One of my wonderful childhood friends actually trusted me
enough to build her a corner shoe bench for her entry way. I don’t have many projects under my belt,
especially custom ones, but I guess seeing the wall bed I built for my son was
enough for her to think I could pull off a shoe bench. My friend new exactly what she wanted, drew
out a rough sketch of it and emailed me a copy with some specific
dimensions. We emailed back and forth to
work out minor details and she waited patiently for me to carve out bits of
time here and there to work on it.
The planning process for this project probably took me longer than actually building it because I wanted to make sure it was just right. (there’s a little more pressure when you’re building for someone other than yourself) I was also learning the Google Sketch-Up program (which I absolutely love!). If you haven’t tried it out, you must – it’s free. There are great resources/tutorials online that will walk you step by step through certain tools. Once you get a few basic skills down, it can be really fun. People design everything from furniture to full blown 3D cities! Do an Images search for “google sketchup” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I’m still learning as I go, but I definitely plan to use it
for every project that I build from scratch.
The best part is that you can draw it out piece by piece on Sketchup and
then you will be able to visually see the “built” project before you even touch
a piece of wood. It saves you from
making so many mistakes that would otherwise be so easy to do if you were
working from a 2D penciled drawing – at least it was that way for me.
