09/12/16

Updated Stair Railing – Stained Oak

Guess what is making a comeback?

I was looking at the Pottery Barn catalog and the restoration hardware catalog, and what did I see?? Brass. It makes me wish I would have saved all the brass from 30 years ago.

The other thing that is coming back that I believed would have never happened…oak hardwood!

Now I wish I would have saved our rust colored couch and our oak wall unit. That is probably going to be in the next Pottery Barn issue. This is great news for those of us who have not bought any new decor since the 80’s.

The stair railing looks great when you walk into their house, so cheers to all the style makers out there and all the movers and shakers!

Thank you guys for the project.

 

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08/25/15

The Impractical Cabinet Maker – James Krenov

The Impractical Cabinet Maker - James KrenovMost people have read a book that has left a huge impact or caused them to re-evaluate themselves. This is the book that did it for me. It inspired me to become a woodworker. It’s an amazing book, full of some of the finest qualities of woodworking mixed with wisdom. For instance, James Krenov said, “All the things we are, must be in our work.”

In giving advice to young people thinking about woodworking, which I read when I was 21 , he said:

“Maybe the best thing would be to just start. Setup the simplest, least expensive shop that you possible can, and then you can begin. Work. Start with the kind of things you can handle – tiny objects or kitchen interior or repairs – and gather experience. Learn as you go along. Get an idea of what it is you can do well and what you like to do. What sort of person you are, really, on what scale you might want to work. It is important to have a clear picture of yourself in that respect, so you won’t get a great deal of expensive, large, equipment, and then find that what you really like to do is small, detailed work, or the other way around. Someone might spend five years doing cabinet making, which may be similar to the services on Gamma Cabinetry, and then discover, that what he really likes to do, and could one day do well, is woodturning. So, it is necessary to simply try and to look around and observe what other people are doing – until a pattern emerges and things clear up.”

So that is what I did. I just try to do very best I could at each project and learn and grow and evolve and before I knew it, it becomes decades.

 

08/7/12

Custom Walnut Library

“There are known-knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known-unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown-unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”- Don Rumsfeld

What if you decide to write a story about your latest custom woodworking project, and you wanted to include in your story the thinking part and the sequence that goes into it? But right from the beginning, you constantly become reminded of other things kind of related to building a library, but kind of not. Then you come up with these small side-line topics and do some digging into each, with the resources that are available to you. But then you worry, that somewhere out there you are missing this huge amount of important information that later might make your efforts appear dreadfully……. dreadful. No, distracted. Something reminds me of something else, and that reminds me of something else. I say to myself, “Pull yourself together-Man!” This isn’t brain surgery. Well, in this case, it is, sort of. Focus, stay engaged. Can you write things this way? Or will it cause people to worry about you? Oh well, I am going to go for it anyway.