Past Projects Day 2 | White Grain Woodworking

All right, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed Monday's video, getting to see some of our earlier woodworking projects. But today, so this, where we're going to start now is a distinct line where we decided, hey, we are going to make money with woodworking. We didn't know what it looked like at first. We tossed around a couple of different ideas, chased a few different things, and now we've kind of landed in the YouTuber, I don't know, like alley or lane. Call it an alley. That sounds dark and depressing. Let's call it a lane. There's a bunch of sketchy characters in the woodworking community. You never know. No, they're all great. But anyway, so all the projects you'll see us going forward, we're trying to optimize our process for building furniture. Kind of optimizing style, optimizing, and just everything's an experiment at this point. So nothing is too set in stone. You'll see that our style is a little bit more eclectic just because we're a business now. And so we're trying to focus on what is going to make us money and what people are going to be happier with, not just what we're pleased with. And what people want to see too. Yeah. That combined with us improving our skills, right? Because if we're not improving, it's not going to be fun for us. So we're not just slaves to what the public wants, but at the same time, we're growing. Our community is growing. Everybody's getting there. So we're taking a lot of stuff into account. We're not just building like, we need a nightstand. Okay, done. We can come up with a lot more stuff. Yeah. Can we make a nightstand that also... The Modern Maker Podcast, they get into this all the time of like, okay, how do I make things that I need, but are also good for content creation? So if you want to hear that, go listen to some episodes of the Modern Maker Podcast. Quick shout out to them. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. They featured us on the plywood challenge that I think just wrapped up. So go ahead. They're cool guys. Yeah. Awesome. So anyway, with that, we'll just... Here we go. We'll continue the tour. All right, so this is a desk that we made fairly recently, and it is made out of plywood here on the base and pine here on the top. So we decided to put just a few shelves on each side. We left that one without shelves because we wanted our computer to fit underneath there. And it's really, really sturdy. That was the big thing. We just wanted to build it like it would survive moves and everything. So it is very, very sturdy. We secured the top with some metal brackets here on the bottom. Otherwise, everything else is just pocket screws. And then in finishing this one, I chose to paint the bottom gray. I used a gray chalk paint just so it would match anything that we did, no matter what the paint was on the walls or whatever decorations we were using. And then on the top, I decided to go with a really, really light stain. I still wanted it to look farmhouse-y because that's kind of the theme that I like to do with our furniture and stuff. But this was kind of when I realized there was a shift in farmhouse furniture and decorating. So the past like two, three years, I mean, before this, when farmhouse furniture really started to take off, I feel like it was dark woods, it was a lot of your burlap, your lace and stuff like that. And that's why our earlier projects have some darker wood tops because that's what was big, that contrast between a dark wood top and a light white bottom. But now it kind of seems to have shifted more modern. So you've got your really sleek lines, your lighter color woods. And so this was the first piece that I kind of wanted to gravitate toward that. So left it nice and light on the top. All right. So after we had built that desk was when Davis and I really realized that we wanted to turn this into a business. Davis had just read The 4-Hour Workweek, so he was on like this entrepreneurial like high and it was great. So we were thinking like, okay, how do we make money with this? And what we realized was there was a gap or there was a need to teach people how to be confident with power tools when they didn't know how to use them. And so we want to make a course where it was super simple. We broke it down for people and we made three main projects with it. We made a blanket ladder, a coffee table, and a little bench, which you'll see. So all that being said, this was the first piece that we made for that course. We literally just used a jigsaw to cut all this. It's pine, it's two by fours, but it's just a blanket ladder, stained it nice and dark. So we started out making like Facebook ads with all that stuff and did that for a while. And we never really launched the course because we realized we hated advertising. We didn't like doing the Facebook ads. We didn't like shoving everything at people and just cramming it down their throats and saying, here, take this, and tricking people to buy our stuff. So that's when we stepped back and we're like, hey, let's just get involved with the community. Let's like plug into this woodworking community. And then kind of just went from there. All right, so this bench was the second piece that we did for our course that we put together. And again, it went with the theme of we only used a jigsaw and a drill. This was all about conserving your scraps, using what you had. It definitely catered to people who wanted to build, who lived in an apartment or something like that, so they had limited tools. So we're talking two by fours and two by sixes. That was it. We stained it dark on top, painted it white on bottom because we wanted the farmhouse look and we put it right by the entryway. So we'll just throw coats and stuff on here and some decorative pillows and turned out pretty cool. All right, so the last piece we did in our three pieces of furniture for our course was this coffee table. Again, really simple jigsaw and drill. So it was one by twelves, one by fours and two by fours. And we just cut them down to the sizes we wanted. We made a little shelf here on the bottom, stained it again lighter. That's when I was going with like lighter colored stain for farmhouse furniture. And we put these little metal corner brackets on the ends. That's what we did with our very first coffee table we made, the really crappy one. And we thought it was a cool idea, so we just continued it over and it helps the pine corners last longer so they don't get dented. But yeah, that's pretty much it. So the course right now, we don't have it live. Maybe once we start getting like some Patreon supporters or something like that, we'll put it up and put it out there. But this was supposed to be the last piece of the three because your skills were supposed to kind of grow and culminate all to this point where you made the coffee table. And then after this, we wanted people to feel comfortable going out and building their own stuff. Finding their own plans. Being able to follow plans. So the course isn't up right now, but it may be in the future. So while I was editing the videos for the course that we never ended up launching, we also needed a kitchen table. And so we had just bought a ton of hickory, like something like a hundred board feet of hickory. We bought all the guy had at the wood supplier. Anyway, it was gorgeous hickory, so we decided we wanted to make that into our kitchen table. And that's when my dad gave us the welder. And so I made metal legs. Just a very sleek, modern design. Again, not super farmhouse, but not super modern either. It's kind of a nice blend between the two. Nice big heavy chamfer around the top. It's just three quarter inch hickory pieces that we paneled up. Made the bench the same way. Same legs and everything. I'd like to make another bench. We just did the chair seats. That was one of our first video series that we had on the channel. So yeah, this is kind of the bridge to where our YouTube thing happened. So we built this right before we started making YouTube content. All right, so in one of our earlier videos, we talk about how we bought 300 of these white balusters from a lady who was selling them, got them for like 25 cents each or something like that. So this is a project that we like to use those on, these bar stools. So we literally just line them up, throw some goggles in the bottom for some support, and then put a panel of pine on top, stain it to whatever color us or like the client wants. And honestly, we'll just batch these things out and we sell them if we ever want to go on a big trip or save up money for something, we'll go ahead and just sell a bunch of these. All right, so after we finished this kitchen table, we kind of wanted to get the rest of our kitchen area together, make it look a little more homey. And so we realized this wall was really blank and white. So we were trying to think of something to put there. We built this little cubby compartment decoration thing out of plywood and painted it gray so that it'd match with everything else. And I kind of just use it and fill it with little decorations, anything cool, I'll decorate it for the seasons. It's very versatile, so you can just shift it up with like Christmas versus spring, winter, stuff like that. It's missing a few decorations because I'm currently staging another project that we just finished. But yeah, that's pretty much it, simple and cute decoration. So oddly enough, these floating shelves were supposed to be our first video that we ever posted on our YouTube channel. It failed miserably, like we were terrible at the camera work, we didn't get any good footage of us building them, so we just scrapped it and we're like, we'll call the next video video number one. So that's why these are really cool. Again, I'll change it throughout all the seasons, holidays. It's literally just pine, two by fours, some scrap wood we had, maybe a little bit of plywood here on the top, and pocket screws, or not even pocket screws, I think there's like two pocket screws and then like, we literally just screwed them out to the outside and it's rustic farmhouse, whatever. It's rustic. Right. And staggered them to take up more room on the big wall. All right. And you pretty much know the rest. If you start at the beginning of our YouTube feed, that's pretty much you're up to speed now. So I really hope that you've enjoyed taking a look at some of our earlier projects and sort of just our lineage up into the point to where we are now. So yeah, you're caught up. We've only been woodworking for what, like 16, 17 months now total? Not quite two years. Yeah. Not even a year and a half. So yeah, we've learned a ton and it's thanks to the YouTube community. It really is. Yeah. I mean, that's where we started. That's where you learned what a pocket hole was. Yeah. I just started watching him for fun because I remember watching my dad do it as a kid. I never really learned a whole lot, but started watching Jay Bates and some other people and just dreamed of a day that I could buy my own tools and it just kind of grew from there. So now it's a hobby and we're doing it now as a business on the side and we've just been so humbled by the awesome response we've had from the YouTube community. So thank you so much for welcoming us with open arms and just... And teaching us like everything we know. Yeah. We're learning so much faster based on your feedback and your comments on all of our stuff. So thank you so much for following us. Thank you so much for subscribing if you're a subscriber. If you're not yet a subscriber, go ahead and hit that subscribe button along with the bell and you won't miss any of our videos. You can unsubscribe from us later, but just give us a shot for a couple of weeks. We put out three videos a week, two projects and a vlog. So you're going to find out really fast if you like our content or you don't. So no obligation. We just ask that, hey, give us a shot. We think you'll fall in love with us, but we're a little conceited. No, I'm just kidding. We're a little conceited. But anyway, thank you so much for watching to the end of this video. If you're watching this far, just subscribe. You're going to like the stuff that we put out. Yeah. Thanks again. And we'll see you next Monday or Friday for the vlog. Yeah. Thanks. Yes.