As an endlessly renewable resource, wood can be used to make pretty much anything that doesn't involve fire or water.
I quite like the idea of working a single piece of into something useful or useless and functional or decorative. I don't really own anything that I would consider irreplaceable except for a 1950s Danish teak desk. It's beautifully made and ironically I got it for a very low price because someone who didn't know what they were doing took a belt sander to it.
The best I could hope for would be to gradually move along the skill-spectrum from belt-sander to precision hand tools. From ruiner to creator.