A new covid hobby

During covid, my wife and I moved from an apartment to a house and one thing that was high on my list of hobbies to pick up was woodworking. I've always enjoyed crafting, I've taken a couple woodworking classes at Makeville Studio in Brooklyn, but never really picked it up. Getting to a maker space was too much of a hassle, I really wanted to poke around, take my time, and going somewhere that I might be blocking other people from using tools as I consider what I'm doing was too much of a burden for me (yes, this may have just been in my head. shush). Now that we have a house, I have room to pick up the hobby!

Okay, so where to start? I found references online to Steve Ramsey's Weekend Woodworker course and that was great. What I particularly liked was that he had a good list of tools to get started without breaking the bank. The most surprising thing on the list was both a drill & a driver. It was a great call because for the amount of drilling I've done, swapping bits every time I wanted to switch from drilling to driving would've eaten way way too much time.

Project 1 was building a small workbench, the BMW (basic mobile workbench, Steve loves naming projects like that) and it went great! The plans are here (they're a teaser for the full course, but great as a stand alone). They've got detailed cut lists for all the components and the plans themselves are very forgiving. As a starter project I hardly could've done better.

This project went pretty quickly. If I was to do it over, there's a few things I would've done differently.

1. Bring up a cheap folding table to do my cuts on. Making cuts on the miter saw on the floor _sucked_ and made it all take way longer than it otherwise would've.
2. Get a long straight edge for cutting, like this one - my cuts on later projects are drastically improved for doing that.
3. Predrill, predrill, predrill. Every time I didn't, I ended up splitting the wood. The plywood was fine, but the 2x4s were not great.

Even with things I would've done differently, I think it came out great. This is what I ended up with, a solid and maneuverable (if small) workbench.

The final product. The cubbies make for great storage, the bench rolls around great and it holds the miter saw well! While I built a larger workbench later this got me started and the mobility really helped with shifting it and my tools around the garage.