Sometime in 2012 I read this blog post and got to thinking about how I'd love for Elle to have a Helper Tower. I tried to think about anyone I knew that might be able to build it, and I contacted a mommy friend from one of our mommy/baby groups - her husband is a carpenter and I wanted to know if he thought this was something he could do. While I totally think he'd do a great job, the price he quoted was much more than the retail price of the tower. So I went back to the mental drawing board.
We were planning a trip home for Thanksgiving - Elle and I drove up and Tim flew up and drove back with us. (It was during that trip that we announced we were pregnant with Wesley.) With the pending trip in mind, the gears started slowing spinning as I thought about who might have the tooling needed to make this tower.
I contacted my brother-in-law, Jeff, because I knew that he loves building stuff (we share a love of furniture assembly that few people can fully understand unless they're passionate about furniture assembly, too), and I knew that he had inherited some of my grandfather's woodworking tools and equipment. While I wasn't sure exactly what tools he had or would need, my first inquiry of him was if he was interested in attempting to build the tower for Elle. I sent this tutorial and explained that we could bring it home with us on our Thanksgiving road trip, which would eliminate the biggest issue of the Ohio-built, Florida-dwelling piece right away. Lucky for us, he was interested and willing and presented it to Elle as an early Christmas present.
Jeff took extra time to paint, decorate and personalize the tower - it turned out absolutely awesome. Elle spent some time checking it out:
And we've since used it for all sorts of baking and cooking fun in the kitchen:
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| Pizza fun! |
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| Helping Daddy make popcorn. |
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| Making brownies with Aunt Marti. |
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| Quality control. |
