The Shop I Built to Avoid the Shop
I run a woodworking studio and I haven’t built anything for myself in about three years.
Not nothing. I teach, so I’m pushing wood through a saw most weeks. We built benches and storage and assembly tables when we reshuffled the layout last spring. I’m in that building five or six days a week. But a piece of furniture that was mine, made because I wanted to make it and not because a class or the shop needed it, I’d have to go back to before the Joinery opened to find the last one.
So how does a guy who owns a wood shop manage that? The easy answer is that I’ve been busy, and it’s true. This past year we sold the house in Lodi we’d lived in for sixteen years, moved to Middleton, watched Simon finish high school, and I had a product at ETC go on hold right as we were launching it. Any one of those is a real thing to be dealing with. But the busy answer is also the convenient one, because there’s always a version of it. There was a reason last year and there’ll be a reason next year, and the Joinery itself has become a reliable supplier of them. The shop I built to do the work is good at keeping me from doing the work.
What’s strange is that I don’t feel starved for it. I get plenty of woodworking. I just don’t get it by making anything. Teaching keeps me around the work, and it scratches enough of the itch that I can go a long stretch without noticing I haven’t built a thing. On top of that I read about it. I’ll find a good blog post or pull a book off the shelf, get excited, start sketching a project in my head, and that excitement feels a lot like doing. It isn’t. It’s the menu, not the meal. But it’s close enough to fool me, and it asks nothing of me, so I keep reaching for it.
And it isn’t only that I’m busy. When a free day does show up, I notice I still don’t always spend it at the bench. Some of the work intimidates me. Forty years in, there are cuts and joints I’m not sure I can still pull off, and rather than find out, I’ll sit down at the computer and run some analysis for three hours, because I’m good at that and I can do it anywhere. Part of what I’m avoiding is the answer. If I go back to the bench after this long, I might find the work isn’t where I left it.
So here’s the thing I keep not saying. It isn’t really that I’m too busy, though I am. It’s that I built my whole life around being a maker, and somewhere in the building I quietly stopped making. I became the guy who runs the place where making happens, who teaches other people to do it, who reads about it at night. All of that is real, and I’m not sorry I do it. But none of it is the thing itself, and I’d let the thing itself slide for three years without quite admitting it was gone.
I’m trying something now, and I don’t know whether it’ll hold. I’ve blocked out the week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights and most of Saturday are Joinery work. Monday, Friday, and Sunday I’m supposed to be off, and one of those open days I go into the shop and build something that’s mine. Not for a class, not for the shop. Mine. Moving to Middleton helps, in a dumb practical way: my commute went from twenty-five miles to three, which is close to an hour a day I didn’t have, enough to plan a cut or order wood during the week so the day itself doesn’t get eaten by getting ready.
I’m about two weeks in. So far I’ve held to it, and I’m not going to pretend that means much yet. I know how good I am at keeping a promise to myself right up until the calendar fills back in. The thing I’m actually worried about isn’t whether I’ll ever build another decent piece of furniture. It’s that I could spend the rest of my making years near the work instead of in it and never notice the difference, because being near it feels so much like doing it. I’d rather find out now whether I can close that gap. I’ll let you know how it goes.
