What should I do about my basement? My father used to have this old woodshop downstairs and one summer in 1986 we spent an entire month building a table out of cedar planks that were all wrong sizes but he never complained because he figured the smel

Opening thread commentary.

the cedar table is probably still in your house somewhere lol — those things are indestructible if you build them wrong enough that they just have more surface area to join together.

honestly salvaged parts projects take about 3x longer than buying new because of the sorting and cleaning, but there's a specific satisfaction from making something work out of parts that were never meant for each other. my dad

I have been through this exactly — my wife found a bunch of old pallet wood and some mismatched studio chair legs at estate sales last year and we spent two weekends trying to make coffee tables out of them, and I will tell you what the trick is: stop fighting the parts that are wrong. We kept measuring every stud against each other and it was driving us both insane because nothing matched anything. The breakthrough came when I stopped asking "how do I make this a square table" and started asking "what can I build with these specific pieces." Turned out we had enough long planks to make two narrow console tables instead of one large coffee table, which solved the size discrepancy naturally without any extra work. If you have mismatched pine studs your best move