My woodworking journey

Pictures from along the way

This is the making of counterpart to my DIY wooden furniture article, a story of my woodworking journey. I'm still working on another table and a couple of smaller items, so this hobby is not ending anytime soon.

It took over two years to finish all the stuff in this article since I was working on these projects mainly at my parents' garage that was quite far away. I only had the chance to make progress every now and then. I'm somewhat proud of what I've created, though, and since I'm about to turn the magical 40, I kind of felt like wrapping up some things that have been part of my life lately. It helps in looking forward when the past is clear.

The items I have pictures of in this article are as follows:

A television mount. Basically a combination of an adjustable wall mount and a free standing TV bench. It has a magnetically attached cable channel. The TV can be tilted (hence an adapter for the initial angle) and lifted upwards. I use the TV as my computer display. The mount is made of the same wood as my bed. This piece of work needed a lot of trial and error, and I'm already planning on doing some improvements in the future.
A stool. Just a simple traditional stool. Mainly to hold my mousepad, but also good for sitting. Made of spare wood.
An RGBW LED lamp. Made of spare wood, same material as my bed. It uses a custom software I made and runs on an ESP8266. The tiny electronics are hidden in the base, and the LED strip itself is in a groove I made to the backside of the slat. It's powered by an USB-C connector at the bottom.
A mood light. Another lamp made of spare furniture legs. To give some warm light from floor level.
My work desk. It's made of oak and thermally treated ash. I wanted the desk to transform into low table if necessary. This took me forever to make. More about it in the mistakes section.
An ergonomic chair. Custom paint job, custom upholstery (not made by me but a professional), and fixing a badly manufactured, welded at an angle seat mechanism. Not woodworking but it was part of this whole journey so it's wooden enough, now.
My bed. I made the bed already a few years ago, but I made some improvements to the way its headboard is attached. I also did full maintenance for the bed, oiling up all its parts anew. I highly recommend checking out the article about the bed, as it still remains my biggest and best single piece of woodwork.
A tailor's chalk sharpener. This was a gift to someone special. Made of spare wood and 43 razor blades.
An acoustic panel. This again was supposed to be a very simple operation, but took me forever and needed a lot of changes along the way. Again made of same material as my bed.
My computer case. It's a Fractal Pop Mini Air but I heavily modified the case itself by cutting a lot of new holes and painting it, and also adding walnut panels. The front walnut panel is a generic tray I bought from Amazon. I also made of wood a WiFi antenna holder and a display cover for my MOTU M4 audio interface.
An Ikea Poäng lazy chair. I want my chair to be sturdy and as close to the floor as humanly possible. I found yet another spare set of furniture legs and decided to modify the chair a bit.
New custom legs + rollers for my small sofa, among with riser blocks to make the sofa parallel with the floor if a better resting place is needed.

Mistakes and changes to plans

None of the works have gone exactly as planned, but mostly I've been just winging it. The TV mount, the work desk and the acoustic panel required some heavy planning, though.

The TV mount has a long arm that introduces a heavy torque. The TV mount is also not one piece, but it can be disassembled for transport and storage. That's why I chose to use heavy bolts and some metal parts, but they just don't hold up that well. Only later I realized I could've - and should've - done the whole thing with no bolts, using just wood with a couple of trivial cuts. It would've been much easier and sturdier. I'm planning on modifying it sometime in the future, as I want to make it easier to assemble and more robust; it now holds just a 42" TV.

The work desk was a major pain. My original plan was to make the legs foldable and lock in place using magnets. I had no idea of the forces involved, and I hadn't realized how much Chinese magnet sellers overestimate the strength of their magnets. On the third try, after buying some really expensive magnets from a Finnish dealer, I finally got the legs to hold in place. What I hadn't stopped to think was the hinges and how much slack they inherently have. My equipment wasn't suited for fine cutting, either. So, after first spending a lot of time getting proper magnets and gluing them in place, I then spent a lot of time getting them out, filling in all the drilled holes and building a rig to drill coaxially along the legs for inserting sturdy steel rods to connect the leg extensions. I could've bought new materials, but that wasn't the point. The legs now have a story, and this was more about going the distance anyway.

The table also offered me headaches with the top. I hadn't used furniture varnish before and wasn't familiar how it behaves. I was always in a hurry to leave for the train when doing a layer, so the next time I went to continue my work, it was usually a few hours of sanding down mistakes before trying again. And eventually I ran out of varnish in the middle of a layer. They had stopped manufacturing the original product, so I had to switch to a different one. This resulted in yet some more sanding and learning, but eventually I got the table in a good enough condition. The final experiment backfired a bit, though: I tried this ceramic nano coating that's usually used for cars. I wanted the surface to be smooth and hard. The first time I did the coating the table top looked quite ugly, but I still started using it. After less than a year the table top had scratches and the leg extensions required some heavy maintenance (re-drilling the holes and all, as some of the legs apparently had swollen), so I applied another layer of the nano coating. This time I let it dry for a longer time and applied it much more than instructed, and the end result turned out much better. Eventually when I do some heavier maintenance, I will have to sand away all the layers, but hopefully that is years away.

The acoustic panels was a quick idea. I noticed a hardware store selling these super cheap small acoustic panels in an outlet, so I bought nine, and decided to build a 3x3 matrix out of them. The project had to wait for almost a year until I had time to actually start building. So I made the frame for the panels and when it was time to actually install the panels, I noticed they smelled bad. Like, real bad. I took the finished panel to my balcony for a few days, I tried coffee beans and baking soda, but nothing helped. So I eventually bought some materials and built my own fabric covered panels. The end result is quite nice and now fully done by me, but it wasn't the quick or cheap project I had planned it to be.

Things I have learned

Working on something for so long, sometimes so seldom, requires a lot of patience. It also requires doing clear to-do lists so that you know what you were thinking three months or a whole year earlier when you had some great idea how to do some non-trivial thing. This is actually quite similar to my work as a software architect: I think the people who are good in that position have the skills to write down even complex ideas so that they can be understood and digested by others and at a different time.

I've also learned a lot about just using different kinds of tools. Even if mine weren't of good quality or otherwise not that fancy, it's still more than nothing. Besides, I think sometimes bad tools force you to learn more about what makes a tool good. Also, not having much forces you to be resourceful - something I've always felt proud of being. I can build the most complex of contraptions from the simplest of things if so required.

This kind of woodworking also forces you to accept suboptimal results and imperfections. In a way it is humbling and healthy for the mind. Besides, wood is organic and a living material. Even after the piece looks like a TV stand, it might still warp and start to do its own things. Planning these ahead is a skill and part of woodworking, but accepting imperfections and knowing there will be some is part of life. Creating stuff with your hands is not only therapeutic, you can learn important life lessons from doing it. This I already knew, though - it's one of the things that has kept me doing it. At times it's almost spiritual. At times it's just sweat and swear words. But either way, in the end it's usually at least a bit rewarding.

Finally, especially after seeing the end results in my home: real wood and proper materials are indeed really nice and even if expensive, they are worth it. It's so much less annoying to work remotely on a computer that's sitting on a sturdy desk made of real wood than it is doing the same thing on a piece of painted white, laminated particle board in a sterile environment.

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