For the last two weeks I’ve been neck-deep in casework – a Monticello bookcase in walnut with pine backboards that is for a long-time customer in Michigan. I haven’t posted much about it because it’s been 10 days of the same: mark, saw, chop, pare. Then repeat until your boogers look like walnut dust (mine do).
But it has given me a lot of time to think about David Pye. Just kidding. Really. No, come back.
Instead, I have had time to think about how casework is different than making chairs. The truth is, they aren’t different. We just think they are different because – for some reason – most of us do only one or the other. Same goes with turning, carving, marquetry etc.
Both chairmaking and casework are about joining pieces of wood. You have to cut to a line. Get a few angles right. Apply a finish. And make sure the structure is sound and can survive seasonal wood movement.
Some aspects of chairmaking might seem foreign – green wood, weird angles and a few new tools. But it’s still wood. And your tools are still steel. The only real difference between the two disciplines is the fact that you think they are different. Or that you think that one is harder than the other.
I am serious, it’s all in your head.
One of the greatest privileges in my career has been to work with accomplished woodworkers all over the globe to help them transform their ideas into a magazine article or a book. The more I worked with these talented people the more I realized that picking up a new skill, such as double-bevel marquetry, is about learning a handful of techniques that aren’t obvious.
To be certain, if you want to master any aspect of the craft, then that takes years of discipline. But if you just want to build a decent chair, carve some letters or turn a bowl – you can do that. Anyone can.
Richard recently finished reading David’s book, and wrote a review, which he posted on several woodworking forums. He writes:
” … The book is, listed here in no particular order, a mixture of biography, philosophical musings, design methodology built upon an artistic background, drawing as a means to express ideas and develop a personal library of forms, practical methods of working wood, client relations, tying up of loose ends, and so on. He is at turns chatty, reflective, opinionated, and explanatory, has his own way of working, generous to those that have helped or worked with him, and acknowledge his influences.”
And: ” … Do I agree with everything he says? No. Nor will most readers I suspect. On the other hand, he’s not afraid to say it as he sees it, and if you are challenged from time to time, which I was as a relatively experienced (but not well known) furniture designer maker it’s an opportunity to reflect and to evaluate what he says to see if he might be right, and I might be wrong, or vice-versa. If you are fairly new to the subject but possess a desire to develop your own point of view and philosophy, here is a book, along with other sources of information of course, that I think would be beneficial to read.”
You can read the entire review online at UKWorkshop (here) and WoodCentral (here).
You can read more about David’s book here, and more about Richard’s book here.
I made a chair sometime back that will be documented in the chair build section of my forthcoming book, “The Life & Work of John Brown.” Apart from my use of a battery-powered drill, it is pretty true to how I was taught by John Brown. I have kept this chair for the sometime, but alas it has found a fine new home close to where I live.
The hunt was on for a suitable location to photograph it for the book. Heather Birnie, the photographer, and I visited a few properties and settled on a wonderful local Welsh farmhouse. The owners already own two of my chairs and were happy to help. They also run a gin distillery at the farm, Jin Talog. I also had a trump card up my sleeve. I had been offered to borrow what is reputed to be the last chair that John Brown ever made.
This made the day a special one, as I hadn’t seen that chair since 2002. The scalloping of the comb had a memorable story behind it as we both had an adventure a year earlier where we got to see an 18th-century Welsh stick chair chair with a similar detail. JB was inspired to replicate the detail in his own way. John Brown had strangely forgotten to chamfer the ends of the legs – one had chipped whilst dragged across the floor. It was a quick fix, and I gave it a coat of wax polish. It’s a fine chair that sits well and comfortable. I felt honoured to spend a few days with his last ever chair.
A craftsman whose work I have long admired recently mentioned that he’d noticed lots of kitchens in my Instagram feed and asked whether I enjoy the work or just do it to pay the bills.
“A friend in advertising gave me this advice,” he continued. “’Only show what you want to sell,’ so I have no kitchen photos, and slowly transitioned entirely into furniture.”
My answer to his question: I do enjoy building kitchens—in fact, I love it—and I do it to pay the bills. It’s because I have bills to pay that I’ve cultivated the ability to make my work lovable.
I am one of those people who thrive on necessity. Were I independently wealthy, I would likely vacillate between paralyzing depression and the kind of perfectionism that prevents some of us from completing anything. Like the strictest teachers, necessity is my ally as well as my taskmaster.
This corner is nearly done. This 16″-deep cabinet will stand across from the fridge, so it will hold the kinds of things used for storing food (storage containers, food bags, wrapping materials) and function as a tea and coffee making area, with a drawer for boxes of tea, coffee filters, etc. The marble counter will have a tiled backsplash and integral lighting. The shelf above will house the microwave (we discussed whether it should be out or behind doors; given the way this family uses the kitchen, the decision was to leave it in the open, as this corner is not visible from the dining room). The cabinet is still waiting for trim at the ceiling, door and drawer pulls, and paint.
“I hated working outside the shop,” the long-admired craftsman added by way of elaboration. “Invariably there was always a tool I’d forgotten, and I detested working on my knees. Also dealing with crooked walls, sloping floors, and supervising customers.”
My knees and I can relate to all of this (especially at my own age of 59, when I am receiving unsolicited mail from purveyors of hearing aids).
Working on a jobsite takes you into a realm where you are not in charge. It’s like captaining a sailboat on the Great Lakes. You have to roll with what comes, whether that means scribing cabinets to a madly sloping floor/wall/ceiling, improvising in the tool department, or responding to a customer’s comment out of left field. (My favorite example of the latter comes from Ben Sturbaum of Golden Hands Construction, one of the wittiest carpenters I know, who answered a French customer’s criticism of his kitchen trim installation with “Do not judge my soufflé before it is finished.”)
Remodeling a kitchen is a hefty proposition at the best of times. On almost every job, there comes a point where I wonder why I take on such work. To continue the comparison with sailing, it’s that moment when the captain props her eyes open with toothpicks to enable an all-night traverse across the vastness before an approaching storm. Between the sheer scale of most kitchen jobs, the centrality of the kitchen to the customers’ daily life–you will be held responsible for the inconvenience of dishwashing in the bathtub, as well as for the fine layer of dust that inevitably circulates around the house, even with excellent dust barriers, though I wonder how much of that dust simply results from the cessation of house cleaning while a major remodel is underway–and the out-of-your-shop/comfort-zone reality of installing and trimming out built-ins, building a kitchen is an odyssey in the truest sense of that word. It will challenge your patience, your improvisational abilities, and maybe most importantly, your capacity for bending your will to necessity.
And that’s exactly what I love—though I should add that I love it partly because I don’t do kitchens all the time but intersperse them with freestanding furniture, design, teaching, and writing. The variety keeps me sane. I know this because I spent many years building furniture and cabinetry without the respite of writing and design.
Notched around the cased opening between kitchen and dining room, this birch counter is finished to match the house’s original trim.
But even more than the challenges of kitchen work, I love the opportunity kitchens offer to work with context. I’ll save that for next time.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work.
For a detailed look at some of the decisions that went into this kitchen’s design, click here.
The Little House, our first structure on the farm.
I’ve never pushed woodworking on my daughters. My shop door has always been open to my family, and I’m happy when they elect to hang out there or even help a bit. Perhaps I’m making a serious mistake, but I cannot bear to impose even the most basic skills upon them – sharpening, sawing, drilling, planing, whatever.
Though I know these skills would serve them well, I fear I would inadvertently drag them into the deepest end of my personal obsession. I know this because I have been there, gasping for breath and trying to simply tread water.
Shortly after our family moved to Arkansas in the early 1970s, my parents bought an 84-acre farm outside Hackett on Hill Top Lane. The plan was to design and build a gorgeous home with our own hands and move there, away from the city. We’d raise strawberries in the farm’s bottomland. My mom promised me I could raise goats.
The nice part about this plan was my parents bought a drafting table and a huge quantity of books on carpentry, architecture, hand tools and folkways. I was interested in all of these things and devoured everything I could about water witching, saw sharpening and Prairie-style architecture.
The miserable part of the job was the work itself. My first memory of our farm was digging post holes for the so-called “Little House,” our family’s first foray into Early Rural Hippie Architecture. The foundation was made of reclaimed telephone poles that needed to sit on footers below the frost line. So into the holes we went with tiny spades.
I know this isn’t true, but I felt like we spent almost every weekend at the farm, installing a compost toilet, nailing on decking boards, digging fence post holes, startling the local turkeys and armadillos.
The Big House, early on in its construction.
Construction took years. I was probably about eight or nine years old when it began, and by the time I was in junior high we started on the “Big House.” This was an enormous structure with a greenhouse, a huge kitchen for my mom and a beautiful two-story stone chimney. The kids would have their own part of the house, separate from the adults. There would be sleeping porches and a gorgeous view of the Boston Mountains.
By this time my sisters and I were far more interested in our friends than working outside without air conditioning. We resisted every effort to drag us to the farm on the weekends. And eventually my parents relented. My dad continued to work there almost every weekend (as far as I can remember) until my parents divorced when I was 21.
Working on the farm made a deep mark on me. It compelled me to escape Arkansas for the city (I chose Chicago) and do something with my brain instead of my hands and my back. While in college, people asked me what it was like growing up in Arkansas. I would reply: “Just watch the movie ‘Mosquito Coast.’ I consider it a documentary.”
But here’s the funny thing: Three years after graduating from journalism school, I was taking a night course in furniture making. I had set up shop on our back porch in Lexington, Ky. I was reading Fine Woodworking magazine and was back to drowning myself on books on furniture, architecture and mountain craft. In 1996, I sealed my fate by taking a job with Popular Woodworking magazine.
Sometimes I don’t know if I should thank my father (now deceased) or what. It’s complicated.
So I decided to let my daughters find their own way. They know what handmade furniture is like, and they genuinely appreciate it – our house is filled with the stuff. And my shop door is still open to them if they ever decide to stick a toe into this giant lake.
But I’m just not strong enough, willful enough or obsessed enough to push them in.
