Confessions of a Scared Woodworker

All my life I've loved building things.  I can remember building birdhouses and little toolboxes with my Dad and Uncle, and how good it felt to finish such a project.  Later it would be nailing together tiny square foot tables that wobbled when I was finished, but boy it was so much fun to use them for my things before it was forgotten about and lost among other garage junk.  In junior high school, woodshop was one of my favorite and most fondly remember classes.  Learning to draft was especially fun and interesting and for a period of time, I truly thought that I'd found something that I could love for the rest of my life.  But then I got a boyfriend, so...

In my early twenty's I purchased a router and table with the dream of building my own log furniture, only to give up because I couldn't even find the appropriate wood to get started, much less finish something.  How was I supposed to know that logs had to be dried a certain amount of time and all that?  It's been sitting alone and unused (except a few times this summer by my husband who used the router to make his own trim, which turned out lovely).

Over the past few years I have gotten wild ideas in my head about needing a certain type of table or shelf to do a certain thing around the house.  I need it...right now. Usually Hubby is not home when these wild ideas are born, and apparently I can't wait, so I go out to the garage in my pajama pants and slippers and scrounge up the necessary wood scraps and hand tools and hammer something together. 

I don't recall any of these projects turning into something that I could actually use.  Tape measure, schmape measure.  Did you know that I measure my pieces by taking a pencil and setting it against the side and go by pencil lengths?  Yeah.  Then I put one end of the wood under my slippered foot, hold the other in my left hand, and hack away at it with the hand saw that I bought myself one day many years ago.

When we bought our home, it did not have a garage.  The following year, we build a detached garage and I insisted that we have a nice, big work bench.  For me.  So that I could build again.  It's been piled high with garage bits ever since. 

I have put a lot of thought into why I can get the idea but not finish it.  Or even start it for that matter.  And my conclusion?  I'm a scaredy cat.  I fear failure.  My regular household DIY projects are no big deal because if I screw them up, nobody knows it and I can move on.  But if I begin a wood working project, it takes a lot of time and makes a lot of noise and failure comes with a lot of wasted stuff.  Good wood that could have been used for something real before I ruined it.  That, and I have no place to do my projects because the bench isn't clean.  And because I have no power tools, only hand tools, and I'm convinced that while others can get by with hand tools just fine, I do not have the patience that hand tools require. 

And that's my fun woodworking backstory.  That is what lead to this, my new blog within a blog.  I'm getting back to it, back to my love of building things (building for real, not building like a girl).  Over the weekend, Hubby and I went shopping with his mom for our wedding.  She is buying us a piece of furniture as our wedding gift!  I'm so excited because I love good furniture and we are in need of a few pieces.  I realized how difficult it was to find good, quality, real pieces!  Everything is particle board with plastic glued over the top.  Ugh.

I need to learn to make my own furniture.

Oh, and I'm scared of power tools.  Stay tuned for my blog within a blog: Confessions of a Scared Woodworker!