Common references and small mistakes

Playhouses | Making easements | Some thoughts on power and purpose

Hello and welcome to Hungry Woodworker, a newsletter mostly about woodworking, sometimes about other topics. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do when I’m not working is write; some get edited into essays, which I share every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.

My brief hiatus is over and I’m excited that July is wrapping up. The world is entirely too hot for my liking and I look forward to the day I can dip my body in the new cooling white paint that scientists created and begin reflecting up to 98.1% of the sun’s rays back into the atmosphere.

During my break, I worked with several families to help build playhouses for the kids’ school. Dad donated Red Oak for the project, which we planed and cut and then worked on a crew to assemble the structures. I enjoyed the project—and remembered to take photos!

My essay follows. I hope you have a good week and stay as cool as the suavest cucumber!

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Notes from my journal:

Small mistakes compound.

Window 3/8” lower than its counterparts. Sighting down from one end of the room it almost looks like the builders were creating stair steps on the wall, each window seemed to hop down a little lower than the next.

Some context: Last week I began working once more with the master woodworker (who also happens to be a master carpenter!) from Lanesboro. Instead of fine furniture, though, she’s teaching me about carpentry and how to renovate a space. She has a long history with construction, having been raised by a carpenter and brought into the family business early in life.

She’s been renovating several rooms in a brewery owned by her friends who are expanding their business because Lanesboro is hopping. It’s an artsy town with an adorably American main street of small businesses, eclectic items for sale, and good eating.

This is my outsider’s perspective. I’m no Bill Bryson, so I don’t have any charming, amusing stories of chance encounters with locals from my ambles about town. But the place is cute. Lots of people in the region seem to agree, as evidenced by their increasing visits to the area.

My first day I learned to make window easements. It took me most of the day to remember that word, easements. Made me think of peasants scraping by on some feudal lord’s land. “Please sir, may I have another easement?”

This is the only photo I thought to take the last few days I’ve been working.

The section of the room we were renovating is about 40’ x 15’ or so (as with everything I write, take any numbers you see here with a healthy dose of salt). I don’t want to criticize anyone else’s work—this newsletter is not a space to badmouth others¹—however, it seems that perhaps the carpenters who installed the windows didn’t use a common reference point, so there is vertical variation.

When you stand back away from the wall, the deviations aren’t glaringly obvious between the six windows in need of easing. The window openings vary in their distances from the floor, but then again, the floor is also crooked. So to find a common point to measure from, we measured from the bottom of the window openings up to the rafters in the ceiling.

Which told us that the farthest window to the left was 3/8” lower than the window farthest to the right.

Once all the walls are up and stained and the whole area is finished, I said I didn’t think anyone would be able to tell. The master carpenter looked at me and said that a woodworker or carpenter would notice.

On this she’s probably right. I’m abashed to say I am not such a one. My attention to detail when I’m not working is appallingly low. I notice changes in a room well enough not to run into them, but am often so in the powdery puff of my own thoughts that I fail to see obvious, sometimes frightfully big amendments to the physical space around me.

Think disheveled professor without the wild white hair and mangled clothes.

One example: years ago, Josiah and I were having some dead trees around our house removed. They were big (no idea what species), maybe three or four? I had been at work all day and when I drove home I noticed the trucks and guys around the house, indicating that the work was finally being done. I parked in the driveway, got the kid and my stuff out of the car and bundled into the house. Went out the back door to check in with the crew, because I saw they were in the backyard, and asked when they’d be taking down the trees in the front yard.

The man looked at me with furrowed brow and a raised eyebrow. He informed me they’d already been cut down. I walked over, and sure enough, there were massive trees looking for all the world like they were napping on our lawn. Right beside the tiny gravel driveway where my car was parked.

Somehow this defect hasn’t stopped me from functioning, i.e., keeping the organism that is my body alive. And the upshot is that I can walk into any room and not notice the many mistakes builders made when they were giving that room its form.

However, as a person making window easements, as the assistant helping a master carpenter attach said easements around windows, those mistakes were maddening. But it was also the first time I’d ever made easements, so perhaps it was the learning curve bedeviling me. Oh! but it’s so hard to relinquish the cognitive satisfaction of blaming issues I was facing on the past mistakes of others.

Like those carpenters, any mistakes I made would have to be rectified at some future point. Choices made to get the task done at the expense of doing it well could get me through the now at the expense of the later.

Once the easements were done and installed, we turned our attention to attaching the wall material to the studs. And then those initial issues with the windows became even more tedious to navigate around. Mostly that fell to the master carpenter. As the helper it’s not on my shoulders to figure out how to handle those mistakes.²

But there is a lot to learn and I’m happy for the opportunity.

This week’s takeaway: Minor deviations can carve entirely new paths. In art that’s great, even if painful at the point of departure from what was expected.

In carpentry, not so much. Better to avoid the little mistakes earlier so they don’t compound into bigger ones later, even if that means more time upfront.

How neat! How pat! If only every lesson in life were doled out so precisely, like perfectly appointed servings of crudités on a handmade charcuterie board. Who among us does life approach this way?

I thought this essay was done, but there’s more I’m trying to work out. To me, all of this connects to purpose, power, who is expendable and who is valued, who gets appreciated and who gets chastised, how seductive it is to fall into the trap of pointing out all the flaws of everyone else but oneself. How comforting it feels to be able to step in and say, I can do it better, let me show you. That comfort of superiority.

To exist in the world without that blanket wrapped tightly around one’s ego is to be bare, exposed to elements that are as like to flay you as they are to ignore you. Which is worse?

I’m reading and thinking a lot about power dynamics lately. In my experience, there are too few people like the master carpenter, who see the work there is to do, who maybe lament the earlier mistakes of others but move on with keen focus to what needs to get done now.

I am drawn to such people, not because I see myself as one of them (this is not an attempt at some unsubtle self-flattery), but because I want to understand them better. Particularly the “set-your-shoulders” stance to the work ahead when it has gotten challenging and the mistakes have compounded into a seemingly neverending knot.

There’s more to examine, but this is good enough for today. I realize that’s an abrupt ending, but I think I’m going to write myself into knots if I continue.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, if you’re up to sharing them. Leave a comment or send me a reply.

1. There is a version of this newsletter that is possibly more delicious to read but more pockmarked with vitriol. And as delightful as it is to write such things, my sense is that the world has enough anger in it already, so why add more?

2. Clearly I’ve made a series of life choices that distance me from real-world responsibility in work settings. Mastery, it seems to me, brings with it more than skills and wisdom. It loads you up with the weight of responsibility, that “buck-stops-here” mentality and reliability. Given that, it’s a safe argument that many people in positions of power falsely believe in their own mastery and the value they bring to the systems within which they work. They lack mastery as I’m thinking of it, except, perhaps, that of bullshitting those higher up and bullying those lower down in a bid to retain their small shreds of power. Oops, apologies! I’m not meant to be badmouthing anyone. I’ll stop here.