Browsing through my phone, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to make a blog post about the pallet frame cabinet completion last year.
We ended up having a bit of a tight deadline for the completion, since it was a wedding gift for Klaras friend. Furthermore I had to remain calm and pedagogical while trying to explain that: If you want the cabinet to be completed in time - well then you need to work on it.
For some reason it was very hard to understand that you couldn't both go to the movies or go to a sauna all evening and at the same time work on the cabinet. And that realization was really hard to fathom.
But after I had explained very clearly that the clock was ticking, and that I had spent hours helping, which was why I sort of expected some effort being put into completing the project, Klara saw what I meant and worked at it.
Klara originally intended to paint the cabinet, but lack of time made this impossible. I told her that the recipient would no matter what be thrilled to receive a homemade cabinet, and that painting was one of the things that she could easily do at home without my tuition.
She also needed to decide on a closing mechanism (magnetic or latch type)
Lessons learnt:
For young people it is very hard to miss out on anything social in favour of a project that they have started themselves. So I should probably have advocated for a much less complicated project from the start. But I had been completely honest with the amount of time that it would take to build something like that, and also described how it could be achieved by a steady effort each day for maybe a couple of hours. But somehow the coupling between doing other stuff for 6 days and suddenly be short of time was not clear.
The actual build was helped a lot by the fact that we had a table saw at our disposal and also a thickness planer.
Mouldings really help giving a finished look, as does a raised panel door.
It itched in my fingers to do part of the project myself, to speed up the process, but I managed to not do it, I wanted it to be her build, and I would only make sample joints so she could see how they should be carried out.
Men don't get the support that their efforts deserve. You demonstrate your patient fathering skills and your daughter will reap the benefits for the rest of her life from this lesson
ReplyDeleteHi Mitchell,
DeleteYes except this wasn't my daughter, but an engineer apprentice that worked on the training ship. So I really had a hard time being super fatherly patient :-)
Brgds Jonas