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Last night I pursued one of our naughty cats into my oldest daughter’s closet, where I saw something that was just shocking.
It was a …¦ well, it’s difficult to describe. Imagine a blanket chest without a lid. What form of furniture is that? A feed trough? In any case, it was chest-like. And it had some Southwest touches. The top edge had a cut-out that looked like stair steps. And that same detail was repeated in the plinth.
It was built using white pine. The corners were joined with finger joints. Large ones. Let’s call them “elephantine thumb joints.” And it had a water-based topcoat on it. I know this because the grain was clearly raised.
I had built this monstrosity right after college and apparently had done a good job of blocking its existence from my memory. It had been a gift for my wife, as I now recall, and it was the “payoff” for me buying a Skil cordless drill, which lasted about a year in my shop.
In retrospect, I wish I’d thrown this project out with the drill.
(And why did I need a cordless drill? To screw together the finger joints of course. I didn’t have enough clamps at the time to do it right. Or I didn’t know better.)
The whole experience was like bumping into an old friend at the store who hasn’t aged well. After getting over the denial that I had built this Franken-trough, I considered hauling it to the curb this morning. Friday is garbage day here. But then I saw something that changed my mind.
My daughter was using it like a corral to store her collectible Breyer horses. They were lined up in there in their tack and other very expensive accessories. It was evident that this abomination of a project still had an important job to do for my daughter. And so I decided to delay its date with the curb.
The good news here is that if you simply persevere you will get better. This morning I set my coffee down on the lid of the blanket chest that is on the cover of Issue 10 of Woodworking Magazine. It also has finger joints at the corners, but that is where the similarities to its crazy grandma locked in the upstairs closet end. The joints are airtight (even without the help of Phillips screws). The miters on the plinth are just so. The finish is nice and smooth.
The bad news here is that craftsmanship is always a moving target. In another 15 years, this new blanket chest might be stuffed in a closet somewhere in the house, and its replacement might be in our living room. This morning it’s hard for me to visualize what the new one would look like, but that uncharted territory is one of the things that gets me in the shop almost every day.
P.S. I just couldn’t bear to take a photo of the original project. There already is enough ugliness on the Internet, don’t you think?
