We ripped out our kitchen on March 1 and have spent the last 10 weeks waiting for a safe time (with procedures sanctioned by state health officials) to resume the work. This week the cabinets arrived, and so I recruited Megan Fitzpatrick to help me make the maple countertops.
I haven’t written about this project because it is deeply personal. I do almost all the cooking in our house, and my ideas about kitchens are not in line with the mainstream. Frankly, I suspect I am a little off base, and I didn’t have the stomach for the criticism.
But there is one funny exchange I’d like to mention.
Today Megan and I built the 11’ section of countertop that has to be installed in pieces for a variety of reasons. I’d surfaced and glued up the maple and had gone into total “machine production” mode, like when I worked at a door factory.
So after cutting the components to size, I got out the sanders to dress the panels. After 5 minutes of sanding, Megan stopped her buzzing machine.
“I think a handplane would be faster,” she said.
I laughed. She was completely correct. I grabbed my jack plane and dressed both faces of the two countertops in less than 30 minutes. After I planed the first countertop, Megan began sanding the countertop to a higher grit.
I walked over to her bench with a card scraper and began dressing the surface.
We put the sanders away and spent the rest of the day blasting Jason Isbell’s new album, “Reunions,” and getting the job done faster, with crisper results.
Here in downtown Covington, we live with a lot of people who are in and out of homeless shelters. Plus, my wife’s job is to write about homelessness, poverty and social justice issues for a local television station. So it’s a topic at every dinner upstairs and at our storefront’s door everyday downstairs.
When we lived in the wealthier suburb of Fort Mitchell, I never answered the front door (our doorbell broke about 1998, and I never fixed it to achieve bliss). It was always someone trying to sell me wrapping paper or mulch. Or it was a political candidate or religious zealot – also selling something.
But here in Covington, I try to always open the door when it’s knocked. Sometimes it’s people looking for the upholstery shop one block down, or someone wondering what the heck we do here. And sometimes it’s someone who needs something. They might be experiencing homelessness, they might not.
I try not to judge. To some people, I look homeless. Last week I walked to Klingenberg’s hardware store to buy some glue, and I had two people stop me and direct me to the soup kitchen on Pike Street.
“Better hurry,” one said. “Today is hamburger day!”
For the most part, the visitors need some change for the bus, some toilet paper or to borrow a tool. We’re happy to help when we can. What is surprising is how often the visitor is there to help us. One guy gave us some rusted F-style clamps he found in an alley. Another woman, one of the prostitutes, found the car keys that a drywaller had dropped while doing some work for me.
A few months ago, a guy with no teeth began knocking at the door. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in a long time. On the way to the door I picked up the jar of change we keep for these occasions. I opened the door, looked him in the eye and said “Hi!”
“I think you lost this,” he said, holding up an engineer’s square. It was a little rusted, but was still in good shape. I told him it wasn’t mine.
“Someone dropped it out here in the gutter,” he said. “It looks too nice to be trash.”
I thought it might belong to one of our students, so I took it and thanked him.
We checked with the students who had attended recent classes – no one had lost a square. I checked the square for accuracy. It is dead-on ISO 9009 perfectly perfect. So I keep it in our machine room. Every time I pick it up it’s a small reminder to stay human, to keep opening our front door and that the first Tuesday of the month is hamburger day.
A Shaker rocking chair from the Union Village in Southeast Ohio.
Whenever I am asked to build a rocking chair, I say: “Sorry, I don’t make them. They are a totally different animal than what I build.”
But if you could centrifuge the polite Southerner out of my response, it might sound more like: “Gawd, I cannot abide rocking chairs.”
I know. It’s a weird hill to die on. But I have honestly never liked rocking chairs. I don’t like their limited functionality. I don’t like sitting in them. And I don’t like the way they look.
Some of you are thinking (while flinging your pizza crusts at the computer screen) that I have perhaps never sat in a good rocking chair. Not true. I have been to the mountain in Rancho Cucamonga. The first time I met Sam Maloof, he took me into his restored childhood home and let me sit in every one of the chairs there, including multiple rockers. The chairs were beautiful in every way. But when I sat in them, I felt the same way when I sit in any rocker – unsteady.
I like a chair that feels sturdy when it embraces you – not roll back on its heels like a tipsy aunt at a wedding. My regular chairs can be used for multiple tasks. You can type at a desk. Eat at a dining table. Play a guitar. Or sit back with a drink. And if you want to “rock,” you can tip back on the chair’s rear legs and balance.
Some people think this is savagery. I think it’s the best thing in the world.
Have you ever tried eating at the dinner table in a rocking chair? Or typing? I have, and it’s not fun.
I know you are thinking: Think of the children! Rocking chairs are designed to lull babies to sleep. That didn’t work with my kids. We had a rocking chair in the nursery and it just seemed to make them spit up more on my shoulder.
To be honest, I think rocking chairs are more symbolic than functional. Here in the South they are on most every porch. The Cracker Barrel restaurants will have 20 of them lined up outside for people waiting for their fried chicken dinner. The rocking chair symbolizes leisure time and relaxation. And maybe I’m just too tightly wound for that.
Or maybe I just get motion sick too easily. Mom says when I was a baby I’d throw up my hot dog lunch all over the car window during even a short trip.
So perhaps I should take two dramamine and shut the heck up.
Editor’s note: This is part of our series featuring some of our favorite columns from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward” years, along with a few sentences about why these particular columns hit the mark.
This column from 1942 speaks to the need to pass on our hard-earned skills, and as a teacher (and a member of the human race), that’s of utmost importance to me. What also strikes a chord is Hayward’s discussion in the opening paragraph of today’s work being divorced from creativity. While his “today” is more than half a century ago, I don’t think it’s changed much…except perhaps for the worse. I built a fair number of projects for Popular Woodworking (and for myself) before I became editor. After I was promoted, I spent all my time in meetings or at my desk. Editing involves some creativity – but it’s not the same as designing and building a tangible thing. And I missed sharing my own tangible work with others. I shouldn’t have let the long hours and employee reviews stop me.
Now, I’m happy to be back in the shop – and happier still when there are six to 10 others in there learning alongside me. But I think Hayward was wrong in saying kids today aren’t interested. Or maybe that was true in 1942. Now, almost every class I teach has “kids” in it. But the point is to teach – to pass it on. Woodworking is an art, but it shouldn’t be a mystery.
— Fitz
We have often discussed here that aspect of modern industrial life which has tended to divorce the work of many men from anything that is intelligently creative, because so much is done by machinery. Compensation comes in the increase of leisure which this allows, a leisure that does at least give a man an opportunity of finding his own interests or hobbies. But at the same time have come the counter-attractions of cinema and radio, offering an easy way of entertainment without effort to a man who is tired after his day’s work. So that, in spite of the increase of opportunity, he has every inducement to allow himself to drift. The older man usually knows how to strike the balance. Things were not so easy when he was a boy, he had to learn to amuse himself, and he grew up with all sorts of hobbies and enthusiasms, and learned to be a handy sort of fellow. If he is, say, a keen woodworker, or a keen gardener, there are times when nothing will tempt him away from the job in hand.
***
But for the younger generation it is different. They were born into the state of affairs where entertainment, like everything else, was made easy. And some of our Youth Leaders are now finding it difficult to get boys really doing things—boys in their teens with no particular hobbies, no particular interests, who simply want to be entertained, and that at a time when a boy should be so full of interests that no day is long enough to cram them all in. “I do not complain of growing old,” says John Buchan, “but I like to keep my faith that at one stage in our mortal existence nothing is impossible.” We feel that that should be so in youth, and yet here is the problem in our midst. “It gives you absolutely nothing to work on,” said one of their Leaders to me recently, a man who numbers photography, book-binding, carpentry and music among his own hobbies, and does them all extremely well. “They’ve no conception of taking the initiative themselves or doing a spot of work for the pleasure of it.”
***
What are we going to do about it? The gospel of “work for the pleasure of it” isn’t an easy gospel to preach to the young. You have got somehow to kindle the spark of enthusiasm in their minds first, that enthusiasm which can make everything seem well worth doing, even the hard bits, for the sake of the end in view. And it is the enthusiasm of the Youth Leaders from which the boys have got to catch their own tiny spark which, once alight, may well kindle into a flame. And it will be worth it. For they can learn more from intelligently working at a hobby than from almost anything else. It develops patience, ingenuity, alertness, self-mastery, helps them to discover their own hidden powers, teaches them the satisfaction of a good job done, widens their knowledge in a thoroughly practical way.
***
But we have no business to leave it all to the Youth Leaders. There is no easy time ahead for the boys of this generation and it is every man’s job to lend a hand where he can. The best place is in the home. If you are a keen woodworker, then try to interest your boy as well. Don’t just hustle him out of the way because you are in the middle of a job and don’t want to be interrupted, or are afraid he will meddle with your tools. Teach him how to use them; help him with some little constructive job of his own, if it is only to make a “safe”—as a small boy of my acquaintance did recently—to keep his secrets in! Small boys are usually keen enough. It is the older ones who grow apathetic. And who knows if the blame can be put entirely on the pictures? Mayn’t it be that we have hustled them out of our way rather too often? Dared them to touch our tools when they were simply longing to try them? The impulse to do and to make things is there right enough. But these are days when it needs to be fostered.
I wish I were a better sawyer. Sometimes I wish I could pull off a nice French polish. But mostly, I wish I could stick to the script.
When I teach people how to make a chair, tool chest, workbench or anything, really, I find myself presenting it as a series of ritualistic steps. I do this, I suppose, because it’s how I approach many small tasks in the workshop.
If I follow every step to the letter, I end up with a beautiful furniture component. If I don’t, then it’s “Klaatu! Barada!… mumble mumble.” And the next thing you know the Army of the Dead shows up, and the project is hacked to pieces.
Sam Rami references aside, I am a strict ritualist when it comes to small tasks in the workshop. To me, they are not constricting. They are like singing old hymns in church. Everything you need for a transcendental experience is right there on the page. Just follow the notes.
When I glue up a chair, I have a ritual. Every part has been numbered in the same way since I built my first chair 17 years ago. Every leg points to its mortise. Every tool is laid out the same way since back when I barely had a beard.
When I assemble a dovetailed case, I have even more complex rituals for marking, clamping and checking for square.
(Side note: These rituals aren’t static. They are improved upon little by little until I get the same results every time. And I’m always open to altering them if I can find [and then test] a better way.)
These rituals didn’t come from a book. Or from a teacher. Instead, they came from grief after a failed operation. So I sat down and figured out what steps would prevent that failure from ever happening again. They are my own private religion.
And they sometimes put me in my own private hell. Today I was laminating some wide boards of Southern yellow pine face to face. I have a ritual for that, which I first created when I built my $175 Workbench in 2001.
There are many parts to this ritual (stand up, sit down, kiss yourself). But the most important parts are:
Clamp. Check both sides of the joint for gaps. Walk away for 5 minutes. Retighten the clamps all to the same pressure.
Let the assembly sit in the clamps for a minimum of five hours. Overnight is better.
Today as I removed the assembly from the clamps, I realized I had forgotten an important part of the ritual – checking both sides of the joint for gaps. I turned the component over, and it was a mess. I asked myself: Can I live with this?
And that triggered another ritual: “If I ask myself a question, then I already know the answer.”
I set the crap part aside to be salvaged in some way. And I went down to the basement to get more yellow pine.
Editor’s note: This is part of our series featuring some of our favorite columns from “
