Earlywood: Yesterday's Shame (and Tomorrow's)

Publisher’s note: Welcome to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996, which we share without shame every Saturday. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2008. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

Years ago I pursued one of our naughty cats into my oldest daughter’s closet, and I saw something that was just shocking.

It was a … well, it’s difficult to describe. Imagine a blanket chest without a lid. What form of furniture is that? A feed trough? In any case, it was chest-like. And it had some Southwest touches. The top edge had a cut-out that looked like stairsteps. And that same detail was repeated in the plinth.

It was built using white pine. The corners were joined with finger joints. Large ones. Let’s call them “elephantine thumb joints.” And it had a water-based topcoat on it. I know this because the grain was clearly raised.

I had built this monstrosity right after college and apparently had done a good job of blocking its existence from my memory. It had been a gift for my wife, as I now recall, and it was the “payoff” for me buying a Skil cordless drill, which lasted about a year in my shop.

In retrospect, I wish I’d thrown this project out with the drill.

(And why did I need a cordless drill? To screw together the finger joints, of course. I didn’t have enough clamps at the time to do it right. Or I didn’t know better.)

The whole experience was like bumping into an old friend at the store who hasn’t aged well. After getting over the denial that I had built this Franken-trough, I considered hauling it to the curb in time for garbage day. But then I saw something that changed my mind.

My daughter was using it like a corral to store her collectible Breyer horses. They were lined up in their tack and other very expensive accessories. It was evident that this abomination of a project still had an important job to do for my daughter. And so, I decided to delay its date with the curb.

The good news here is that if you simply persevere, you will get better. That same morning, I set my coffee down on the lid of the blanket chest that was on the cover of Issue 10 of Woodworking Magazine. It also had finger joints at the corners, but that is where the similarities to its crazy grandma locked in the upstairs closet ended. The joints were airtight (even without the help of Phillips screws). The miters on the plinth were just so. The finish was nice and smooth.

The bad news here is that craftsmanship is always a moving target. I imagined the new blanket chest 15 years from now, stuffed in a closet somewhere in the house, with its replacement in our living room. That morning, it was hard for me to visualize what the new one would look like, but that uncharted territory is still one of the things that gets me in the shop almost every day.

2025 Update

Eventually, I couldn’t bear to look at the feed trough. I put it to the curb, where someone immediately picked it up to use. Perhaps on their farm to store oats? Or maybe it received a Viking funeral and warmed their bones for a few moments.

In any case, I’m glad it’s gone.

The curly maple finger-jointed chest, on the other hand, lives on in my office. Today it is being used as a low bench for finishing a chair. It also holds my art supplies.

I haven’t built a project using finger joints since this one (I now use dovetails). But it’s still a nice piece that I enjoy using.