I thought this build would be straightforward. Not easy or quick, but straightforward: a small bedside table in silver birch, or vårtbjörk (wart-birch) as we call it here in Sweden. The boards came from a tree milled decades ago by my partner's grandfather, from the last batch of logs he ever sawed. His old sawmill is parked outside our barn right now, so it felt right to finally turn some of that wood into furniture. I'm building the table for my dad, with a live-edge, pull-less drawer front cut from a spalted section I stumbled on halfway through milling.
I started in the middle of July and finished at the very end of September. A two-week project took two and a half months, and the full story is in the video.
The struggles
The main culprit was a newborn who was only a couple of weeks old when I started. Shop time went from afternoons to twenty minutes here, an hour there. Every session began with figuring out what past me had been planning and ended with me wanting to be done, which is a bad recipe for accurate work.
The mistakes piled up. I marked the top overhang at half of what I intended and didn't notice for weeks. I ripped the back apron to the wrong width. The Domino, which I'd trusted to be foolproof, gave me a day where I plugged and recut almost every mortise. That one got its own video. And the wavy grain that looks so good on the finished piece tore out all over the place, which slowly killed my plan of an all-planed finish with no sandpaper.
Linus Staf
Linus Staf
What I'm taking away
I came out of this build with a more realistic view of my limits, and the understanding that they aren't always the same. Right now there's a baby, not much sleep, and not enough practice. Next year there'll be different limits. I'd rather work within the ones I have than chase a perfect version that only exists in my head. Toward the end, I started treating new mistakes as things to learn from instead of reasons to be annoyed. They still sting a bit, though.
The table will spend the winter indoors, which is a lot drier than the barn, so I'm curious how the wood reacts. My dad won't pick it up for another half year, which leaves me a choice: fix the visible mistakes, or treat this as the practice run it was and build it again. I'd like to hear what you'd do. Rebuild, or repair? And was designing around the sloped wall worth it?
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