One simple project?

The Hydra nature of a seemingly straightforward project | One day at a time

Hello and welcome to the Hungry Woodworker, a humanistic exploration of woodworking, purpose, and trying to make a living from the skills of my two hands. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do when not working is write; some of those notes get edited into essays, which I share every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.

Hi there, a quick update: I’ve spent the last couple of weeks coming up with a new logo, which means I’ll be revising this newsletter a bit.

A friend gave me her old router table with a bevy of bits. As a thank you, I wanted to make something for her and her family, so Dad and I repurposed a Cherry burl into a bookstand. This was a fun little project, making use of some pieces of wood that were just lying around.

My essay is below—I hope your week is full of delightful little projects that bring joy to you and others. ❤️

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One thing always leads to another

This morning I’m sitting outside watching Josiah, the most productive man alive, pull rotten trim off the side of our house. My contribution to this project is attention—I’ve been hearing his reports as he assessed the situation over the last couple of weeks and now I’m appearing to take a strong interest every time he brings me over another piece of rotten board to inspect—and some Cedar boards. Actually, the boards are really Dad’s contribution. It’s not like I have 80”-long Cedar just lying around my shop. But I did help plane them to thickness and cut them to width.

Not sure what Josiah would've done without the dog helping out.

Once Josiah’s done here, the woodpeckers will have to find their amusements elsewhere.

Have you ever noticed that even a simple project can quickly balloon into something more complex and hairy once you’re into it?

This trim project came about because of a strong stench. Imagine you left a good-sized pail of food waste in an exceedingly hot room for a couple of weeks, where the various juices could meld and stew together. The resulting smell would come close to that which emanated from our son’s closet during the hot days of summer. It’s the kind of smell that makes your stomach wretch and alarm bells ring in your brain.

The culprit wasn’t the boy. It turned out to be decomposing mice. Or maybe just one really big mouse taking an unholy amount of time to return its body to the universe. We heard their tiny feet skittering around the walls in our entry way, just below the child’s bedroom.

There is no easy access to the closet wall without putting a hole in it, but a look in the attic showed signs of mouse activity. And a hunt around the outside of the house revealed access points through corners, which we filled with copper mesh. However, it also led to us (okay, really Josiah) to discover just how rotten the trim boards were in the front of our house, right near the child’s wall, under which more decay was found and a tiny hole, big enough for a mouse body to squeeze through.

Trying to solve one issue—mice going to live out their final days in the varmint hospice of our son’s wall—has led to a trip to the shop to mill some lumber, and several hours of labor with paint, hand saws, crow bars, and drills.

This tumble from something seemingly simple into the wild chasm of myriad additional tasks popping up whack-a-mole quick is a familiar state in my own shop. It often happens when I’m attempting something new or trying out a skill by myself for the first time.

For example, I’m making a blanket chest for a friend’s child. I’ve made boxes (pretty much everything in woodworking is a different take on a box) but haven’t made a chest before, so thought to build a smaller prototype first.

I want to join the corners with dovetails, which I’ve made before (generally for drawers, usually in Dad’s shop under his supervision, with a router and jig). I’ve even made half-blind dovetails in my shop with a router and jig. But I’ve never made through-dovetails on my own in my shop.

So all I wanted was to get some practice and gain more confidence making dovetails.

I set up my jig and reviewed the instructions. Set the dovetail bit depth to 1/2”, because the depth is supposed to be equal to the thickness of the boards to be joined. Lined the board up so that the tails, which I was cutting first, would be equally spaced. Clamped the test board and made my cuts.

When I pulled the board out and inspected it, the tails were cleanly cut but with a major issue: a 1/16” wooden lip on the end of each tail. My bit, it turns out, is too small to cut dovetails at a 1/2” depth. Looked in my stock of bits and couldn’t find a bigger one.

So to make this test chest, I will need to buy a bigger bit or take the boards back to Dad’s shop and figure out how to use his jig (which is different than mine and I’d be on my own because he’ll be gone). One seemingly straightforward project isn’t.

To pause and get a little personal: I’m having a hard week. Actually, it’s been a hard few months. Events have knocked me down and are taking time to work through.

I share this because it has implications for how my brain is operating: “Like a broken field runner slippin’ through the lines.”¹ Because I’ve been so down, I’m not thinking nearly as creatively. Or proactively, strategically, usefully. Life is one day at a time.

I was reading Harriet McBryde Johnson’s Too Late to Die Young and this sentence caught me: “Self-powered in my chair, self-employed in my office, at large and unsupervised, I am free to spend the morning and the rest of my life as I please.” Like her, barring the normal constraints we all have when living, I am at large and unsupervised, free to spend my time as I please running my little woodworking business. Which, I have to remind myself on days when the work does not contort itself to my (admittedly meager, less-than-strategic) plans, is normal.

Projects will always take longer than expected, generally run over budget, and ordinarily include factors that we never could’ve predicted.

In the time it has taken me to draft this essay, Josiah is still outside, hard at work. He has had to remove another section of trim and says he’ll need more wood. He says that by the time he’s done here we’re going to have a whole new house. One piece of rotten trim led to gnarly stuff underneath to another section of board that has to be removed, etc., etc. Makes me think of the ship of Theseus paradox. And how, in every project, one thing always leads to five others.

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Other essays

• Inconvenience and working solo:

  I love my little shop—a topic Dad and I have discussed (and likely a future essay) is how shops can be deeply personal spaces, reflecting both the subtle and obvious characteristics, needs, and desires of their owners. The tools easiest to hand say a lot about what a woodworker values and how their time is spent.

• Hubris and making a (big) box:
  Someone advised me that with woodworking I should start with small projects to build up my foundational skills and muscle memory. Something like boxes. This seemed quite sensible to me. Unfortunately my family’s need for wooden boxes is low.

1. How is it I can remember this one line from a country music song I must’ve last listened to three decades ago but can’t remember anything useful about cutting dovetails?