I'm sure most people have figured out by now that Eric and I build things - a lot!! I would have to say at least 75% of the time we decide we can build something better than what we can buy. Even after 3 years of almost constant projects - we have barely scratched the surface of the number of shelves, cabinets, closets, furniture and random wood projects we have planned.
Which brings me to our current "should we?' moment. During our closet project we went to Home Depot and had one of the associates cut the 1/4" backing for us. We did this for 2 reasons - (1) we were too lazy to unbury the sheets of 1/4" plywood in the garage (which we very smartly buried at the back of a huge stack of random wood we have and then parked a car in front of and so on...it's about an hours worth of moving things to get to it and then we would have to put it all back), and (2) since we decided to buy new wood it wouldn't fit into my car in its original size. Anyways - as we were standing there while she made 6 cuts in like 5 minutes I thought "Wouldn't it be awesome to have one of these panel saws, where you just slide the 4'x8' piece of plywood through and it cuts it like butter?!?", then I basically said the same thing to Eric and he agreed. So after a stunned moment of "what?!?!" We looked at each other and started talking about why it had never occurred to us (in 3 YEARS!!) that we could buy one of these saws...Seriously, this would have been a huge game changer if we had thought of it before we started Eric's office or the kitchen. We have been struggling with making our too small table saw work, with a lot of brute strength/force and frustration. So we decided to do a little research - I was still convinced we would look them up and it would be like $5000 and completely out of our reach. It turns out that you can get them for a lot less than I thought. You can actually build one if you want to and spend even less but we decided we wanted a metal one that we don't build ourselves - just in case - something about a DIY saw going crazy makes me uncomfortable lol.
This is just an example of what we are looking at, but it gives you an idea of what it is. It does both vertical and horizontal cuts, you can use a saw or a router with it, and it takes up less floor space (I know just the spot where we can keep it if we don't to mount it on the wall).
So now, we have to decide - is it really going to be a useful tool, or is it just a big toy we want to play with? I think it would be awesome to have - it is NOT easy to wrestle those huge pieces of plywood and we have sooo many things left to build!!! The one part of a project I dread is the cutting part - I don't think it will be a problem anymore with one of these. But, of course, the cost is the sticking point - it may be cheaper than I thought but it is still not cheap. If we had discovered this before we bought the kitchen cabinets - we would own one right now and we would have made them instead...but we didn't so now we have to choose whether it is worth the cost or not.
Decisions, decisions...
Have a great day!
Beth
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