Dancing the Jigsaw: Power tools in Seattle

All my relatives should be fearing for my safety right about now. I got a jigsaw on Saturday.

My eye-hand coordination is somewhere south of dismal. You know how the kids who can’t play sports can at least play video games? I’m the one who always killed QBert in the early 80s because I couldn’t figure out which way the joystick went. So the concept of me + power tools = scary.

This is a first step to our first big post-housewarming project. We have a closet that was sheetrocked after the floor was laid in our sun porch, but the closet sits empty while our kitchen is stuffed. We’ll be putting in some shelving and storing a lot of barware in the new pantry/bar/whatever we’re going to call it.

But first I have to learn to operate the saw safely. My plan is to use it to cut the lumber that will frame the drawers I’m going to hang under my workbench. We have two kitchen drawers that were displaced when our dishwasher was installed, and no other place to put them, so I thought, why not? The answer is apparently “because there’s not much there to attach them to.” So the plan is to cut some two-by-fours to the length of the drawers and mount the slides on them, then put cross-boards across the tops of the drawers perpendicular to the drawer mounts and screwed into the drawer slide pieces. Then I’ll use the cross members to mount the assembly to the bracing members under the workbench.

Theoretically. The good news is that the plan doesn’t call for a lot of complicated cuts, so it should be just the thing to learn how to operate the saw. The only trick is finding the time.