The 75 dollar bench

Here's the nearly completed bench. It still needs all the holes drilled for the dogs, planing stops and the hold fasts. I'm waiting for arrival of these items before doing so. I'm away from home house sitting for about a month so that will have to wait until I get back. It's going to be a long month.
The title of this entry is somewhat misleading. But I do only have 75 bucks into lumber for this guy. The two bench screws were about 35$ each and the end vise I got on sale for 80$. Here in the Peoples Republic of California they don't know from Southern Yellow Pine. It is not available locally and the two dealers I located online failed answer my e-mail regarding pricing and availability. The best price I could get for maple here in the west was over five bucks/b.f. and as it is winter and I'm off work for a couple more weeks I went with Doug fir. It is dirt cheap and Chris Schwarz mentioned that he always had trouble convincing folks of it's worth so that was that. Any time someone mentions that people don't want to do something the bad part of my brain just has to do it just to be contrary.

I live in a smallish town in the northern Sierra called Truckee. We're situated at about 6000 feet above sea level and 13 miles north of Lake Tahoe. I mention this because we tend to get quite a bit of snow this time of year and finding dry lumber is a bit of a task. The material for the top of this bench is Kiln Dried 2x4 from a big box store down in Reno. There was no K.D. fir available up here on the "hill" and the only available K.D. lumber available in Reno was 8' 2x4. Period. Nothing wider, nothing longer, which was probably just as well as it all had to go inside the camper shell of my pick-up.

26. That's the number of 8 foot 2x4s that will fit into a '97 Tacoma Extra cab if you stuff one end through the sliding rear window and into the passenger compartment Sanford style. It was raining in Reno and snowing by the time I got back home so lashing anything to the roof wasn't really an option since I was going all that way just to get dry lumber in the first place. Upon getting home I quickly unloaded into the garage and so began the race with humidity and my lumber stock pile. Total cost of lumber so far, 42 bucks.