Let me set the scene. It's a Sunday afternoon. I've been watching WoodworkingProject content on TikTok for three weeks, you know the rabbit hole, the satisfying cuts, the joints that fit like they were born together, the sawdust falling just so in the afternoon light. I have convinced myself that I, Vixen Rae, who has never built anything more structurally complex than an IKEA Kallax, am ready to build a custom pedalboard shelf for my studio.
I needed somewhere to rack my pedals off the floor and add some shallow shelving above my audio interface. The commercial options were either cheap and wobbly or the cost of a decent used guitar. So I thought: how hard can it be? I've watched maybe forty videos. I basically know how to do this. I even wrote down measurements. Plural. I wrote down measurements PLURAL.
Spoiler: it was harder than I thought. Spoiler two: I am deeply humbled. Spoiler three: the finished thing is actually kind of beautiful in a lumpy, battle-scarred way that I have chosen to call "handmade character." But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let me take you through the whole humbling from the top.
the hardware store part (overconfident phase)
I walked into the hardware store feeling like a person who builds things. I had a list. I had a tape measure in my back pocket that I borrowed from my neighbor and had not yet returned. I had strong opinions about pine versus plywood that were based entirely on TikTok and had not been tested by reality. I was wearing overalls and steel-toed boots, which I own for practical non-woodworking reasons, but they made me feel very competent.
Here is what the hardware store does not tell you: the lumber aisle is vast and confusing and the actual dimensions of lumber are not the stated dimensions. A 2x4 is not two inches by four inches. It is one and a half by three and a half. This is apparently just a fact that everyone who works with wood knows and no one told me about. I stood in that aisle for fifteen minutes staring at a board, holding my tape measure against it like it had personally deceived me. It had. They all had. The entire lumber industry is built on a lie and I'm just supposed to be okay with that.
I bought the wrong amount of everything. Not by a lot, I wasn't a disaster, but enough that I had to go back. Twice. The guy at the cutting station remembered me by the second trip. He was very kind about it. I could tell he was being kind about it, which was somehow worse.
The Measuring Part (Humility Begins)
There is a saying: measure twice, cut once. I have heard this saying. I have repeated this saying. I did not live this saying.
My first cut was fine. My second cut was fine. My third cut was about a quarter inch short, which in woodworking is not fine, it is "you now have a decorative piece of wood that fits nowhere and serves no purpose." I stared at the too-short board for a long moment. Drank some cold coffee. Put it down and picked it back up as if it might have changed. It had not changed.
The thing about cutting wood wrong is there's no undo. With music, even with recording, even at 2 a.m. when I've accidentally overwritten a vocal take I loved, there's almost always a workaround. A backup, a fix, a different approach. With wood, if you cut it short you have cut it short. You can use it for something smaller. You can throw it in the scrap pile. You cannot make it longer again. This is a feature of physical materials that I understood intellectually and had never felt in my body until that moment.
The crying... I said "measured once, cried twice" in my TikTok and I meant it, sort of. It was more of a frustrated exhale the first time and a genuine three-minute sit-down-with-my-feelings the second time. The second time was when the dado joint I had attempted (after watching an entire tutorial) did not come out clean. Functional but rough. Rough in a way that would be hidden once assembled but that I knew was there. That bothered me more than it probably should have. I have high standards for my own work, even the parts nobody sees. Especially those parts, actually.
The Assembly Part (Making Peace with Imperfection)
I'm not going to walk you through every step of the assembly because this post would be seven thousand words and you'd lose the will to live. What I will tell you is: it took most of a Sunday and all of a Monday. I ran out of clamps and had to improvise with some bungee cords and a book about Fleetwood Mac. The Fleetwood Mac book worked great, actually. Very solid spine.
Somewhere in the middle of the second day something shifted. I stopped trying to make it perfect and started trying to make it done and then something interesting happened. The imperfections started to look intentional. A small variation in the shelf spacing that happened because I slightly mis-drilled a pilot hole ended up giving the bottom shelf more clearance, which is actually where I need it for my taller pedals. The rough joint I'd been upset about is invisible from the front. The whole thing is sturdier than I expected because I used more fasteners than strictly necessary out of anxiety and that turned out to be a feature.
I finished it around 11 p.m. on Monday. Set it up in my studio corner, loaded it with pedals and cables and the little succulent I'm trying to keep alive, stepped back, and looked at it. And I said out loud, to no one: "I made that." Not sarcastically. Not modestly. Just factually, with some wonder in it. I made that. With my hands and some pine boards and a borrowed drill and a Fleetwood Mac book used as a clamp. It exists in the world now. It will hold things up. My pedals are organized for the first time in three years.
What I Actually Learned (That Has Nothing to Do with Wood)
I've been thinking since then about craft. The kind that lives in skilled hands, in calluses, in the muscle memory of doing a thing ten thousand times. I work in audio, which is its own kind of craft, but it's invisible. Sound doesn't leave a physical record of effort. A well-mixed song sounds effortless by design. You're not supposed to hear the work, you're supposed to feel the result. But a well-built piece of furniture? You can see every decision. You can run your hands over the joints and read what kind of care went into them.
My aunt Deb's husband, Uncle Pete, passed a few years ago. He was a carpenter, not professionally but as a compulsion, same way I make music as a profession but also just can't stop. He made things for everyone in the family: a cradle, a rocking horse, a long dining table that's still in my aunt's kitchen. I used to take that table completely for granted. Ate dinner at it my whole childhood without thinking about it once. This week I FaceTimed Deb and asked her about it, how long it took him, whether she'd show me the joinery if I came to visit. She was quiet for a second and then she said, "He would have loved that you asked."
okay I cried a little at that. just a little.
Here's what the WoodworkingProject trend on TikTok gets right: there's something genuinely satisfying about making a thing. Not buying it, not streaming it, not downloading it. Making it. The algorithm is full of people who figured this out and are sharing it, and I think that's because a lot of us are starving for the feeling of completed, physical, real work in a world where so much of what we do is abstract and digital and never quite finished. A song is never fully done, you just stop working on it. A shelf is done when you stand it up and it holds the weight.
I have been humbled. I have also been converted. I bought my own drill last week. I have plans for a small set of studio risers next. I've already watched fourteen more videos and I am slightly less overconfident this time. Slightly. The overalls are still going to be involved.
If you're a woodworker, real and trained and skilled, and you want to yell at me in the comments about my technique, please do. I need the feedback. Also please tell me what I should have done about that dado joint. I am still thinking about it.
I also want to say: this whole project made me weirdly emotional about competence in general. About people who know how to do things, real concrete physical things, and do them well. My dad could fix a car. Uncle Pete could build furniture. My aunt Deb can shear a sheep and fix a fence post and knows exactly how much garden space a family needs to get through winter. I spent years thinking of those skills as background, as context for a life, and this one lumpy pine pedalboard shelf made me understand that they ARE the life. The knowing is the point. I want more of it.
I love you all. Go make something with your hands today, even if it's imperfect. ESPECIALLY if it's imperfect.