Hello, Will here.

Sorry for not writing sooner, and thanks Jess for making all the previous posts.

In my absence I have been mainly at work, but occasionally buying less and living slow by making things for the house. Work has been great, it provides us with all we have materially and will hopefully one day allow us to move somewhere more rural (Wales) when we have saved up enough. After work and at weekends I have built a few things for the house. First I made a shelf to give us more space in a cubby hole:

I used some wood from my Grandad and screws Jess' mum gave us.

Not long after that or perhaps before that I got another bit of wood that Grandad gave me which had been in use for a while under our the length of our bed as a support. It snapped one day so I put it to one side. The slats didn't break and are strong enough on their own. I fixed this broken piece with 2 screws and some glue, then rounded off one end with a chisel and put it in a pole holder that was at the end of the garden. I drilled a hole in it and we threaded through a line we got in a corner shop for £3 maybe. Jess treated the wood with preserver so it will last. It had two heavy wetsuits on it and they touched the ground so I used a bit of wood as a prop. Jess had a better idea and put them closer to either end of the line. I think there is a photo of it on the blog elsewhere.

I also made this shelving unit out of more old wood from Grandad, and a few bits from dad's vulgar kitchen extension. It took me quite a while as I got one side the wrong way round and had to unscrew it and make new holes but I got there eventually, and now we have a gleaming example of function over form, giving more space than the two floating ikea shelves that have been banished to the loft until we leave.

Here's one I made earlier, maybe 2010 or 2011. It is a pew from St. Martin's church in Dorking that grandad rescued from a skip when they took out the first couple of rows of pews to put chairs in. It may be a hundred or so years old. It was a wonderful experience to renovate it and learn the old ways. There are only 6 screws holding the frame together, all hidden quite cleverly. You can see how the holes were drilled and then chiselled out to fit the back of the pew into its sides. It sits together like this with no screws. I will get a cover for winter at some point. Hopefully the car boot will have one.
I can sit on the pew and evangelise about buying less. In these cases although I have been lucky to have things given to me, a lot of the wood I used for the shed was second hand stuff I bought. The bed was built entirely from new pine, but it gave me pleasure to make it, I made it how I wanted it, and it wasn't reliant on as many people working in factories. From now on I will ideally get all the wood I use second hand as I don't trust any of the big timber companies since they were caught selling Amazonian timber. I want to contribute to deforestation as little as possible.


 Lastly, here are some small cabinets I made, the bathroom one for Jess, which she painted, made from wood my friend Arron was throwing out, and the bedside table is from chipboard that started out as kitchen cupboards, then almost became a bathroom cabinet, but in the end I made it into a bedside table as the cabinet project went wrong and it was too heavy and would have swelled when wet.
 The new cabinet is held together with little dowels I carved out of some scraps of wood I had. Faggots?
And the bedside table I just bashed it together with nails, quite a crude job but it is functional.