This is a walnut coffee table I built as a Christmas present for my parents. It is my first large project, my first walnut/hardwood project, and my first indoor furniture project.

This is project will also be submitted for /r/Woodworking's 2015 Year in Review Challenge. 2015 was the year I started woodworking. This project was the last project of 2015 that I completed.

I built a letter holder as my first project in April. It looks terrible. There is glue sticking through the finish, poor joinery, and I only had a cheap stanley miter box, a few F-clamps, a block plane, and a mini fridge to use as a workbench, but it opened my eyes to the beauty and fun of the craft. My wife and I still use the letter opener to this day as a reminder of my humble beginnings.

I did not build anything for a while, then in August, I built an adirondack set for a friend of mine.I learned many new techniques in this project, including: filling knots with epoxy, gluing up and flattening the top by hand, using a making and using a drawing batten, card scraper, tuning up and using a spokeshave, using a pocket hole jig, using BLO and wipe on poly, and how to take down the "plasticky" look of the wipe on poly and applying furniture wax. My only regret with this build is that I could not use mortise and tenons. I practiced cutting some by hand, and I just did not feel comfortable enough incorporating them into this project. I hope you enjoy looking at my build. There were many lessons learned along the way! While I have much to learn, I feel that I also have learned a lot in my short time woodworking.I look forward to learning more form this community at SimpleCove! Thank you for looking!



P.S- Sorry for the poor quality build photos and only a few of them. I took a ton of photos in the start of this project, and then I went through a camera crisis. I was left with only the pictures in this album, which are unfortunately of poor quality. One of these days I'll get a dedicated shop camera.