One-off

A recent one-off project was more unusual than most: I didn’t intend to make it at all.

We all make a lot of one-off projects and furniture. You build something for a specific place, use or request – but only once. You never made one before, and you don’t intend to make one again. But that assumes that you do intend to make at least one initially.

For a recent article, I needed to stage a photo of drilling angled holes on a drill press, and I thought a perfect – and perfectly easy – object to mock up was a stool seat. It didn’t have to be elaborate, since I only needed it for a couple photos where the seat itself wasn’t important, since it was the drilling I wanted to photograph.

So, I jointed and glued up some short lengths of 2x4, cut a round seat, set up the drill press, drilled three angled 1" holes, and shot the photos. Except for the glueup time, the whole thing only took a few minutes, and I had my images. Afterward, I just tossed the drilled seat aside, figuring I’d use the stock for something else someday.

But my wife saw that discarded seat later in the day, and asked if I was making a stool for our grandson who was coming for his yearly summer stay. She just figured I was making it as a small surprise for him, which got me to thinking, why not?

I had plenty of 1" dowels, so I grabbed one and cut three legs and sanded them. A quick sanding of the seat, a bit of glue in each of the holes and bingo – a one-off piece of furniture. Not my best work, and certainly nothing fancy, but in a matter of minutes I had put what was about to become a piece of scrap to work and had something my grandson would enjoy when he arrived. The oddest part of it all is that I kind of like this little stool, and enjoyed making it.