Free-wheeling woodworking

Hi ,

First off, I wanted to welcome all newcomers to this newsletter! Tons of you decided to try something new and enrolled in my woodworking courses in June, and I hope that you’ll discover it was one of the best decisions you’ve ever made. Woodworking is a creative challenge that will grow with you for years to come. My newsletter, Notes From the Shop, is a fun way for me to connect with over 270,000 friends on the first Friday of every month.

I hope everyone’s summer is chugging along nicely. As a kid, my family would usually vacation in July, sometimes in the form of a road trip. It’s funny how childhood memories play out, but my brain tends to recall mostly mundane moments of these trips. One year (I must have been about 6), we packed up the station wagon and drove from Denver to Chicago to visit my grandparents. Strangely, I can’t really remember anything noteworthy that we did during the actual visit. I remember swimming in the pool at a hotel somewhere in Kansas and being allowed to drink an entire (glass) bottle of Coke from a vending machine. My memories of those trips are reduced to vague overall feelings that can’t be accurately described. I wonder if my adult memories would be shaped differently if I grew up in the age of digital photos and video.

A wonderful movie called Aftersun explores this topic. It’s about a woman whose memories of a summer she spent with her dad 20 years earlier are clouded by watching home videos she shot during the holiday. It beautifully illustrates how the memories we perceive from our childhood might be imagined or distorted, and if we were to look at childhood events through grown-up eyes, we might understand them completely differently.

Today, many children are growing up on video, with some families filming their activities daily. As someone who also shoots a lot of videos, I am certain that no person in front of a camera is 100% authentic. Even the youngest kids switch to performance mode when a camera is pointed at them. It might be subtle, but we are all conscious of how we wish to be perceived in the future.

So we are either left with inaccurate recordings incapable of capturing honest moments, or we just let our brain record what it wants, even if those memories are hazy.

I think the solution is to simply enjoy our experiences, our holidays, and our summer journeys in the moment as they are unfolding, and allow them to pass gracefully. Our lives are filled with new experiences every day; we really don’t need to worry about how we’ll remember them in the future. And we certainly don’t need to record every Kodak moment—the kids will mainly remember the hotel pool anyway.

Meanwhile, in the present day in my yard, tomatoes are finally bursting out on four plants, and the early-summer lavender and poppy blossoms are fading away. The Marin County Fair has come and gone, and it’s fun to cool off in San Francisco and watch freezing-cold tourists.

Building the new deck was a much-needed summer project, but it left me with, well, a big empty deck, and I decided to build a couple of Adirondack chairs to break up the liminal space. I’m very proud of this design—be sure to take advantage of my special offer later in this issue!

Summer isn’t only me making summer projects, but my wife making stuff as well. I was in L.A. last week, and when I got home I discovered all of the new things that she had created, including a side table for the deck made using redwood cutoffs she found. I love this kind of ingenuity when you just build something with found materials and no tools! She also stacked a couple of pavers and concrete blocks to make a gnome shrine. Correction… I just was informed that it’s a pagoda (but seriously, it’s a gnome shrine).

I like that parts of our yard are landscapes of kitsch. Did I mention the two Rapanui-inspired stone heads in the front yard that are locked in an eternal staredown with each other?

We can all take inspiration from such a free-wheeling approach to making things, or at least a less critical approach to woodworking. One of the most limiting struggles in woodworking is worrying about how our projects will be perceived in the future—whether it’s by ourselves or the other people who we think will surely notice the flaws in our work. As a reader mentioned last month, a common defence mechanism is to immediately point out those flaws ourselves when we show off what we built.

Your woodworking journey is an internal process of discovering what you are capable of. Try thinking of yourself as a craftsperson more than a technician. Maybe even an artist! Focus on the creative process of building, even if that means just gluing some cutoff boards together to make a table. Be patient. As your skills grow, so will your precision and confidence. Cut and shape wood as accurately as you can, but understand that it probably won’t matter if you’re slightly off. In the future, your memories won’t be as much about building specific projects, but more of a general sense of contentment and fulfillment spending time in your own workshop creating things from nothing. No video required.

—Steve

After 15 years of designing nearly 150 free woodworking plans, I decided they need to be easy to find rather than scattered in various places, so I just created the new ShopWWMM.com website.

It’s taken me over a week of frustrating nerdy web stuff to get this thing online, but it’s finally live, and at the moment, you can browse through one single plan (the Adirondack chairs). I’m just one guy, after all... this ain’t exactly Amazon!

In the meantime, I’m working on revamping some of my favorite projects and creating all new versions of those plans. My design skills have improved over the years and a lot of my older plans leave much to be desired.

Most of the plans on this website will be offered for free (with an option to pay whatever you like), while some of the new, more detailed, premium project plans will be priced a bit more.

As a way to say thank you to readers of this newsletter, I’m offering the Adirondack Chair plans for 20% off through next Friday, July 14. Just type in discount code NEWSLETTER at the checkout. Two chair sizes are included.

Regarding my Father’s Day essay:

“Steve, I just wanted to say thank you for your notes. My dad passed away when I was 14. My son is 13 now and I sometimes feel I’m trying to cram everything in quickly in case I don’t have much time left. Thanks for pointing out the importance of just being together and not forcing my interests on him. You are right, my fondest memories of my dad are also just hanging out with him as he did something.” —David Kirba

How timely. It’s amazing how our important memories are as simple as just being together. —Steve

*****

“Brilliant story about you and your relationship with your Dad.

Here in Ireland, my son made the international football (soccer to you guys!) team for Northern Ireland at age 16. As any dad would, I hoped that he would pursue it and maybe turn pro but it didn’t work out and he went in a different direction.

Yes, I was a bit disappointed initially but I got over it quickly and from then on just decided to back off and let him make his own decisions for good or ill. A valuable life lesson learned.” —Jonathan Cullen

It’s amazing how kids become adults, complete with their own interests and passions. Our main job is just to be there. —Steve

*****

“I thoroughly enjoy your woodworking videos. I found your $1000 tool list very interesting. My dad was a carpenter and cabinet maker, so I’ve been woodworking for most of my life. In my adult years, I’ve tackled dozens of projects, all completed with the most basic tools. My powered tool list includes only a circular saw, a handheld router, a drill, and a jigsaw.

Yet with these simple and inexpensive tools, I’ve been able to build some amazing projects. Here are three examples; a rolling stand-up garden, bookshelves, and a 14’ shuffleboard table (in progress). Since I do NOT have a table saw, it takes me longer to construct my projects, but my experience has shown that anyone who wants to start a new hobby as a woodworker can do so on a very minimal budget—much less than $1000.” —Robert Kumza

An awesome custom-engineered Loft Bed emailed in by Morgan

“I wanted to share this loft bed that I built! I’m really pleased with it. At the time that I built it, I was living in a small studio apartment and needed more storage space. All the dead space above my bed bothered me, so I decided to make a loft bed that lifted my existing bed frame up kind of like stilts. That way I could utilize the space underneath for storage—mostly for wood and tools. 😁 I even managed to find the white cabinets that fit perfectly underneath for free on Facebook Marketplace! I have now moved and no longer need the loft bed which I’m quite sad about. It’s disassembled and sitting in my shed. I may sell it, but it’s so hard to let go of things you custom-build for yourself!”