Master Strokes

David Clyde
Riverton, Utah

David loves the challenge of doing carpentry projects around the house. "If I push myself beyond what I'm comfortable doing," he says, "it builds skill and self-confidence." When his wife became pregnant, David needed to create storage areas in the baby's room that would also accommodate spillover from the master-bedroom closet. He lay on the floor of the empty 10-by-10-foot nursery until the solution came to him.

David disguised two closets in his son Charlie's room by turning them into train towers that connect via a rail bridge. "I went slightly overboard," David admits. He grouted each miniature brick, transformed metal mailboxes into tunnels, and consulted engineers on the physics of bridges. "I loved every minute of it," he says.