That One Project

I was about to make a desk for my son John’s bedroom and in my mind it was a beautiful thing: simple, sleek and with elegant proportions.

-  Marci Crestani

Drawings and a cut list were completed. Walnut boards were purchased and transported to Cerritos College in Norwalk, California where I am a community-ed student on Sundays. There should have been a plan of procedure, but since I had made a vaguely similar desk two years earlier, I thought I could safely wing it. That was my first unwitting mistake.

Like you, I begin my projects with hope. Of course we expect problems along the way because that is the nature of woodworking, but at this point we’re not certain what those problems will be. Yet not long after I started working on this desk, I got into a nasty feud with it that lasted all the way through its glue-up. Forget about hope. I began to loathe this desk.