The Hardest Year of My Life: A Build Diary

What This Is

This is a 2.5 hour film about one year. Not a tutorial. Not a how-to. A diary of the projects, the disasters, and the moments that made up the hardest and most important year of my life.

It starts with a pallet wood Spanish chair and ends with a timber frame door made from my dad's log. In between: a ceiling that nearly collapsed into my living room, a turntable cabinet built from scrap wood and Blade Runner nostalgia, a 10-day timber framing course in Latvia, and the moment I burned my father's workbench and finally learned how to let go.

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The Spanish Chair

It started because I saw a €7,000 Danish designer chair and thought, "I can build that from pallets." Which is basically how my whole career started. Luxury furniture, extreme budget.

The Spanish chair by Borge Mogensen is a classic. Chunky, medieval-looking, designed in the 1950s after a trip to Spain. I reinvented it from two euro pallets, some glue, a Domino for the joinery, and a piece of thick leather that terrified me to cut into.

Right in the middle of the build, I got a phone call that knocked me sideways. Family stuff. The kind where people have been talking about you behind your back. I won't go into details, but I spent the rest of that build processing it with a sledgehammer and some pallet nails.

The chair turned out beautiful. Pallet wood, leather seat, walnut pegs that started as a mistake and became a design feature. I sat down in it for the first time and something clicked. Other people's expectations don't actually matter. Not really. Not in the way I once thought.

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The Ceiling That Nearly Killed My Bedroom

We planned a quick repaint of the living room. Then I looked up at the ceiling and noticed it was sagging. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I started ripping it down.

Behind the 90s tongue and groove panels, I found a destroyed 100-year-old plaster ceiling with ornamental stucco that someone had smashed to bits. Behind that, I found rotten structural beams from the 1800s. And behind those, the discovery that two load-bearing walls had been removed by a previous owner who then covered the whole mess with a cheap dropped ceiling.

My bedroom was slowly sinking into my living room.

My friend Jonas, a real contractor, showed up with steel props and started jacking up the ceiling. We cut out the rotten beams and replaced them with steel I-beams. We rebuilt the entire ceiling from scratch. Wood fiber insulation, new plasterboard, the works.

This took months. I moved the kitchen into my office. I didn't upload a single video. It was chaos.

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The Turntable Cabinet

While the house was a construction site, I found my old vinyl records in the attic. Depeche Mode, A-ha, Star Wars soundtracks, Blade Runner. Music I bought as a teenager with my newspaper delivery money.

I built a turntable cabinet entirely from scrap wood. Bowling alley staves, water-damaged birch plywood, leftover ash from the cabin build. No plans. Just my stupidity and a playlist.

The design has round corners made from angled staves glued together, built-in speakers, and a finish that went wrong twice before I burned the whole thing with a weed burner and started the finish over.

The Blade Runner connection hit deeper than I expected. Roy Batty's final monologue about lost moments and running out of time. "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." I was 50-something, finding my teenage records in the attic, realizing how fast the decades went.

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Latvia

In September, I packed my bags and flew to Latvia for a 10-day timber framing course with The Northmen. Hand tools only. Axes, chisels, hand saws. No power tools.

I was terrified. The other participants were professional carpenters. I was the guy who makes things from pallets on YouTube.

But as soon as we started, I remembered why I love this. The feel of an axe biting into green timber. The sound of a chisel finding the grain. We took raw logs and raised a complete timber frame in 10 days.

This is where the Øhavsladen barn project was born. The conversation about rebuilding my 1850s barn as a proper timber frame. The Northmen liked the idea. A designer at the course started sketching plans. And suddenly my crazy dream had drawings.

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Burning My Dad's Workbench

My dad passed away in October 2022 after battling prostate cancer. He stayed at home until the end, in his own bed, on his own terms.

He left behind a property full of stuff. Tools, tractor parts, buckets of screws. He came from a world of scarcity and he was great at collecting things but not at letting go.

Among his things was an old workbench. Soaked in oil and chemicals, covered in nails and bits of metal hammered in over decades. I brought it to my workshop and kept it for years.

Every time I looked at it, I saw my dad standing in his barn, covered in grease, tinkering with his Massey Ferguson 35 tractors. I couldn't use the bench. It was too damaged. But I couldn't let it go either.

My daughter, who is training as a Buddhist, kept talking about how clinging to things only makes us suffer. Letting go doesn't mean you don't care. It means you understand that nothing stays the same forever.

One day I burned the workbench. It felt like a ritual. Not just burning wood and metal scraps. Letting go of the weight of holding on to something that was never mine to keep.

I don't want my kids to have to sort through mountains of my stuff the way I sorted through my dad's. Hold things lightly. Appreciate them for what they are without trying to make them last forever.

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The Door

The last build of the year is the one I wrote about in another post. My dad's log, the Norman fir from his neighbour. The one he didn't think I'd ever make anything from.

I milled it, built a timber frame door with traditional mortise and tenon joinery, burned it with a weed burner, and sealed it with Rubio Monocoat Sealer 707. It hangs at the entrance to my workshop now.

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What I Learned

This video is almost 3 hours long because a year can't be told in 10 minutes. A Spanish chair taught me about expectations. A collapsing ceiling taught me about asking for help. A turntable cabinet taught me about time running out. Latvia taught me about craft and ambition. Burning the workbench taught me about letting go. And the door taught me about starting before you're ready.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: a rich man isn't the one who has the most. He's the one who needs the least. I could have a bigger truck, a bigger workshop, a busier schedule. But would I actually be wealthier? Or would I just be spending my time paying for things I don't need?

Sometimes the richest thing you can have is time. A 45-minute walk home from the bus stop. A daughter painting next to you in the workshop. A bonfire and a vinyl record on a quiet evening.

Go build something messy, meaningful, and mildly unstable. Whatever works. Because the only time left to build anything is the time you have left.