The completed drop leaf table on the clients screened porch.
Recently, I’ve been looking back through old projects. I keep a record of projects by year and number them as they go out the door. I’ve been making a living as a wood worker for over 20 years now. During a large portion of that time, I was also building and running a non-profit. It’s hard to leave an organization, a business or even a relationship that you have spent 13 years building from nothing but sometimes it’s the best thing you can do for yourself. That was the case for me, fried from trying to make a boat building school, work and not satisfied with my own work. For years at the boat building school, I would have conversations with people who wanted to run away from their lives and become a boat builder. The first step is of course to run away. After convincing a friend who had been involved in the boat building school to take it over, I ran away to New York City and then to Massachusetts.
When my wife and I bought a place in Northampton, Massachusetts, we were looking for a house in which I could have a shop. The deal on the house we were going to buy, fell apart. The seller locked herself in the house on settlement day and refused to sign the papers. That left us with a few months to find a new place to buy. With three months left on our lease and my job as a boat building instructor in New York City winding down, we began to look for a home, putting our ideals aside. We ended up buying half of a two-family condo, with no space for a shop. Once in Massachusetts, I spent many months looking for work and trying to figure out what I was going to do. Having no success finding work and feeling the need to be proactive, I decided I would try to make a living as a furniture maker. I didn’t really know how I would make that happen. I was without access to a shop for the first time in 17 years. I also needed a website to be able to show a portfolio of work.
I knew that the only thing I could do was just to start. Eventually, I would hopefully have enough pieces to display on a website. As I was working to complete my first piece, friends that knew my work as a boat builder, asked me if I would design a table that would live outside on a screen porch for summer dining and be tucked away inside, when things began to get cooler. I designed a drop leaf table and we agreed I would use some beautiful pieces of locust they had because of a boat they were in the process of building. I had to put my first project as a furniture maker I was building for myself on hold and work on my first commission.
If you would have asked me how I was going to pull off making that table, I wouldn’t have had a good answer. I was just working out an arrangement where I could use some of the tools at a wood working school to mill wood for projects, in exchange for some work as a shop monitor. I was planning on doing most of the work on a rebuilt bench I set up in my basement in about 150 sq. ft. of space where I would bang my head on the heating ducts if I wasn’t careful.
What I was doing was starting the process of working as a furniture maker where I was, not where I wanted to be. It seems somewhat simplistic to me, writing these words. Yet I think is has very much been the key to my evolution as a wood worker. When working with novice wood working students, I often am asked what should be the next or first tool they should buy. The question always strikes me as off the mark. As if there is a string they might pull and wood working knowledge will simply unravel into their head and hands. There is a project you can do right now that will lead you further down the road to being the wood worker you want to become. It might not be an entertainment center for your living room or a dining table for your family. If it is something you can complete, being on the other side of it will advance your skills and knowledge further down the road then you were.
I came up with a design for the table, I and the client were happy with and dove in. The lessons came quickly as I worked through constructing the table. There was plenty I had not done, and the precision required for a piece of furniture was much higher than is necessary in a boat. At every step of the way, I pushed through. It would have been nice to build that table a few times in order to learn the lessons sufficiently to execute each step at the level I desired. Of course, that’s never a possibility, not to mention unproductive. Looking back at this table, built in 2014, I can’t help but be amazed by the joinery I choose. I haven’t given serious consideration to the methods I would use if I built the table again but knowing where I am today, I’m sure I would make some changes.
