I remember once as a boy staying at a friend’s house when his dad helped my friend and me to build a small wooden toy boat.  We built the toy boats in my friend’s garage and took the boats down to local canoe landing on a small creek.  20 years later and it is one of my fondest childhood memories.

Yesterday afternoon I had the kids to myself for a few hours while my wife went shopping with some of her friends.  For the first hour, we kind of stared at each other trying to think of something to do to keep us busy for a few hours, when suddenly my childhood memory came rushing back.

We headed down to our local Home Depot for some free scrap wood.  When Home Depot custom cuts wood for customer, they leave the scrap wood in a cart.  If you ask nicely enough you can usually pick through the scrap wood and pick up some good small project wood for free.  I also picked up a wooden dowl for the stack and some eyelets to attach some string to when we decide to water test our craft.

I kind of had a template in mind when I started this project.  I wanted our boats to look something like this:

I’ll be honest with you, our wooden toy boats are still a work in progress.  I’m hoping to complete them today and I’ll post some pictures of our results.  Hopefully, I can also take some pictures of us launching our boats in a local stream.  I wanted to get this post up so you can start working on your own boats as well.

By the way, I grabbed the photo above from http://www.craftkitsandsupplies.com which has the above kit for $3.60.   Here is a link to the boat kit: Woodcraft Kit - Tug Boat Kit.

I had a really enjoyable evening tonight.  My wife and the kids and I went on a nice bikeride around our neighborhood.  We started out not really with any destination in mind but ended up at a nearby park to let the kids play for a while.  As I was bicycling around and enjoying the beautiful summer evening a thought occurred to me, “now this is a great staycation idea!”.   One thing that kind of put a damper on the evening though was the fact the we realized our daughter is over the 40 pound weight limitation of the bike carrier.  Looks like we might have to invest in a good bike trailer.  Any ideas?