Last Sunday at church, my friend Jay started asking me about making a butcher-block table. He is a handy young man, and had decided that the butcher-block tables that he and his wife had been looking at were simply too rich for his blood. He asked me what I thought purchasing the lumber to make the table would cost. While admitting that it was the wildest of guesses, I gave him my estimate. That number was apparently not to his liking either -- so he asked me if he cut some trees down on his property, could he build a butcher-block table from that? (Jay has the heart of a woodworker, for sure!)

Which got me to thinking, so many of us have wanted to chop a tree down, make it into lumber and then “build something.” For woodworkers, it is a common goal. So my question is … how many of you have done it? And if you did, how did the effort go?

Let me know, and I will put the best of your letters in the Feedback department.

Rob Johnstone, Woodworker’s Journal