jgoforth.com | we(b log)

Perfect Desk: Trials and Tribulations of amateur woodworking

Here is the thing, I like to think I can do most things I attempt with some level of success. Almost universally, starting something because I figure I can do it does not make me an expert. This gets me frustrated when trying to meeting my personal expectation of perfection. I am definitely making progress, and I am happy about that, but each step of the way seems to present some new thing that doesn’t work they way I want it to. First I had the stain issue, where I didn’t understand the kind of wood I was working with and just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted to. My original assumption is that I was staining all wrong, but it turns out that my choice of wood was wrong. The next couple of issues came with trying to get the wood cut for the desk surface.

Having laid out the MDF base for the desk, my next step was to cut all the pieces of aspen to be the table surface. I calculated how many of the boards I would need and stopped by Lowe’s on the way home from work and picked up several planks of 1×8 aspen. It is here I would like to take a brief moment out of my story to address the married men out there. Men, when you tell your wife you are stopping by the hardware store to pick up some wood on the way home, you should really specify a rough estimate in time. You should not say “I am not sure how long it will be, but it may take awhile”, because when you say “awhile” she will assume, quite reasonably, that you mean about 15 minutes and not the 1 hour it actually takes you to decided what to get and then get the lumber guy to cut it for you so that you can fit giant pieces of wood in your tiny Mazda 3. You will then have to apologize for not getting home to eat the dinner she cooked as early as she had planned.

Anyway, I  cut it up in 30 inch chunks and laid it out on top of base to see how they fit and see how much of the end boards I needed to trim to get it all to fit nicely. Instead, what I found is that they came up about 2.5 feet short. How could this have possibly happened with all my careful planning and designing in SketchUp? This brings me to reason-I-am-not-an-expert 2. No matter how many times I work with lumber, at some point I always incorrectly assume one of the labeled measurements is the actual measurement.  I immediately knew that the 1x8s weren’t 1 inch think. I knew they would be about 3/4 of an inch. That knowledge did not carry over to knowing that they were not 8 inches, but rather 7.25 inches. That makes a big difference across 13 boards. Ugh. Now it has to wait for another trip to Lowe’s for another board.