a stack of wood plus some elbow grease gives me...

... quite a lot!

i bought some salvaged timber strips, or known as "kok chai" in cantonese, some months back for some home improvement project. gabriel introduced these timber strips to me and i have lots of fun with them. for a half baked, low skilled nitwit wood worker like me, the flexible kok chai can be used to build just about anything.  have built quite a lot from just a stack of these strips. they are usually sold in bundles of 120 ft, or 10 pieces of 12 ft strips. cost? less than rm50 for such a bundle!

besides, i find wood working to be therapeutic. it is so calming to work with our bare hands. fyi, everything i built here is accomplished with hand tools only. a band saw, wood glue, screws, wood brackets and some clamps.



first thing i built, is this "creeper's aid". the base though is not made from timber strips but rather some bed frame someone in my neighbourhood threw away! yes, during my walks with tonto, we scour around the neighbourhood for rubbish. as the saying goes, one man's rubbish is another's gold.

this fella stands at 6 ft tall but unfortunately the plant is taking so slow to grow. hmm...

also built this compost rack. i'm tired of hearing the excuse of "not enough space" to compost. how about 3" by 1"? this is all the space taken up by our compost rack.

 

 but the most fun i have, is building this food dehydrator. a year ago, i blogged about making your own food dehydrator. well, that crude thing consists of 4 pieces of wooden plank (salvaged from the neighbourhood) and some L brackets.

since we use this quite often, that ugly piece got to be retired. and so i built this fella. since it is only oiled, you could see the timber strips clearly.

 

at the lower end, a 100w incandescent light bulb is used to provide heat. 

  

in case you are wondering,  a 100w light bulb manages to heat up the upper rack all the way till 50 degrees celcius. just nice for a slow dehydration.
the thermometer is a roast meat thermometer. excellent for this purpose here!
oh yeah, among my wood working tools, i could print some letters too. nice eh?

 on the left, drying some pig ears here. tonto absolutely loves this!
 on the right, drying some tomatoes. there's 7 tomatoes here. 8 hours give us some wonderful semi dried tomatoes.

so with some elbow grease, you could accomplish all this from just a bundle of timber strips of less than rm50!

best of all, these are all YOUR handiwork. there's no commercial stuff like this!

 

build your own minibar

i like woodworking a lot too but haven't done as much as baking bread. making your own furniture makes a lot of sense as store bought furniture typically won't fit 100% into your existing deco as well as space.

ever bought a bookshelf with gaping space at the top? can't seem to find a bookshelf that goes all the way to the ceiling? i really hate seeing the little gap there between the bookshelf and the ceiling. and the top of the bookshelf does nothing but collect dust!

hence i strive to build as much as possible.

furthermore, if you ever bought furniture from IKEA, you'll notice that assembling them isn't that difficult. the difficult part is designing them right, cutting and gluing to right measurements and sizes.

to that end, you need appropriate tools. now power tools don't come cheap but over here in malaysia, we are lucky to have so many china made power tools which are not only cheap but perform very well too! i bought a rm200 mitre saw before and using this mitre saw, with some help from friends, managed to saw off the ultra hard resak wood for our staircase. the savings from asking someone to saw for you more than made up for the price of the mitre saw.

anyway, showcase here is one of my more satisfying "handiwork".

it's supposed to be a minibar but at the end of the day, this furniture only holds 2 bottles of liquor and all sorts of other stuffs! it has become something like a food storage furniture (there's supposed to be word for it...).

notice that the sides store the glasses/mugs. the side door is detachable should you decide to change the look one day...

it's supposed to be a minibar you see. the wood is finished with polyurethane.

it's supposed to be a safe material but then to be absolutely sure, i'd rather have a layer of plastic film between the polyurethane and my mugs. also, with the plastic layer under the mugs, even if you slam the side door, the glasses won't even clatter.

doesn't look like a minibar anymore right? my wife hijacked it and now we store all our food stuffs here.
























the top is not glued down. this way it's "modular". you never know one day when your wife says "this is too small for our needs now"!

credit goes to gabriel for helping me complete the unit. i built it over several months as i got stuck couple of times. in the end, gabriel helped me get "unstuck".