I love engaging in hobbies, from the initial idea and wonder, to the research phase where I get to educate myself (I've always said I'm the best teacher I can get,) all the way to the decision phase, where the question "Can I do that?" turns into "I can definitely do that." This is just an example of "I can definitely do that" spiraling way the hell out of control.
You see I moved to Oklahoma City in 2024, and when I moved I brought very little from the small town in Southwestern Oklahoma I lived in the 16 years prior to that. In 2008, when I was 21 years old, my Nana called me and told me that my Poppa was real sick and she needed my help. I quit the nihilistic, self-destructive lifestyle I was living immediately, right after the sense of duty and loyalty to my family that Nana and Poppa had ingrained in me kicked in. I spent the next 9 years of my life being a caretaker for both, then one, then neither of my grandparents, giving them the best life I could help them live until they died. As a result of this particular impetus for being in rural southwest Oklahoma, I lived in a house full of their stuff. Over the course of 16 years I didn't really gather that much of my own stuff, but instead subsisted on what they (and later a temporary roommate) left behind.
Moving was a clean slate, an opportunity to have a place of my own for really the first time in my adult life. It wasn't a flophouse, a den or warren of rats and druggies, and it wasn't my grandparents house, haunted by echoes of their memory long after they were gone. It was mine, truly mine, only mine. I had no tie to anyone who lived there before and it felt appropriate to get rid of nearly all of everyone else's stuff and stake my claim in a new city alone! On the flip side of that, it meant moving into a house lacking a dining room table, a couch, basically everything but a bed, dresser, and desk for my computer.
Now I'm at a point where life is comfortable, I've somehow managed to come out of the constant stress of always-on-survival-mode and settle into something terrifying, but peaceful. I still have a lot of things to deal with that I was just enduring, but life is getting better. Obviously that means it's time for more stuff! I grabbed a ratty little couch secondhand last year, moved some things around, bought some throw blankets and pillows and turned my home office into a cozy little gaming and movie nook.
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ooh, ahh, I'm so impressive! (ignore the basket, it was laundry day) |
I also hung some art up in my bedroom and got a new bedframe, I'm not showing my sleeping space here, but the relevant information is I've been kind of going room by room, next up: dining! I started shopping for a dining room table and, let me tell you, I was aghast! The prices on the low end were bonkers, the build quality was shit, and the selection just wasn't there. I couldn't find anything resembling what I was picturing in my mind made out of a quality material for under a few grand. I spent days browsing the internet, completely unaware of a dangerous question forming in the back of my mind: "Could I make a dining room table myself?"
Once that question formed, it hit like a ton of bricks. I started down a rabbit hole that is continuing into a master plan to relandscape the back yard at the house I'm renting, mostly using materials that already existed here!
Part 1: The Beginning of the Project
Well obviously the first step is research. I needed to be able to define what I wanted in order to figure out how I could potentially make it. There are a lot more steps between the idea and the execution that are still ongoing, but this was the first foot on the path towards a project. My initial thought was "kind of futuristic like the Jetsons were futuristic, but not made out of plastic and metal," which I had to follow up with what materials I'd like to see in my home. I settled on walnut, I learned that the clean lines, organic curves, and solid "form follows function" I like in design is called Mid-Century Modern. Okay, awesome, now I can start looking at how other people do this, after all this whole blog experiment is called "On the Shoulders of Giants" for a reason, anything I do isn't necessarily going to be hideously innovative, it's going to be a product of me learning from other folks work and mistakes.
All of that allowed me to settle into exactly what I wanted and realize that if I'm going to make the table, I may as well make the chairs too! After a few more days of poking around the great, wide internet, I found the plans. There's these guys, Foureyes Furniture that make a lot of mid-century modern inspired furniture, they also sell plans for this furniture, and they have plans for a table that feels right and chairs that go along with it. They also have a youtube channel, though I think only one of them is involved in that anymore, hell he may be the only one involved in the business.
Of course I consumed this content ravenously. I learned a lot about furniture making, the tools needed, and came to a realization: I'm going to need more skills. (editor's note: you'll notice a throughline in these blog posts: it's never a matter of "I can't do this," rather "I can't do this yet." I'm sure that blind self-confidence will never cause any real problems in my future [[note on the note: it definitely will]])
I started searching for other plans, shifting my ideas from working on the dining room next to making my outside time with the dogs a little more hospitable. Over the course of this week or so of reading and researching I found another excellent source: Ana White, she's a woman who found herself in a similar situation to me: needing something and not being able to find what she wanted (though for different reasons, she's in Alaska,) so she started building her own. Her website is chock full of free woodworking plans that range from beginner friendly to much more advanced. This is where I found the 2x4 chair I later built.
I'm a very hands-on sort of person, I learn best kinetically, followed very closely by visually. I retain information pretty well if I hear it, but watching someone do something, or even seeing the steps, and doing it myself remains unmatched. I read through her plans, got some wood, and decided to make a chair.
Well, sort of.
Part 2: The Secondary Hobby
FIRST I decided to make a raised garden bed. I didn't
really have a reason for this other than "Danny, you need to learn to
build a box if you're going to build a chair, since a chair is kind of like a more
complex box that you can sit on," and had no intention of doing much
with it after building it. Maybe I'd just take it apart, or give it to someone I know who is into gardening, I certainly am not.
Well...
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| Turns out I am, in fact, into gardening. |
We see how well that lack of intention held up: I'm planning on building 7 more 8'x4' beds and planting a pretty damn serious garden next year, but lets take a moment to back up and see how I got here.
Again, I needed to build a box so I'd be comfortable using my tools to build a box meant to hold my not-so-meager body weight. Something with right angles and straight lines would do, Ana White had plans for that, and they were cheap, too! Well, the plans were free, the materials were relatively cheap, a couple of 2x3s and some cedar fence planks, as well as a good rubbing of Tung Oil. I didn't own power tools at the time, but I had intended on getting them anyway, this just accelerated the process. Okay, maybe the materials weren't that cheap in hindsight, I did spend about $500 to get underway, but that's tools and materials and the tools are an investment, dammit!
At this point I'm still laboring under the delusion that this is just practice to get used to my tools before I invest both money and my trust in something I will wind up sitting on, the pursuit here is woodworking and nothing else! My intentions are clear and will not be interrupted, this is for learning. I'm so full of shit I know you can smell it from there.
I made some goofs learning how to use my little circular saw and didn't really document the whole process (nothing dangerous, I was just off my mark and cut short, which meant I had to adjust all my other measurments) and I wasn't wise enough to check square every step of the way, but I did get the corners done, then cut the planks to length, as well as the top of the frame:
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| Raw materials: 2x4 and 6' long cedar fence pickets |
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| The four corners of me on a slippery hobby slope |
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The spray paint pig silhouette was there when I moved in. |
I learned a handful of techniques in the building of this box, which I'm very thankful for, and even had to do a very odd cut at the edge of one short ends. Additionally, I needed to understand how to coat things in order to weatherproof them, too, so I thought I might as well learn with this strictly learning project. I really did spend a ridiculous amount of time deluding myself into believing I wasn't about to pick up a second costly hobby. The whole thing was coated with Tung Oil, which as you can see from the photos of the corners to the photos of the finished box, really brought out the red color of the cedar wood I used. I was very happy with it overall, it's functional and pretty and... well I might as well use it, right?
So I did some looking, obviously if I'm going to start a little hobby garden, just for funsies you see, I should try to plant things that will at least grow here in Oklahoma. As it turns out, the OSU Extension has a handy garden planning guide and between that, research telling me I live in a 7a-7b plant hardiness zone, and the Old Farmer's Almanac Planting Guide, I wound up settling on a couple of stalks of corn, zucchini, and a green bean bush plant, and I found some raised bed soil pre-mixed.
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| Boom, a bad photo of a raised bed filled with dirt |
My reading armed me with the finger method for checking my raised bed hydration, where I stick my finger down to the second knuckle in the soil and if it comes out with soil stuck to it, the bed is still hydrated enough for the plants. That method is all well and good, but I did notice a correlation between how fast water drains into the soil and how much stuck to my finger when I did the finger method, so I started learning to feel out the hydration in my dirt.
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The first sprouts in May, also a test bed in the ground with no special soil |
It's hard to believe that was only three months ago with how gigantic everything is now. You'll notice in the above photo that there's a test bed against my fence. Remember how I said I certainly wasn't into gardening, well I apparently was lying to myself and you. What a surprise.
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| Progress! This was dated June 7, about 10 days after the first growth photo |
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| Nearly 2 weeks later, June 18th. |
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| Humble bean-ginnings |
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| Zucchini's flowering! This was so exciting for me. |
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| I planted some flowers for the pollinators in my life. |
It's currently July 13. I started this blog on July 9 and have slowly written this entry over the last few days. At this time I've only told my partners that I started a personal project but I don't want to talk about it until I've done it for a month or so, just so it's something that sticks. That said, in the 2 days between July 9, when I took the first photo of the zinnias, and the 11th, they've grown rapidly:
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| One of the whole butterfly squad I found in my flowers! |
So, at this point I'm pretty solidly admitting that I like gardening. It's a zen-like experience for me, I enjoy being outside with my dogs, in my little sunhat, watering my plants.
Part 3: Back to the plan
The goal to build patio furniture continued during this time, too. Much like the garden box, I didn't spend much effort documenting the process, but this chair happened:
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Placed on the porch on May 11, 2026. |
I actually finished the chair
before three days before planted the garden, but thought it would be best to tell
this tale in chunks, not linearly. Originally I sealed it with a water
based stain then put Tung Oil over the coating, it didn't color the SPF
(spruce, pine, fir) construction lumber the same way it did the cedar,
but as the coating hardened and weatherproofed further in the sun, it
got a nice golden color to it. A couple of weeks later it looked even better.
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| A lot of porch sitting has happened since this: May 28, 2026. |
Part 4: Continuing down this road
Both hobbies have continued slowly. The idea for a chair for my partners to sit on the patio with me came to mind, and one of them bought materials for me for my birthday. It's currently 50% completed in my garage and will get finished when I either have the gall to work in the garage during the heat of the day, or when I get up early enough to make the last few cuts I need.
The garden has grown to something much bigger, both now and in the future. For now it's turned into me being a better arbiter of the plants at my house: I've been trimming dead tree branches and unruly bushes, cleaning things up for better growth. I've learned the three D's: dead, diseased, and damaged, and been diligent about making passes over everything after the infamous Oklahoma winds do their thing. I've also been better about my lawn, trimming it longer to promote better root growth, shading the dirt, and have already noticed the grass in my yard starting to beat out the weeds (it's also a plus that it feels great to walk on barefoot.)
For the future, I started by beginning to work my yard up, going over it and pulling up the 170+ 1ft. x 1ft. square brick paving stones that had been put down without any support or proper technique. They were completely overgrown with dirt, weeds, and dead grass. Currently they're stacked on my patio, but it's inspired me to learn the proper way to use them. I began with a plan to expand my little 12x13ft cracked concrete patio by 5ft on both exposed sides. I won't be able to get an excavator of any kind into my back yard, so I will wind up doing all the digging by hand, at which point I'll put down paving gravel, tamp it, then add sand and level it. After all that I'll look at polymeric sand to gel everything together and plant some posts to run string lights for the mood.
All the while I plan on continuing to build out some patio furniture, with a 3 seat couch in the same style as my chairs in the works (11 10ft 2x4s instead of 6,) and a little breadboard-ended farmhouse style coffee table. Between those things and my grill I'll be able to have a little cookout for friends in a nice space. Of course that just triggered more plans when I settled on that, including a 13ft round gravel cutout for a firepit and some homemade Adirondack chairs, as well as seven 8x4ft garden beds placed around the edges of my yard so I can get some serious growing in next season.
All told it's going to be an expensive prospect, and things may have gotten out of hand from my original intention, but it's really leaning into this desire I have to make my life as good as I can by the work of my own hands and time with the people I love most. Having a place I'm super comfortable with to host that time makes that prospect even easier. If we're going to live in a place that is hostile to anyone not rich enough to ignore the hellscape, we might as well make the hellscape a little more bearable, right?
