For the past few months, it’s been stairs.
The right-angle conflict between treads and risers, and my sheer pigheadedness in not wanting to waste expensive materials.
I’ve been putting off fixing the basement stairs for months, ever since I made the rash decision to buy 11 birch treads — a heavy shopping-cart load of stairs — at a Saskatoon lumber store. I eased those steps safely into storage under the workbench, afraid of damaging their surfaces with something as simple and small as a speck of gravel caught between them as they slid over each other, or by the inevitable error of “measure twice, cut too short once anyway.”
I will never be a carpenter — they have the confidence, familiarity and comfort with wood that I have with words, and the implicit knowledge of when things are going wrong, even if they, like I do with a sentence, cannot effectively explain why.
But working with wood can be like an easy vacation for me: calculating how to do something, measuring repeatedly, and making near-incomprehensible notes to myself on random pieces of scrap paper somehow lets me disconnect from the workday and any other trailing discordant pieces of the rest of my life.
Clearly, I will never be a carpenter. But I like being a problem solver, and solving carpentry problems sometimes helps me do things as simple as falling asleep. Over the last few months, I’ve spent plenty of nights, just before easing down into sleep, thinking about how to handle the necessary right-angle meeting between riser and step, and how to ensure that connection is a strong and lasting one.
Sometimes, I wake up at 2 a.m. and fall asleep all over again, puzzling over the same woody equation. It’s important to calculate a way to do it right. The right right angle.
Because woodwork isn’t about today or tomorrow. It could even be about someone years from now perhaps having to disassemble your work, and maybe, just maybe, marvelling for a moment or two at your ingenuity.
I’ve worked with wood for years. I built things — badly — in shop class in junior high. I cut and split firewood for years. (Somehow, as part of a true lumber education, I think an important part of understanding hardness and the vagaries of wood grain involves an axe and a chopping block.) I used the simplest of woodworking tools to start, all human-powered, handsaws and chisels and screwdrivers. Hammers that left dents in the wood, and hard steel unforgiving countersinks that weren’t supposed to.
I didn’t even have a screw-driving cordless drill until three years ago. I still do not have a brad nailer, though I have a broad enough variation of power saws to easily separate me from any number of careless fingertips.
Later, I graduated to tools that were more singular and specialized.
My mother had a block plane she wouldn’t let anyone else touch. I understand why now.
My block plane is not the beauty hers was, far from its sleek professional design and micrometer-tight precision, but mine still does the job when it needs to, joining with its woody partner the rasp in convincing stubborn pieces of wood that it’s in their best interest to go ahead and fit together. A sliver of persuasion, as it were. I now have plenty of particular woodworking tools that just do one single thing — but do it exceedingly well.
And every time I do something, I learn a little more. I learn from successes, and I learn from mistakes.
It’s a sad commentary in this digital world that everyone believes that complex skills are somehow easy. They are not. They take a long time to learn, and every expertise builds on earlier expertise. You are not a mechanic because you’ve changed a filter and replaced a car’s side mirror: not a doctor because you watched a Youtube video on vaccines; not a carpenter because you can hold eight finishing nails in your mouth while you pound another one into place in a board with a hammer, while only once hitting your thumb.
Skill is more than simply an announcement.
I’ve built shelves and installed support beams, I’ve designed and built decorative panel walls and shimmed noisy staircases. I’ve clapboarded a whole building, trimming out windows in the process. Have I done it perfectly? Not at all. Far from it.
Will it pass muster with a professional? Well, let’s just say, it will only pass muster with the kindest of them, the ones who are willing to overlook the sorts of things experts just see in an instant.
I will eventually finish the basement stairs.
And then I will move on to the next woody thing. With pleasure. Knowing that a sort of peace hides in the soft space that lies between the sharp divide of the grain lines.
If you fall asleep calculating how many two by tens you’ll need to shore up the slipping floor above a root cellar — and how you’ll finagle those beams down through the trap door and then cut them to size down there in the near-dark, three long extension cords away from the outside plug, maybe you’re my kind of people.
Maybe that’s even more true if you know the everlasting value of shims, and the benign absolution of the carpenters friend, caulking.
If it’s all new to you, you might be ready to try anyway. Start small. It’s immensely satisfying when it goes right. You could just be glad you did.
And, eventually, you might not even have to buy just one more stair tread, having made all the cuts correctly the first time.
Don’t bet on it.
Nice piece. I have intimate knowledge of what you speak. Working with wood is a joy unto itself. If you make something useful, all the better. But if it's whittling a foot of 2x2 down to the perfect toothpick, that's a joy as well. Thanks for the picture of the shavings. I swear I can smell 'em. And significantly, you only get shavings with a hand tool. Power tools save time & effort, but they don't make shavings. More's the pity.