Ah, spring! With winter behind us again, all those months of Vitamin D deficiency are but a lingering memory. It’s time for actual sunlight, refreshing breezes, being buzzed by daredevil hummingbirds and getting the grill ready for some serious outside time.

It’s also time for me to take care of that pile of *stuff* that had to be put on hold while I hibernated. I saw the light last weekend, and started attacking a planter project that has been at the bottom of that pile. It’s a 3′ x 3′ (roughly) planter box with a bottom, in which we will grow a range of herbs in our tiny back yard. This one has to be finished in time for early spring planting, so it’s chop-chop time for me.

After some shopping around, I found that buying chunks of fencing at the widths that I needed would do the trick for less than buying and breaking down lumber from a hardwood source. With my now-indispensible keychain tape measure in hand, I headed off to Home Depot for some fencing. I grabbed 6′ lengths of 5.5″ x 3/4″ FSC-certified redwood (not surfaced) for $1.87 a piece. Yes, please.

I also grabbed some 8′ lengths of semi-decorative strips at 1.5″ x 1.5″, something that would have been less expensive to rip down from a board bought at a hardwood dealer. I don’t have a table saw, and ripping long strips with a hand saw isn’t my idea of a good time these days, so prefab wins this round.

On one particularly nice day, my saw bench, my ryoba and I planted ourselves on the patio and started breaking this stuff down. The interesting bit is that I reworked my original plan for the planter based on the stock that I bought, and accurately built the joinery (mostly grooves) into the SketchUp model. After spending a bit of time confirming the accuracy of the model, I then used it as reference for each initial cut. I did some rework on the sizing of the grooves as I went.

This thing isn’t really complicated, but it was the first time I’ve left the numbers up to SketchUp after building the joinery to specs.

For this project I’m going full-bore. For absolutely no reason other than practice, I’m cutting mortise & tenon joinery for the frame and grooving the panels in. I think practice is a good reason, as the next project is the tool cabinet. At the very least, it will be the most over-engineered  flower pot in the history of civilization.

Rain or shine, if you will.

On a tangent, I cleaned up my cuts and did some surfacing on the components with the new workbench and it went very smoothly. I can’t describe how much less fatiguing it is to do face planing on a bench that you don’t have to simultaneously hold down with a foot…