Weekend Continued.....

So our weekend continued to be filled with more activities that we had planned. thinking we would be home most of the weekend turned out to not be so. While at Flugtag Emma received a text from a co-worker that a B-day party was going to start at 4. So we all headed over to our place to let out the dogs (oh that's right.....we were watching Nina and Marco again while their parents were out of town). Anyway, we went to the party which was really fun. I took the night off from taking any pictures so I have none to post.

The next morning after recovering from all the yummy food and home brew, we finally decided to tackle our wine barrel project. We had picked up some wine barrels from another co-worker (see post) and decided we were going to make some planters out of a few of them. The idea was to cut them in half down the center and use each piece as a planter for some more veggies to grow in the back yard. It sounded easy and the idea was great since one half costs $30 each at Lowes but it turned out to be a bit harder then we had planned. Of course with anything that we decide to do on our own has to have some sort of custom modification.

We first had the idea of using the new jigsaw or reciprocating saw and just cut down a line in the middle. Well of course that worked for about 30 seconds until we found out that after you cut one board of the barrel, the pieces pinch the blade and cause it to kick back. The design of the barrel is such that it really is only held together by the bands that go around and the grooves that each piece sit in. So we stopped to think about what to do next. TIME TO GOOGLE IT!!!

We found suggestions all over with people suggesting hand saws all the way up to chain saws! Well that didn't help.

So we moved on to figuring it out our own way. We ended up using a hand saw (goodwill special) to cut a line around the entire barrel and then finish with the jigsaw. It worked well but had to wedge a screw into each board after cutting 3/4 of the way through so as to keep it from again pinching the blade.

Once it was cut in half we added holes in the bottom for drainage and placed them in the garden.

My arm is still killing me from all the hand sawing. I must be wimpy compared to the folks back in the day that had nothing but hand saws. Maybe sitting in front of a computer doesn't help either!