Yesterday's Two Hours of Productivity

Even though this past week has been lousy as far as my health is concerned, I did manage to have a couple of productive hours yesterday morning. As a result of pushing myself too much in the morning, my afternoon and especially through the night was absolutely miserable but, I'm happy to say I had a couple of productive hours yesterday morning!

I cut and sanded all the wood that I will need for two small step stools for the grandchildren as well as doing the same for all the wood necessary for a little stand for a power controller for Lukey's train set. The sanding isn't finished but I did a coarse sanding on all these pieces of wood to remove the previous finish.

All of this lumber was recovered from an old church. I've had it sitting around for about a decade at this point but I finally put it to use. 

Over the years, I've had various ideas of how to use this lumber but the small sizes of this lumber made it perfect for this little project so this church lumber is now re-purposed as two step stools and a small stand.

The sanding I did yesterday after all the cutting to size was just a coarse sanding to remove decades of dirt and the old finish as well as to clean it up. When I feel well enough, I need to hit it with some finer sandpaper to smooth out the grain and round the edges a bit. 

I'm still undecided on which order I should finish these pieces (although it appears in the photos that some of the pieces are assembled, they are not)... I can assemble them after sanding or I can start staining and add a coat or two of polyurethane before assembling. If I stain and poly before assembling I can avoid trying to get stain applied evenly in all the inside corners rather than it all accumulating in these corners. 

Usually, however, I assemble first... we'll see how I feel when I am up for doing a little more work.

At least I accomplished a little bit yesterday!