Buying a biscuit jointer helped a pile, but it still turned my "couple of weekend's work" bench into a couple of months solid effort. One of the most laborious jobs was cutting the dovetail joins for the drawers, which I did by hand. The first one is pretty average, but I learned reasonably quickly that if you do the markup with a scalpel, and sharpen your chisels often, they actually work pretty well.
Here's what a dovetail looks like together. No, you can't see my first try.
Once the drawers are assembled, there's a happy home for all my sharp things, where they won't get full of dust and shavings.
Noisy stuff gets stored in the cupboards underneath. Maggot really loves the cupboards, as they're joined up, so he can go in one end and come out the other.
And there's even just enough room to squeeze between the arse end of Elena and the new bench with the garage door closed.
Now that there's more room, I figured it'd be nice to put bigger speakers in the garage. These are old Infinity 1500's. They have 8" woofers and play bad eighties rock really well when driven from a little 50 watt MOSFET amp. I finished the base with a couple of coats of Scandinavian oil and used linseed oil thinned out with gum turpentine for the top.
Now, I seem to recall I was building something else out of wood before I got sidetracked with bench making...