That is the advantage of the poly plane extrusion method you build the geometry in small steps so it is easier to keep the geometry under control. As opposed to starting at a high level primitive and then having to add lots of control edges and route them all over.

I also am a big fan of breaking the model down into parts rather then trying to make one gigantic unified mesh.

I did not clean the polys up much. There are lots of hidden ones that I would remove in the UV process. The handle had to have thickness and as a result has a lot of hidden polys.