Donuts and Wood Working

After not posting for a while, we thought we would finally share some of the fun and interesting things that have been going on here.  One of the kids wanted to go get donuts recently and Lena suggested that we make some instead.  For what we would have spent on a dozen donuts, we were able to make a few dozen and the kids enjoyed helping as well.  It was a fun family activity and breakfast.

We have been wanting to get some swings for the kids for a while, but finally Mike decided to build a frame for swings and add it to our existing wood playset that Mike made a number of years ago.  We got the basic plan for the swing frame from http://ana-white.com/2010/06/how-build-swing-set-playhouse.  

We made a few modifications, but it turned out fairly good.  We still need to add a few more swings to it, but the kids are already really enjoying it.  Comparing it to other wood swing sets at Home Depot, this thing is a lot more sturdy than those.  It should last a really long time.

There was a kit at Home Depot with some of these same swings and hardware, but Mike decided to pick and choose the pieces that he wanted.  The funny thing was that the kit claimed it could be assembled in one hour.  It took Mike nearly 2 hours just to hang the swings, so no idea how the whole kit could be done in one hour.

For Lena's birthday recently, Mike got her a compound miter saw and a drill.  Now, I am sure you are thinking that is a joke, but Lena really asked for those for her birthday.  Part of the deal is that Mike has to help her feel comfortable with using the saw.  Lena looks at and follows the ana-white.com website fairly frequently and has a wide number of things that are so much easier with these tools.  The extra drill is especially helpful with the kreg jig pocket hole screws because one drill can be used to drill the pocket holes and the other can be used to drive the screws and we don't have to change bits back and forth. Here is Lena with her new birhday presents.  Mike built the cart for the miter saw from this plan on the ana-white website: http://ana-white.com/2012/04/plans/miter-saw-cart.  We made some modifications to the plans because we wanted to build it completely with leftover wood that we already had from a number of other projects.