New Project - Enjoying Each Step and Happy with My Skills

 I've just started a new project that is on my bucket list - Chrisitan Becksvoort's iconic 15 drawer chest.  Lost Art Press published an awesome Becksvoort book entitled Shaker Inspiration.  In this book, there are a baker's dozen of Becksvoort's pieces with measurements.  If you like his work, I highly recommend the book.  

I have ogled over this piece for quite some time. Finally, finally, finally I am starting on it.  Back in 2020 I had purchased cherry to make Mike Pekovic's Shaker chimney cabinet.  As with any project, I purchase excess, just in case.  The excess just in case cherry is what I am using.  I like the connection between the two with the same cherry.  However, all the best pieces were used on the chimney cabinet.  As such, I am having to make some compromises on what is and isn't the best face.  Such is life; I don't want to waste a nice wood and none of it is horrible.  Back in Nov/Dec I had access to a Powermatic 15" planer and took wood off of each side of the remaining boards to get them to the desired thickness.  They were already dry and by taking off of both sides, I didn't expect any wild movement.  These S3S boards remained flat and I was happy.

In past projects, I have always found myself anxious to move onto the joinery work.  I've noticed that now, I enjoy each aspect of the build.  Right now, I'm in the very early stages of breaking down the lumber, figuring which piece out of what wood goes where, hand planeing the boards, ensuring they are twist free, etc.  Each aspect is important (said by Captain Obvious) so I want to get each phase of the build its due.  Wasn't always the case but now I am aligned with this.  Feels good.

What also feels good is when I see an issue with the wood, I don't panic.  I know how to fix it.  In fact, I had a pretty big oops moment.  To get the width I needed, I had to glue up some wood.  I got a good glue joint and that went fine.  What I noticed was that there was a fairly significant hump on what would be the face edge of these pieces.  It was a long board and the hump was significant.  Given I am going to cross cut these up, I realized that I didn't need to remove the hump from the entire boad, just enough to cross cut out the first three pieces.  The worse of the hump was in the fourth piece.  In doing this, it made the job much easier.  After cross cutting them down, that one board took less than a minute to fix.  It would have taken significantly longer to fix if I had tried to do it on the whole board.  I was just happy that I didn't panic, saw this easier way to do it, and was able to execute to plan.  There were a few surprises along the way (not worth elaborating upon) but I easily handled these as well.  It just feels nice to feel comfortable and confident that I can fix things and to get to where i need to be.  I still have lots to learn and still consider myself a beginner woodworker.  I'm just happy I can see progress over time.

I've got a long way to go on this project (guessing it will take me 250 hours of work) and mistakes will be made.  There will be some gaps that annoy me. In the end, I will have a nice piece of furniture and a lot of fun in the process.  Life is good.