Box #1,000,000: A Retrospective on My Lifelong Battle With Squares

At this point in my woodworking career, I’ve made so many boxes that archaeologists could dig up my shop in a thousand years and assume I was part of some ancient box‑worshipping civilization. They’d find layers of boxes — good ones, bad ones, crooked ones, “experimental” ones — and conclude that I must have been a high priest of the Church of Right Angles. Little would they know that I have never successfully made a right angle on the first try.

My relationship with boxes started innocently enough. A simple project, they said. Great for beginners, they said. Just four sides and a lid, they said. What they didn’t say was that a box is a deceptively evil shape. A square looks harmless, but it has infinite ways to betray you. Every time I think I’ve mastered it, the square laughs and says, “Try again, buddy.”

By the time I hit box number 100, I thought I was getting the hang of it. By box number 500, I realized I was not. By box number 1,000, I accepted that boxes were my destiny — not because I’m good at them, but because I keep messing them up and starting over. And now, here I am at box number one million (give or take a few hundred thousand), still fighting the same battles with the same four sides.

The biggest problem is that a box requires things to be square. And nothing in my shop is square. Not the boards, not the tools, not the table, not my sense of direction. I’ll measure a board, cut it, check it with a square, and somehow it’s still off by a degree and a half. I’ve made boxes that lean. Boxes that wobble. Boxes that close only when the humidity is exactly 42%. I once made a box so out of square that it looked like it was trying to escape the workbench.

And yet, I keep making them. I keep sketching new designs, each one more ambitious than the last. I draw perfect corners, perfect proportions, perfect symmetry. On paper, I’m a master craftsman. On paper, I’m a woodworking legend. In the shop, I’m a guy staring at a lid that doesn’t fit, wondering how I lost 1/8” of material without touching anything.

My family has learned to accept this. They’ll ask for a “small box,” and I’ll proudly hand them something that started as a medium box, then became a slightly smaller box, then became a tiny box after I trimmed all the mistakes. They smile and say, “It’s adorable!” which is code for “We can tell this wasn’t the original size, but we love you anyway.”

Over the years, I’ve developed a kind of box taxonomy. There are the “almost square” boxes. The “don’t look too closely at the lid” boxes. The “rustic charm” boxes. The “gravity‑assisted closure” boxes. And, of course, the “this was supposed to be a gift but now it’s shop storage” boxes. Each one tells a story, and none of the stories make me look competent.

But here’s the thing: every box — even the crooked ones, the warped ones, the ones that accidentally became parallelograms — has taught me something. Usually what it taught me is what not to do, but that still counts as learning. And somewhere in the pile of bizzilion boxes, there are a few that actually turned out pretty good. Not perfect, but good enough that I didn’t immediately hide them in the scrap bin.

So yes, I’ve made a million boxes. And yes, most of them have “character.” But I keep making them because each one is a tiny adventure. A tiny challenge. A tiny reminder that woodworking is less about perfection and more about persistence — and the ability to laugh at yourself when your “simple square” turns into a geometric mystery.

And who knows — maybe box number one million and one will finally be the perfect one. Probably not. But hope springs eternal, especially in the heart of a woodworker who refuses to surrender to four sides and a lid.