1. Make a solid piece of furniture by hand

This idea grew out of a few places.  First, I'm an avid gamer, (think boardgames, but I spend way too much time playing videogames too,) and many years ago, I saw a Geek Chic table and got really jealous.

Thinking I'd never get permission from my wife, I started thinking about how to build one.

The thing with woodworking is, it's pretty permanent.  Aside from couches in college towns, most furniture tends to stick around for a long time.  It gets passed down, or stored, or resold, or whatever. It never really goes away.

Part of having a list of things to accomplish is itself something I'm leaving behind, (at least if I'm telling lots of people about it.)

I did a lot of Googling for, "D&D table."  There are a lot of things out there, but none of them were the simple design I was looking for.  Also, any of the ones I did like didn't have plans.

I tried for a few months to make plans for the table; I even bought and cut wood once.  However, nothing seemed to work out right.

I'm not going to say I gave up, but I was looking for other kinds of furniture plans on line for something simpler I could build.

I knew I had a goal, but I didn't think this would be it.

The final nail in the coffin came when my wife asked me for another Dyson vacuum.  (We got one as a wedding gift, (her request,) then we got another one when they came out with the stick vacuum, and this specific one was a newer model of the stick vacuum.)  Jokingly, I told her we could get it, if I could get a Geek Chic table.

She agreed.

I have no idea why she thought it was an ok idea to spend $4,000 on a table in exchange for a $400 vacuum, but whatever.  There's a lesson here about negotiating.  The lesson I learned was to rely on blind luck, but there's probably something better.

So the big boardgame table was out.

About a year later, our younger son got a wooden train for his birthday.  We got the idea to buy a train table for him and this way we could get him more trains, then he could have them in the table and not on the floor.

I looked up train table and found some plans.  (Somewhat regrettably, these plans could easily be altered for a boardgame table, but no one advertises train tables as multi-use gaming tables.

So, I downloaded the plans, bought some wood, and got to it.

I did have the tools to build it, but, there's a caveat to that:  I had been doing smaller projects around the house that needed the tools for other things.  I had built a sandbox a few years earlier and got many of the tools then, and a few others here and there as other projects needed them.

It took me about two weeks to build the table.  I think most of that time was spent sanding.

Well, now my kids have a table for their Lego blocks.  They stay mostly off the floor, and as a dad, I've yet to step on a lego block.