A dog house is generally regarded as being a utility structure, especially for people who keep their dogs outdoors. It is intended primarily to give them a place to hide away and seek shelter when it rains, snows or is unpleasantly windy. But this doesn’t mean that a dog kennel should look like a utility item. Most commonly built using wood, dog houses can look attractive if they are constructed with imagination. In fact homemade dog houses can look a lot more attractive than those that are mass produced. So if you have some basic wood working skills, why not knock [...] Read more »

I get the question a lot lately about cutting dado’s and grooves for larger projects such as shelves. If you are a beginner woodworker, you spend a lot of time just trying to figure out which tool you need to build the project you are interested in. It’s nice if you have someone there with [...] Read more »

The traditional gazebo is a time-honored structure that finds its place quite happily in the modern backyard. Normally it will be used as a garden structure for outdoor entertaining, but sometimes people will build a gazebo simply for its visual impact. Although it is quite a complicated woodworking project, learning how to build a gazebo won’t take someone with basic carpentry skills very long to do. With some good woodworking plans, you could have it completed in just a few weekends. The traditional gazebo was basically a rather quaint ‘outdoor room’ or ‘pavilion’ with a view. Often the garden gazebo was raised [...] Read more »

People build wooden decks for many reasons that include wanting to extend their living space from the inside out, reclaiming wasted space on a slope in the backyard, and surrounding their pools, spas and hot tubs with a safe, solid surface in the form of a wooden deck. There are many different deck designs and deck building plans that you can use. Some are very basic, while others have additional features ranging from built-in seating and storage boxes to rails and steps that will make your deck a lot more accessible and safe. Some wooden deck designs are more complicated than others, which [...] Read more »