Simple Table

Over the summer between my junior and senior years of highschool, I went for the fifth year to a summer camp called Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions. At this camp, I completed several projects which may be less technically impressive than others listed elsewhere. However, I believe they demonstrate a different type of aptitude, namely the ability to work from scratch with limited resources and time to create a functional item. There are three total projects I will be writing about, and I intend for them to be understood in this sense.

With that being said, this project was building the table pictured above. I was using material I found the camp had leftover from other miscellaneous projects throughout its history. I found the tabletop itself fairly quickly, shortly followed by the legs, and I thought that I had the vast majority of the hurdle out of the way. However, I quickly found that there were many small details that would pose a significant challenge. Screws that could hold those legs on sturdily were not easy to come by. Cutting the angles on the bracing 2x4s accurately required making a new dust guard for a table saw. All these small things (and countless others) are what made the project both rewarding and challenging.

Additionally, these small issues often led into one another. For example, once I found screws strong enough to hold the legs on (left over from a recent renovation of cabins), I discovered there wasn’t a drill strong enough to drive the screws into to the wood. What ended up happening was I had to go into a nearby town to get a drillbit to make a pilot hole so the screw would take less effort to send into the wood.

I think overall having completed this project gave me more versatile skills to improvise solutions to problems that arise during a partially completed project and still produce a result that is useable in line with the original intent. This is a valuable skill, because no project in the real world will ever actually go according to the exact original plan.