One Mans Trash is Anothers Table Pt2

My table top is coming along nicely, slower than I am use to progressing on a project like this but I’m not complaining I am getting back in touch with why I love woodworking. Normally I would of none a small top like this one in a day or so with some other work squeezed in between the drying time for the glue up. But since I have no shop, and I’m doing the work with hand tools, and some hand held power tools in the living room of my apartment and in the front yard when it’s not raining, it is taking me a bit longer, which is alright with me, I’m enjoying myself.

I really forgot how nice it is to run a sharp plane over a board and hear that crisp sound of iron slicing wood, and the smell, oh the smell of fresh pine filling my nose without the distraction of grease in the air. Yes I am falling in love with woodworking again. Working with hand tools sometimes make me feel like I am a rookie again and you know what? I like that. It makes me have to stop and think before I do things, and plan more than I did when I was working with my machines. I was a good cabinetmaker but it’s a lot like being a grunt in the Army, you build what you’re told, when you’re told, and you get very little opportunity to put anything of yourself into your work. I still loved it though, same with owning my own shop. But now doing work for my wife and myself I can put 100% of me into the piece’s I build and that has me excited.

When I first gave up on the idea of have a working shop again I was more than I little depressed and I wasn’t sure I wanted to even do woodworking anymore, but I kept cleaning and sharpening my tools I even picked up some treasured planes and saws that my wife would show me when we went to the flea market or yard sales. Even us picking up that table base and her gloating me into making a top for her was her way of getting me back on the horse, so to speak. Then she said something to me that really hit home she told me that “an artist and a woodworker is what you are not what you do” that’s when I realized I don’t have to make money with my woodworking to be a woodworker and if in the future I get the chance to have working shop, that will be great, but if I don’t, I still have my wife and daughter, who both have honey do list longer than I have time to complete, and I am sure it will grow as time goes by. Now I just need to decide what’s next in my life, the wife and I are thinking about truck driving, so stay tune.