From watching my KeefCooks cooking videos, you might think my kitchen is blessed with an island unit that I can stand behind and you can see the action from the front. But actually, it isn't. For the last few years I've been using a ramshackle assemblage of our dining table with one leaf folded down, a Black & Decker Workmate, a folding support thing that spans from table to Workmate and raises the height by about 6 inches, and a big, solid slab of oak sitting on top of all that. It took a long time to set up and put away, and also I've been getting fed up of the overwhelming oakiness of our kitchen. I decided to create a new solution - basically a tabletop with folding legs - long ones to reach down to the floor, and shorter ones to sit on the table. And then I needed a fascia to help stabilise the thing, and to conceal what lies beneath. I chose some grey slate-effect laminate flooring for the top - it's only 8mm thick, so it's not too heavy. The only...

While handheld plunge routers are fine for light usage and small pieces, if you want to move on to routing longer lengths of wood a router table is pretty much essential. But a good router table can often cost more than the router itself, so I decided to make my own. Like many of my projects, there was a bit of scope creep as I developed the design. The finished item contains a Triton JOF001 router mounted upside down in an oak cabinet I made from, essentially, a larger oak cabinet. It has an adjustable fence with homemade featherboards. There is space on top for my sliding mitre saw (Evolution Rage 3-S), a cupboard containing the router and a wet & dry vacuum cleaner (Titan TTB350VAC), a shelf for router bits and accessories, and three drawers. The drawers were upcycled from another source. The whole unit is mounted on locking castors so I can move it about easily. MAKING THE CARCASS The material I used was mostly rescued from a vintage oak cabinet or sideboard that I got vi...

I only came across this recently -  a very simple and cheap way to make your own wood stain. All you do is pop a chunk of fine wire wool into a jar, top it up with the vinegar of your choice, give it a shake then unscrew the lid a little to let the gases escape. After about two days, remove the wire wool, filter your stain through some kitchen paper, and that's your wood stain ready to use. Now, the colour you get depends to some extent on the type of vinegar you used and on the amount of tannin in the wood you want to stain. In the video of this, I made up small jars of stain using white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, white (distilled) vinegar, red wine, malt and balsamic vinegars. Then I tested them all on oak, softwood, ordinary plywood, MDF, and an unidentified plywood that I made my workbench top out of (the top and bottom skins are kind of reddish). The results on the oak, which has a lot of tannin, were amazing. They were solid black, blueish-black, and a range of greys....

We bought our son a beautiful print for Christmas, but not a frame. Maybe we thought we already had a frame we could re-use, I can't remember. But I do remember being in the man-cave, looking at a pile of gorgeous engineered oak flooring I'd got from Freecycle and wondering what amazing things I could do with it. I couldn't do anything as amazing as using it as actual flooring in even the smallest room because there's only 1.5 square metres of it. Inspiration struck and I decided to make a picture frame. I had about 5 days (actually, a couple of hours each day) before we were due to drive down to That London to deliver it, which I thought should be plenty of time. As it turned out, it was a close-run thing. My first attempt involved mitred corners, but I have neither the skill nor the tools to cut them accurately. I worked on it for 2 days before I abandoned it. The second attempt was much more successful, involving full-height stiles. Here's the video of me ...