How did I join the footrest to the legs? A story about moving forward and possibly faith. At an unspecified time in the past, I was attempting to lift a piece onto a torsion box that was awkward to lift and a bit heavy for one person to manage. I ended up not getting the piece quite high enough and it pushed something off the torsion box which fell onto a finished table and broke off a corner of it. I’m being a little vague to protect the projects involved and no, it wasn’t your project. I have enough perspective at this point in my life to have been able to realize the path of my mistakes, at least when they are strictly physical. In this case I should have stopped and had lunch, gotten help and slowed down. So, I quickly glued back the immediate results of the damage I caused and sat down and ate while the glue rolled back the minutes. Was I upset? Well, all roads lead forward or you just gotta keep moving. Words to live by that my dad would say, if he said such motivational quips. I would fix what needed fixed and keep going.

Back in the days when masking up was an unknown phrase, beginning wood workers would inquire about the path to mastery. “Which tool should I buy first?” or “What class should I take next?” I always fell back to the same line of thought; pick a project and complete it. Buy as few tools as you need and then do the next project. Make something you need or want. And… repeat. Often, I would find, at some point in the future, that people would end up getting stuck someplace, with a task or process and remain stuck. Or just never pick that project and therefore not take that first step.

Getting through a project to the end is really a superpower. And that project that was completed informs the next or the next after that. About that footrest. I was able to join it to the legs because I took a class at the Center for Furniture Craftsman ship in Rockland, Maine. They were doing a lot of joinery using a router sled they built that allowed for a pretty simple, repeatable way to do tenons to hold a fixed shelf in a cabinet in place. Make a dado groove or a sliding dovetail. When I came home from the class, I bought a new router and made the router sled I’d used at CFC in Maine. Then, I built a small hanging bookshelf for my son and then a larger bookshelf for my wife’s home office using the router sled. I made a few additional router sleds that I modified for different sized channels for a drop leaf table with fancy slides using a method developed by Clark Kellogg. I got more and more comfortable with the sled and came up with more ways to use it. So, when I came up with a design for a stool, I couldn’t figure out how to do any of the joinery. It took a lot of trial and error and test jigs. The idea with the footrest was for it to look like I just pushed it into the legs. And when it came to trying to figure out how to achieve that I wondered if I could use the router sled. It was a bit awkward the first time, but it worked.

So have faith. Work to complete the project you’re on and trust it will lead you down the road you want to go. A road paved with progress, next steps and a few cool pieces of furniture along the way.