Grab one of the torches from your house, dig up a bunch of dirt, find an island someplace, build stairs up to a floating room. Walling off your doorway creates pretty much total safety.
Light prevents monster spawning, and being offshore usually prevents 'em too - at least, I think it does. I never saw any monsters spawn on the island I use now - only occasional pigs and sheep.
Anyway, you are now safe forever at night. You can make your islandhouse your main base, or use it as a temporary place while you build up an acceptable home on the mainland or whatever.
You can cook pork in a furnace. If you don't take out the cooked stuff, you can also stack cooked pork this way - you can't with any other method, so it's kinda exploit-y, but very handy.
You can use sticks, planks, and logs as furnace stuff. Logs and planks burn for 1 operation each, so there's no real reason to use logs. Sticks burn for half an operation, but like planks from logs, you get 4 from a plank, so you pretty much double efficiency in exchange for micromanagement sorta stuff. Coal burns for 8 operations, I believe - try to fire stuff 8 stuff per coal, I guess.
Get wood by punching trees. Only punch one section at a time.
Also, have lots of back up tools with you while you're doing stuff. Picks especially - might be handy to always have at least one back up sword, too.