Attic cleanout + a fun little project

Last weekend I saw a little tray in a store and momentarily thought about buying it, before realizing I could make sometime similar (better) with some scrap material I had at home. So I kept my $20 and made for the garage.

During Attic Purge 2016, an activity that will hopefully never happen again, I found a few mahogany 1x2s that I'd bought four years ago for a project I ended up not using them on. Perfect. I'd been planning on digging into my scrap pile of assorted pine and fir, but this was way better.

Tangentially, here is a list of a few other things I found during Attic Purge 2016. Feel free to judge me, because some of this stuff is ridiculous:

• the remaining broken wax chunks of a peach candle I bought from Pier 1 in junior high, in a plastic ziplock bag
• a bag of receipts from 2007 and an envelope of coupons from about the same timeframe
• an entire unused huge box of crayons and three packages of markers (including bold colors, which I never liked)
• 4 boxes of staples, 2 hole punches and many packages of push pins, labels, manila folders, printer paper and other various office supplies. Like, enough to supply a small office, not just a handful of things for two people to use.
• college graduation tassels and an empty (hmmm...) diploma case
• a thumb drive that was approximately as big as my index finger
• the laptop lock that came with my IBM ThinkPad tank of a laptop from freshman year of college
• college notebooks and papers, including handwritten (!) exegesis of all of 1 and 2 Samuel and quite a bit of Spanish homework
• a jar of wine corks. Cheap wine, like Barefoot and $2 Chuck, from when we were first married. 
• an empty olive can. I think I liked the label. 9 years ago.
• the address stamp from our first place in Pasadena: 726 Lincoln Ave. 
• like 6 sets of sheets for a queen bed. We don't have a queen bed anymore. 
• a box of tupperware containers without lids

Now we have a way emptier attic neatly organized into clear giant tupperware containers, a pile of garbage in our garage to slowly get rid of, and a LOT of stuff we are donating. The attic got so ridiculous because when we moved to Bend five and a half years ago, it happened really fast, so we kind of ended up throwing a bunch of stuff in boxes and forgetting about it upstairs until now. Consequently, it was this odd little time capsule representing our college years to about 2008 or 2009. (Which, gag me, was 7 or 8 years ago.)

Anyway, back to the point. In the course of this project, I found the mahogany. And I made a tray out of that and some scrap tile from our slate countertops.

This little critter was surprisingly tricky to photograph. I mitered the corners, then glued the whole thing together and clamped it within an inch of its life using my sweet corner ratchet clamp. I "finished" it with some mineral oil, so it's not exactly designed for a life of hard use, but it sure came out pretty and I think it should be solid and sturdy. At least, I hope so; I gave it to a friend as a little gift.

I'm already working on the next one, using some 4"x12" carrara marble tile I picked up at Home Depot. I'm going to make a new little tray for our olive oil and salt and pepper in the kitchen. I'm going to stain the wood dark for contrast with the marble and then spray lacquer the whole thing, since the marble will look gross if oil penetrates the surface. Just waiting for a nice day to be able to stain outside, since Minwax smells horrible.

Hopefully Builder's Bargain is still selling those pieces of mahogany. The figuring is really beautiful; they're almost iridescent. And the whole bundle, 8 feet of that plus some mahogany dowels, was only $3. That's less than half of than Home Depot is charging PER FOOT.

I kind of thought about selling the trays on Etsy... thoughts?