Life Lessons From A Curious Beginner Woodworker
When I moved to New York, I took my parents’ old kitchen table and chairs.
They were rather large, nicked, bruised, grimy, and… gunked up with remnants of a million happy memories.
This table and chairs were the home of thousands of family dinners, messy arts & crafts projects, hours of homework, massive cookie-baking marathons. It’s where my mom and I hand-glued my wedding invitations, and cut the fabric for many Halloween costumes as well as my senior prom dress…
If you can’t already tell I’m (arguably overly) sentimental and as a proud core contributor of that grime, I refuse to get rid of it and was eager to give this old furniture I love a second home.
Except the set never quite fit into any of my NYC apartments, (Thank you to my former roommates for allowing our shared living space to be crowded with nostalgia). Now, my husband and I have been in our apartment for a few years and moved our home aesthetic away from “stuff we got for free” and finally starting to have cohesive matching stuff...just nothing that matches our kitchen table and chairs.
Once again I declined the invitation to get rid of them, but thought I could help them fit in a bit better... So I made a plan to sand and stain them!
I knew next to nothing... (welp...nothing) about woodworking or upcycling. I did not realize HOW long sanding takes! To paint a picture, it took me the entirety of 2.5 audiobooks to finish sanding just 1 (out of 4) chairs.
When I first started out, I thought hand sanding alone would cut it… which it absolutely did not.
So I invested in a palm sander which worked great!... for the flat parts. I was able to finish a chair’s seat and back in a brisk 90 min. And those are the largest parts! Surely I’d be done in no time...
….But chairs have legs, and these chairs had cylindrical ones, as well as 5 cylindrical back spools complete with delightful curves and crevasse and (so many) areas in which the palm sander was not effective.
When hand-sanding failed, a friend introduced me to a new tool that had cylindrical drill attachments of varying sizes that allowed me to sand the more curvy areas. These certainly sped up the process, but each leg of each chair still took me about 2 hours, and each back spool about 1 hour.
…And even still, the tools couldn’t get in the many teeny-tiny crevasses. So I resorted to hand sanding and used what I called the “teeth brushing technique” where I folded up pieces of sandpaper and scrub like I was brushing a toddler's teeth.
My chair was making progress, but it seemed the more time I spent, the less noticeable my efforts were.
The final 4 days of work, I would begin by saying “I probably only have 10 minutes left to go! Surely I can finish today!” Then I’d put in 2 hours of work, and still not be done….In other words, I thought I was 10 min away from finishing for 8 HOURS!
I eventually calculated that 1 inch of curvy detailed surface area took up about the same amount of sanding time as 10 inches of flatter surface.
But boy was it sweet when every quarter inch of its former coat was finally scritched and scratched away.
Learning this new skill reminded me:
1. There are always skills within the skill.
2. As the obstacles change, the tools will change.
3. It’s faster to ask for help!
4. Not all terrain is created equally….
The 4th is the one I want to talk more about…
I’ve noticed this pattern is common, if not mandatory in all skill development.
When we’re beginning, we go for the basic building blocks where there is often high reward and semi-quick payoff: we learned how to use the palm sander, we learned the notes of a C major scale, we learned what a tendu looks like! How cool that we’re starting to speak the language!
When everything is new, every new piece of information feels like a meaningful step forward. But the more you know, the more you see what you don’t know, and the more details that need your attention are revealed.
The tiny details required to master the skill require way more focus, effort, attention, and consistent elbow grease.
When you switch from broad strokes to devilish details...when it’s time to smooth out the tiny divots, you must switch up your techniques and tools!
So, if you feel like you haven’t moved forward in a while, despite consistent effort, Congratulations!
Know that you’ve now put away the palm sander, and its time to break out the new tools, learn a new technique, put your patience pants on, and get comfy with tedious repetition.