what the sea helped me build

This story begins with a trip to the beach, months prior, along with a few exploration-loving friends who are just as inclined towards painfully dragging home heavy, dirty objects as I am. Well, this lovely trip resulted in the acquisition of two very awesome, half buried, semi-barnacle-ridden, red and white painted tide markers.

The second part to this tale is that one lovely man contacted me about building him a desk, so over he came to my ever-shrinking studio to see some pieces in person. He instantly noticed these tide markers, up against a wall, over in the corner, and asked can you incorporate one of those into the desk? Well, of course I can!

He preferred the more worn, faded tide marker, the magnificently silvered one with very little paint that is simply aged to perfection. An exquisite specimen, it is! But before I could begin, I had to plane it down to one inch thick from the back, as they are originally two inches thick and would not match the thickness of the top of the desk. I don't have a planer, so I took it to a local wood shop and asked if they could take it down an inch on the backside. I spent an hour de-nailing the damn thing, so I was really excited to get on my way and start building.

Well, I was admiring this wood shop's spaciousness {the opposite of what I have}, their light filled industrial windows, drooling over their wonderfully kept professional tools, not really paying attention. And -- of course -- BOOM. In three seconds the tide marker, in all it's old glory, was dead. Gone. Poof. Yep, the man had attempted to help me out, but instead he had planed down the FRONT. The front! The side with all the beautiful paint on it...

I was crushed. Devastated. Lovers of old wood, you may want to avert your eyes!

I know. Horrendous. So terrible, that I must admit, there may have been a wee bit of crying involved {hey, what can I say? At least I made it out of the woodshop filled with macho guys before bursting into tears}. I was dreading the email I would have to send that said Dear Sir, I have accidentally murdered your tide marker and you will never see it again. Yeah. Not fun. But lesson learned. Very, very learned, and in three parts:

One, be clearer.
Two, pay more attention.
Three, freaking do everything myself!

Ta-dah! Hello beautiful, precious, incredible Bosch planer that's so smooth and wonderful it's like shaving off butter. Butter I say! So ultimately, I lost an irreplaceable piece of wood in order to initially save myself a hundred and fifteen smackaroos. I should have just bought the damn planer in the first place.

So, onward! To less horrific parts of the story, like when little Shop Cat here helps me build the frame.

And here she is. The Tide Marker desk. A collaboration of ideas that made me put two things together I may not have thought of on my own. Such a lovely thing, learning and adapting, overcoming disasters, and realizing that even with that sadly destroyed piece of wood, it will still make a damn nice shelf.