very large custom rigs for milling the raw wood dead flat with parallel faces. The slabs are then offered in that form, requiring fine sanding, a finish, and legs. But they'll also pre-finish and/or add legs as asked. Quite the sight, a room full of those!

If all goes well, I do hope the next worktable in my office here will be a live edge slab.

Cheers!

They sound great, can you pop a couple in the mail

Yeah, my wife says "You realize that we have to take that with us whenever we go back to the US." (which won't be anytime soon) I'm trying not to imagine what it'll cost to ship that thing. It might be cheaper to buy a trailer and tow it up and then sell the trailer on the other side.

Which, since the conversation is wandering anyway, reminds me of a story. When I was in Belize, there was a guy who drove down every winter from the US with a trailer for his belongings. Every year, he would rebuild the box of the trailer completely out of mahogany (which is dirt cheap in Belize), then tow it back to the US. Because it was a US tagged trailer, he didn't pay any import duty on the trailer itself. He would then disassemble the trailer, sell all the wood to help finance his trip, and rebuild the trailer out of whatever was cheap to bring back down. I always thought it was a cool way to work the system.

Just a word of warning, even if they start out dead flat, they may not stay dead flat. The mesquite table changes with the seasons and the humidity. Of course, none of the houses here have climate control, so your experience may vary.

Not sure if this is avoidable through proper maintenance or if the wood wasn't dried properly or what. I think it's just the nature of this type of wood and it's reaction to the evironment.

That's just what wood does (as part of "seasonal wood movement"), due to the differences between tangential and radial shrinkage ratios. It can be compensated for by how a slab is cut at the sawmill, or through construction techniques.

But with a big slab cut from anywhere except dead center down the tree trunk, it will not stay totally flat from season to season. Bracing it with a frame structure to keep it more flat is one solution, though in the long run it may crack/split if prevented from warping. Sealing it with a humidity-blocking finish is another approach, but difficult to achieve in practice.

An interesting tidbit I have learned from the biz, is that platters (cheeseboards, breadboards, trophy mounts, etc..) can be sliced diagonally from a whole trunk segment, in such a way that the tangential and radial shrinkage ends up dead even. So the small platters don't warp (much). Just gotta pick the right angle of cut for the wood species in question.

Cheers

Wait, you're telling me this guy *smuggled mahogany into the US* by building his trailer out of it? That is hilarious and amazing. That's like building a boat out of cocaine. I'm wondering just how much profit one could make by that. Is the price of mahogany in the US so high that it's really worth his time to do the construction/deconstruction?

It's not just about import duty. Mahogany is IUCN "vulnerable" and is in CITES Appendix II. Folks should really not be messing with that stuff.

Peter

Interesting! Looked up the Wikipedia article on it, and learned (among other things) that the Belize coat of arms has a mahogany tree on it.

Most of the slaves were brought in to cut first logwood, valued in its use of making dyes, then later mahogany. This is because treaties forbade the production of plantation crops.

The village I lived in, Gales Point, started out as a settlement of escaped slaves that lived in the area and eventually settled on the peninsula (according to the local lore).

Logging is also represented in the flag by the wreath of leaves, the tools pictured in the coat of arms and the motto "Sub Umbra Floreo" which in latin means, “Under The Shade I Flourish."

There are UK firms that do this. One that I looked at did all sorts of strange species; cedar, horse chestnut, tulip etc, all UK grown.

I didn't end up getting a track saw and I didn't make a jig, but I'll make one the next time I have a project. I tried just using a straight-edge and some measurement, and while the results are more than adequate for a hall closet, it wouldn't be for anything more.

We have a weird, triangular linen closet in our house, and the stock wire shelves just didn't fit it. Sheets and towels would just cascade over the edge of these shelves that only came out half-way into the closet. So I ditched those and just did the quickest job I could and still make it look passable. I cut up a bunch of triangular pieces of 3/4" plywood, sanded them down, glued half-round molding to the front edge, and set them on some 1x2 cleats attached to studs and toggle bolts.

I should have scribed them to the walls to make them a little tighter fit, but again it's good enough for this spot, and the result was almost a tripling of shelf space.

Space gaining solutions like that are always good fun. Congrats!

Note that 1/4" quarter-round molding from the home store is very flexible and can be fitted at the rear of shelves like those to fill any gaps and give a nicely "finished" look to things.

Cheers

Well done!

Good idea Mark. I might just leave it and save some effort. My wife is happy so that usually means the job is good enough

I just had another good look at the corner cupboard photos: those wire shelves were tiny!! Looks like a major upgrade with the new shelving!

I know, right? The length against each wall was only 17.5". A folded towel would just barely stay on the shelf, and one corner would always be hanging over the front part.


Thanks! I think it is. The new measurement is 28" along each wall. The triangular shape is still annoying (hard to figure out how to pack that), but at least nothing is poised to start an avalanche, and we can store a lot more toiletries and things.

Honestly I think whoever designed a triangular linen cupboard into the house in the first place deserves most of the blame here.

Peter

Would be fine as a broom cupboard, I suppose. Oh, wait.. 2017.. okay, a cupboard for the central vac hose then!

Fold your linens into triangles!

-jk

It would have been a bigger project, but ...

Sometimes the inner drywall walls can be removed, allowing the closet interior to be expanded/reconfigured into the newly exposed wall cavities. Exact results and possibilities will depend on what kind of structure detail is found within the walls.

Depending on the situation it is possible to just paint the inside of the now exposed drywall surfaces (which is the backside of the 'exterior' drywall surface).

In one case I installed vertical plywood panels (carefully crafted as needed to fit) to create a new closet shape, then added a drywall layer directly onto the plywood. In another situation I just painted the plywood surfaces and then attached the shelf hardware with wood screws, no drywall plugs needed.

Interior wall cavities behind drywall (for stick built houses) are typically 3.5" deep, sometimes that is enough extra space to make the effort worthwhile.

For the closet shown here, it is possible to have the shelf front edges extend into the doorway space, such that the closed closet door would be just shy of touching the extended shelves.

Ha! Yeah we'll do a flag ceremony after every laundry load! Nah, the towel wouldn't fill up the space as a triangle anyway. I tend to just fill the extra room with wash cloths and hand towels.


No go. Each cleat on both walls is attached to studs. There was one stud behind each wall, and the other cleat fastener is a toggle bolt. Good idea though.


I can't argue with that. It's a weird design. The center staircase is set at a 45 degree angle to the exterior walls of the house. On a floor plan it would look like a square with a diamond inside it. It's an interesting design element, but it makes for weird areas in the middle of the house.

Sometimes the stud can also be removed

All depends on the wall structure. If not loadbearing then it comes down to wall stiffness for supporting the remaining drywall. Hence the plywood (or wall sheathing board) layer which can provide strength and support for the now much thinner wall.

In oddball wall shapes and corners sometimes the construction guys just keep adding studs until they get enough edges to attach all the drywall pieces. All that extra vertical wood can take up a lot of useful space. Rethinking the construction details can recover some useful/usable space.

That wouldn't work here. There's also wood behind the corner, so the result would just be an even more difficult/complicated shape to create shelves for.