Hand Carved Mesquite End Table Planter

Bought a large 2' x 2' pot for my patio to turn into an end table, and decided to make half of it a pot for succulents!

Bought a couple planks of Mesquite at Woodworkers Source in Tucson then did the following:

1. Flattened ("joined") the sides of the boards so they would meet up nicely
2. Decided the orientation of each board and traced out the intended circle onto them
3. Cut out butterfly keys, traced them into the wood, the cut out and chiseled the holes (very difficult to do with mesquite! Mostly was me sanding instead as much as possible to avoid chiseling)
4. Glue up the board, then used the drum sander to flatten it well enough (going for rustic, so it didn't matter if you could feel very small imperfections or height differences between the boards).
5. Cut out the circle
6. Traced the dashes along the perimeter for the hand carved pattern I was going to do. I was going for coiled rope but doesn't really matter too much what it looks supposed to look like. As long as it's a consistent and repeating pattern it'll look good)
7. Use the Dremel with a few different kinds of bits found at Xerocraft to carve in the pattern. I was not about to try to do that by hand on mesquite after my experience with the butterflys, LOL
8. Sealed with Waterlox since it's going outside
9. Bought a water heater cooler drip pan that happened to be a close fit for the pot, then made cuts into it so it fit perfectly and epoxied it to the inside rim of the pot.
10. I cut out half of the inside of the drip pan and folded it upwards and cut it away to make a half circle containment area for the soil. It didn't need to be watertight just needed to hold the soil well enough