Kids' Project Idea: One Sheet Plywood Boat

We were looking for a boat that we could build ourselves and came across Gardenfork.tv and his great video.



As you can see, it takes him ten and a half minutes to make a boat.

I did not quite explain the subtleties of camera cutting to my older child (now 6), who watched this with me and decided this boat was something we could do.  We are good at rough carpentry, and not that great at finish work.  This looked like it was just up our alley.

So we made a materials list and went to Home Depot.  We managed to get help loading the sheet of plywood both into the cart and onto the car, so we were off to a strong start.

We encountered some difficulty when it took me over an hour to clean silicon caulk off my hands (I missed that part of the video where he says to wear gloves, and I am not great at caulking to start with).  But we perservered, and even set the trim.

My son noted that Gardenfork was a lot quicker at this boat building business than we were.  I then explained video cutting and time lapse and saw the light bulb go off in his head.  We let the caulk dry and called it a day.

Priming was messy business with three kids around (we babysat a neighbor kid that afternoon), and I lagged in motivation to do the final coats.  The boat sat for a week.

Then we got too annoyed at it in the driveway and did a coat one day.  Then another coat the next day.  Then we did touch up paint.  

Then the stickers my son made went on~ one said the boat name and the other two were the registration tags~ and we added hooks for the deck hands and the rope.

Then he had to design and make a rolling cart to move the boat.

And it worked to get the boat to the nearest body of water.

And it was deemed seaworthy!

The little deckhand did his job.

And it was even sturdy enough to be a stand up paddle board.

This was a fun project.  It was a bit slippery inside for me when it was my turn for a ride, but I went barefoot.  Those tub strips for babies might be a good addition.

The boat got a little scraped up on the pool edges, so we have some tires laying around and are going to make some bumpers for it.  I also need to talk him out of trying to get it to a reservoir/ lake and using it there.

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Follow Up: This has been turned into a kids' airplane.

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