There are a couple of design issues that occur in an 80 year old house. One of them is that there are no open spaces. The other is that of the 7 closets in the house, 6 of them are located upstairs. And because I have tile and hardwood floors, I like to keep brooms around to pick up the dust, hair, dirt, and other nubbins the cats bat around the floor. Only I’m not leaving some generic, ugly broom laying around my brand new kitchen.Which was the inspiration behind this idea…

Hey, wow, there are my feet. That looks ridiculous. If you can ignore my freakishly long second toe you’ll see that this is the first rough cut. I just started with a  standard 2 x 4 and my portable jigsaw. Then refined that down by using the angle-cut feature of the 3-position saw.  Whether I’m carving in wax or wood I find it easier to cut the corners off before I start “hand” carving if I’m going for a round shape.

This is the point where A.) People stopped looking at me weird when I told them I was carving a crooked broom handle out of a 2 x 4, and B.) The mosquitoes got so damn bad I had to set up shop (and by “set” I mean “rig”) in the basement.

For all of this carving I use a roto-zip bit in my Dremmel (that has a $20 flex-shaft extension) to just kind of shave off a little bit of wood at a time. I do have a bunch of fancy bits that come in handy more when I am carving in to something (such as the swirl at the top) as opposed to just smoothing something down.

This is what it looks like as an actual broom:

And, as a finished one:

Blue stripes to go perfectly with the blue tile in my kitchen. Now this is something I don’t mind leaving leaning against a wall in the kitchen.