Night stands in quartersawn white oak with red oak secondary woods. The finish is polyurethane. This was a great project for learning stock preparation and mortise and tenon joinery.
I began planning this pair of nightstands some time around 2001 or 2002, as a project to work on with my dad.
Shop time was hit and miss, but I finally got them finished and holding up bedside reading. The nice thing about learning under my dad’s tutelage was that he made sure it turned out to be a project I’d still be proud of years later.
I began to see him differently, too – there was an eye for detail, a sense of precision that I always knew, but I also saw a great sense of dignity, a pride in his work I hadn’t realized was there, whether it was in wood or the decades-long commitment he’d made to the state’s highways. In that time he taught me to be more precise, to care much more about the work I did.
life, revisited 