What's Your Craft?
Woodworking and humancraft have much in common. Where do you find solace
What did you do during Covid?
With so much going on, this might be a good time to reflect on how we got here and what we did to occupy our time. During Covid, with college kids returning to parental lock up via government decree, old hobbies surfaced and the excuse of no time vanished.
I turned a one car garage into a full blown woodshop. Mainly to escape an estrogen entrapment. But it became total immersion, a daily job the government paid me to stay home and do. And the universe obliged. I worked in the found object side of woodcraft. Mornings were usually spent stooping and scrounging.
Driving along one morning, I discovered this treasure. Remodeled or demo’d house scraps are Holy Grail sites for stoopers, scroungers, and scrappers. In the foothills of Azusa CA, this barn door made itself available for refinish.
The old dude that owned the house rescued it from an actual barn “up in the canyon that burnt down.” Interesting parallel to some bridges I’d burnt down and now trying to find ways to cross back again.
I was voluntold by the local Community Garden Commandant to construct an enclosure to conceal a garbage can, but make it look old. The scrolled slats were part of a section of a white picket fence that used to frame a family’s hopes and dreams. They now hide the trash we don’t want people to see. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there.
The pieces below were found at different places and reborn at different times, but somehow, these oddballs, misfits, and throw-aways all came back to life with a little love and care. And now they fit together like some kind of crazy family.
Yeah, that’s a 1960s hanging lamp made into a planter. It was from a house in San Clemente, hence the surfboard connection. The skateboard above was located without trucks or wheels, making it hard to for it to call itself a skateboard. An old pallet symbolizes the found wood we used to create ramps back in the day.
Here are a couple of tossed-out tables that found some new life in the hands of a caring craftsman. The top one had some weird glossy shellac-type finish on a super-thin veneer - notice the left-front corner where the sandpaper bit in too hard. It’s the battle scars that keep score in the game of life, I guess.
The bottom table sat on the patio of its owners mom for “a bunch of years. It may have had plants on it.” It was deeply damaged, from multiple abuses and decades of neglect. Once it got some attention, it’s natural beauty began to show itself. It was one of my most impactful jobs. When the owner first saw it, she started crying. She said she had not seen it in that condition since before her dad died.
I refused to take any money for this one, it just seemed her reaction was the payoff. The next week, we found a rolled-up wad of cash thrown over the fence into our patio. It was $100 and a note that said “thank you.” Coincidence, I guess.
The shadow boxes are sources of particular pride. They were the red-flock-lined drawers of a jewelry armoire. Top one contains childhood mementos of yours truly, and the bottom belongs to the softball playing daughter. Maybe some memories can live behind glass, never to be forgotten or distorted.
This is a function-first minimalist piece from leftovers. Like with food and other things, maybe we should start calling them freshenovers?
This group of ladder shelves share the same shape and style but carry very different items. We all have various loads and some structures are built to handle heavier weights than others.
Old bed frames and forgotten forms, relics of things that used to be. Some hang by a thread and others are made of solid timber. But whatever burdens they bear, they’re important to the things on the shelf.
The best for last - an old (lol) 1980s era corner china hutch that literally had a lifetime worth of shellac and cigarette smoke saturated into the grain. Replacing the glass-doors on the top with an X-Cube solves wine bottle storage, while the drawer becomes the cheese storing and serving solution.
Little touches like wood-burnt detail and glass-hanging rails add to the functional fashion for this piece of refurbished furniture. It’s kind of nice to notice something solid from the past and give it a chance to find new relevance today. The unseen surprise is the multi-color bluetooth light bulb that disco-fied this whole thing. This was a $2500 project, and one that I very much enjoyed.
Let me know your favorite piece in the comments and please share and like at will. I’ve welcomed aboard almost one new subscriber per day over the last two months, which has been very rewarding.
Please give us a shot and we will make your life way better. Just ask anyone here. Speaking of throwbacks, here is the first playlist I made for CSW. Enjoy.