Back in the workshop

It’s taken me a year of fits and starts, of hemming and hawing and sharpening and organizing, but I’ve finally managed to get into a real woodworking project: a child-sized writing table.

Since we realized — or “decided,” if I want to claim more agency in the matter — that we would be living in our present small house until, at least, the Monkey was grown and off to college, we’ve thought that we would one day loft her bed to give her more space for a desk. The Monkey is my daughter, and though she is now nearly six and I am no longer permitted officially to call her “the Monkey,” it’s the only pseudonym I have, and it fits as well as it ever has — by which you might guess, as we’ve recently accepted, that lofting her bed is going to remain a dangerous proposition for some years to come. She is… energetic. And impulsive. For the latter I have to claim some responsibility, but I have no idea where she gets her energy. Solar power, maybe. In any case, lofting her bed would present, as we tell her about so many things, a “safety issue.”

If we can’t loft her bed, she doesn’t really have room for a desk. And not having a desk of her own will, after a certain point soon to come, make homeschool difficult. The kitchen table is fine for some things, but we all need our own space.

After we rearranged her room last week, I noted that there was space enough at the foot of her bed for a small writing table. Not a full-sized desk, but a table big enough for a book, pad of paper, and pencil, or for a box of crayons and some paper.

Then I remembered the white oak I’d bought to build her a toddler bed, back in the fall of 2004. I got as far as squaring the legs and paneling up the headboard and footboard before I had to put the project aside for a few months, and by the time I got back to it, I’d realized that she was growing so fast that she’d be out of the toddler bed within another year. I tend toward pigheadedness, but I have my limits. The next summer we headed to Pier One Kids, and the white oak gathered dust in my workshop.

It turns out — almost magically — that the legs are just the right height for a writing table that will serve her for a few years, and that the headboard panel makes a tabletop just big enough for the writing surface she needs. Small but serviceable, and the hardest labor is already done. After some trimming and planing I set to making the apron, and tonight I finished the tenons. I sharpened my 12mm Iyoroi mortising chisel, and tomorrow, maybe, I’ll start cutting the mortises.

It’s been years now since I built a piece of “fine” furniture, and I was honestly a bit afraid that I’d have forgotten the methods, the procedures, the little tricks that make work with hand tools — well, work. But this seems to be one of those skills that’s like riding a bicycle. I have to spend a little extra time thinking through each step, but the kinesthetic memory brings it all back. It’s probably best that I’m starting with something simple — I’m not even giving it a drawer; I want to keep the apron fairly narrow to leave room for her knees. But it’s good to be back in the shop. There is a satisfaction in the smooth surface and sharp corners of a fresh-planed board that I never seem to find elsewhere.