Anna Wanted Shelves

Anna wanted floating shelves.

Two planks. Some brackets. An hour with a drill. Every kitchen on Pinterest has them. I said I’d handle it.

I came home from my first day at my friend Casey’s woodshop and sat her down to explain why floating shelves were actually the wrong move. What we really needed was a freestanding shelving unit. Something we could take with us if and when we moved. Something with real craftsmanship. I may have used the phrase “long-term value.”

She looked at me the way she’s looked at me many times before. I turned a three-hour project into a hundred-hour project.

I have two walnut planks from my dad’s backyard. The tree came down years ago and my dad had it milled. They’ve been sitting around waiting for me to do something with them. Which meant they couldn’t just be shelves.

I shaped the legs by hand. I built a poplar supporting base. I put through dowels with little brass pins in them that absolutely nobody will ever notice or care about except me. I spent hours on the finish. Every time I came home from the shop, Anna would ask with a smile, “you almost done yet?” This happened many times.

Somewhere in the middle of the build, I screwed up. Cut domino holes in the wrong spot on the shelf surface. Ugly rectangular slots staring up at me from the face of a walnut plank I’d been saving for years. The kind of mistake that makes you want to start over.

In woodworking, there’s a fix called a bowtie. It’s a small piece of wood shaped like a bowtie that you chisel into the surface. You trace around it, carve out the recess, glue it in, and sand it flush. It doesn’t hide the mistake. It replaces it. What was a screw-up becomes a design element. By the time it’s sanded and finished, it looks like it was always supposed to be there.

I didn’t plan the bowtie. It exists because I messed up. It’s my favorite part of the whole piece.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. That’s the name of this newsletter and I think about it differently now than when I started. It doesn’t mean lower your standards. It doesn’t mean “done is better than perfect” in that annoying LinkedIn way. It means you can shoot for the moon and still make peace with the mistakes.

You can spend a hundred hours on something that was supposed to take three, not because you’re chasing perfection, but because the long-form progress IS the thing. The extra hours aren’t wasted. They’re where you figure out what you’re actually building.

The bowtie isn’t a compromise. It’s the best part. And it’s just one of many mistakes in this piece that nobody is ever going to notice or care about. The polyurethane isn’t perfect. There are cracks I didn’t fix. Joints that are close but not exact. I could have kept going. I didn’t.

The shelves are up now. Walnut from the yard, holding a Le Creuset and a stack of cookbooks over my daughter’s snack basket. Anna loves them. Not because of the brass pins or the bowtie or the hand-shaped legs. She loves them because they hold stuff and they look good in the corner. And because I love them.

I love them because of the brass pins and the bowtie.

Anna wanted floating shelves. A hundred hours later, she got something else. She would have been fine with the brackets.

-Jake