u/BlisteringB4rnacles

I've been working on this planter for the last week or so, after finally getting my workbench set up. I designed it in Sketchup a while back, so pleased to have finally taken the plunge. This was my first time using a router and first time trying to do any kind of joint (I tried to do some dado joints..)

I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of things along the way:

• I realised approximately 5 minutes after finishing routing that I didn't need to exerting myself holding down the router, because it in fact had a height lock on it the whole time. FML.
• It's super easy to go just slightly too big on the joints. I bought a mallet, hoping to get a nice tight fit on the joints; I absolutely did not have to use the mallet.
• I didn't follow my design to the letter:
  • I couldn't be bothered redoing the whole thing with the dado joints on it, which I thought about at a later point when I was considering how heavy the load might be, and how to support it.
  • I also rounded up the length of the long horizontal beams. This was stupid, because I had calculated my decking board cladding to cut 3.6m exactly into two 1.8m segments.
  • The only thing that saved me was the dado joint *taking off* more overall length than my rounding up had added. So it was only by lucky coincidence that it worked out.
  • I also widened the whole thing by 15cm, which meant my calculations for the slats went totally out the window and I had to scrounge up some other bits of wood.
• The decking board for the cladding - I erred on the side of too short, rather than too long, which meant I had gaps on the corners. It would have been much easier to cut a bit long and then trim as I assembled if needed.
  • For the cladding, I should have gone up layer by layer, not done a whole side at once.
• Because my boards were too short, I had gaps in some corner joins.
  • I decided to fill in some of the corner gaps. My first approach was to use some router cuttings and some wood glue. That was not at all effective, so then I put in some proper wood filler and rounded the whole edge with a sander. But it still doesn't look *great* up close.
• The green... I'm still not sure I should have done this!
• The root cause of all of the above was inexperience and rushing, because I had one toddler-free day to get as much done as I could! Slowing down would definitely help though.

All that being said, I think it looks ok. It's incredibly sturdy, so that's something. The cost of the materials was about £100 (ignoring the router/mitre saw cost - that's an investment!).

I look forward to making the next one!