Always Building Something

The little man is definitely a boy through and through, which is good considering the crazy shit that's going on in the world these days. Not to side track on that though, because I'm not going to get annoyed at some of those things lol

There has been something on my mind that I've been meaning to get resolved and that was come up with some kind of way to do some type of standing activity for work. The work area that I'm using right now works pretty well for the various stages of my energy and joint stress level but standing up all day has been tough on one of the joints that I wasn't really thinking about: my shoulder!

My shoulder, when I would stand up, would get pissed off because of the angle that everything was on. With my standing desk, not being a legitimate standing desk but something fashioned together to function like one, is a little limited in that regard. I can stand up well and do the work that I need to do however my elbows aren't at 90 degree angles, and the position I'm in is more like a forward raise for those people who are weight lifters, which puts some pressure on the shoulders. To fix this shoulder issue, I decided that it was about time that I put something together to alleviate that height challenge!

The little man is always up for an adventure but even more so when it comes to using tools! He's gotten older and a little wiser with the tools, so I'm letting him do more of the jobs that I wouldn't let him do previously because he was a little too young and inexperienced. He still doesn't get to use the cordless drills alone without me holding it and the object, and most certainly doesn't get to use the cordless circular saw or saw-zall but that's going to be a number of years before he's allowed to use any of that stuff.

With the other tools though, he's always up for some work! He especially loves stealing my tape measures, screwdrivers, hammers, and squares. I think I'm going to have to buy him his own square because that's the tool that I'm most challenged when I can't find it, as when you need a square, you need a square to do it right lol.

He loves giving me some measures and now that he's better at reading and writing, I can now say let's measure out 18 inches on the board and then draw a line. He took a little time to work with me to figure out how to best draw an accurate line with the tape measure so he can transpose it with the square in a nicely straight line but he's gotten that down pretty well!

With the standing area that I've come up with, it's nothing really fancy because we also need to be able to easily store it out of the way and where my wife won't hate it. She didn't love the idea of what we were doing because it adds another thing in the already busy house but sometimes you can't put a price on being able to make something with our own hands and using a bit of imagination! Plus I always try to figure out what I can do to build something with the little man. I try to foster his creative mind and constructive tendencies as much as I can, although in healthy ways. Sometimes he gets a little obsessive with wanting to build all day every day hahaha but I have to put a little bit of a squash on that so we can accomplish other things that we need to do.

Still the design here is pretty simple. I bought 2 2x4's for the job and zipped them down to size with the help of the little man and his measurements. I am just going to make a simple platform, 2 2x4 high and secured in the middle with some additional 2x4's and glued together nicely. I'm going to then put a piece of wood on top of it, type is TBD because we have both 1/2 finished plywood or 1x10 boards. I'm leaning more towards the 1x10 boards because they will be easier to cut to the appropriate size for what we need to do here.

After we were done with day 1 of the project, measuring and cutting the various boards to size before we got to assemble them, the little man immediately stole them all! Lol. He was making all kinds of contraptions with them on the stairs. With this he was building a house with zip ties and the boards. I let him be and the wife wasn't thrilled at seeing the stairs get turned into a construction zone but he was entertained with this activity for about 5 hours one day, so it was an overall win on many fronts hahaha.

We did eventually take it all down because we've partially put the stuff together at this point but it's finishing up the other part that's going to be fun. I always like to start a project but it feels even better when you get to finish it! We started this on a Sunday which can be both a good idea and a bad idea. Good idea because you get all day to do it, bad idea because if you don't finish it then you have to wait a few days or a week in order to get time to get back to it later lol oops