Sippican Cottage
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I’m Going To Say Something Rude Now

May 1, 2011 37 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Written two years ago. In the interest of verifying “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” one cannot help but notice the author and his family moved into a somewhat larger version of this shed one year ago. Reposted with comments intact, as they are so trenchant.]

[Author’s Note: There is no editor, and there are a lot more squirrels and bees in my house than in that shed.]

Here it comes: I would rather live in this shed than in your house.

Click on the picture. It’s a very high resolution shot. Look at it. It’s beautiful.

I’m generalizing, of course. It’s possible that I’m not referring to you. But there are so few of you that are exceptions to my impertinence that I simply say it matter-of-fact-like: Your house has no soul. It’s got no anima. It’s a misshapen plastic lump dedicated to the exaltation of your car and your television. It is the bastid love child of a realtor with the taste of a vegas hooker and a contractor with a prominent eyebrow ridge.

It makes you unhappy. You don’t know that, because many of the ways it does that are subtle. Paying for the damn thing, though it brings you little pleasure, is not so subtle.

I do listen to people a little in these matters. I watch them a lot. And what they do about their house cancels out what they say about their house every time.

You tell me that absolute neatness is paramount. Then I see you camping out in one little corner of your house in a midden of messy but prized possessions.

You tell me you want to luxuriate in a whirlpool while reading poetry with candles next to an open window. Then I see you showering in a hurry in a room with all the shades drawn. The spiders like your jacuzzi, so it’s not going to waste, exactly.

You tell me that you like your television over the mantel in the living room. I see you turning one room after another into a “den”, then eventually building additional rooms, trying to make a comfortable place to look at a screen. I call your living room the “Furniture Mausoleum” when you’re not around. Sorry.

You tell me how much money and effort you’ve spent to make your home perfect. Then I watch you leave it, gladly, on any provocation. You can’t wait to escape your homemade Colditz.

You’ve explained to me in some detail that under no circumstances should you be expected to pay any attention to the maintenance of your house. If a material can deteriorate in any way, and so require the touch of a hand, it’s verboten. So you flee your vinyl house for a vacation in Tuscany and wish your house had soul like the one with grime from the 17th century still visible in its stucco.

You spent $35,000 on windows, and then boarded them up with blinds and drapes because they don’t look at anything.

No stranger can ever find anything in your kitchen without asking, or find a bathroom.

The sun doesn’t shine in your windows, except in your eye when you’re trying to sleep.

It’s impossible for guests to sleep comfortably at your house, though it covers 3500 square feet and is two stories high.

You can’t prepare actual meals from raw materials in your kitchen.

You feel isolated but have no privacy.

You exit and enter your house every day by bumping into a trash can in an unlit warehouse for your car. Your dog wouldn’t.

There are birds in your yard and you’ve never seen them.

You tell me all the live-long day you adore your house, but when your mortgage is ten cents more than your Zillow estimate you mail the keys back to the bank.

It may just be that my idea of what a house should be is dead. I have to respect other people’s opinions, after all, especially about their own affairs. I might tell people they shouldn’t do things, but I’m not interesting in telling people they can’t do things. I mostly try to dwell on the positive in these matters, but if my opinions about housing were unleashed, I’d make Gordon Ramsey look circumspect in comparison. In a way, my cottage furniture business is a rearguard attack in this regard. I’m trying to save the entire stock of housing in America one end table at a time. Big job. It would be unwise to bet on me. But it’s always unwise to bet against me, too. I sense that many are dissatisfied with their abodes now but are confused about the genesis of the feeling.

I’ve watched the “Let’s Wander the Earth with a Floozy Realtor and Choose Between Three Tawdry Split-Level Houses” show with my wife, and my advice to all the prospective homebuyers is the same. I yell at the screen: nuke all of them from orbit, and maybe you can make something pleasant out of the hole.

Ad Hoc? I Invented It. Six Homemade Tools

November 29, 2010 8 Comments

I make furniture all day, but I still gots no money; that doesn’t explain my ad hoc infection, exactly. In construction and related disciplines, you’re always making props and jigs and what-have-yous for the situation at hand, and you adopt it for a way of life after a while. People from the delicate arts (that don’t want to admit they are) talk endlessly about duct tape because they think it makes them sound manly, but duct tape is more a symptom that you have no idea what to do than an indication you do, and are all manly and so forth. This stuff isn’t a patch.

Woodworking catalogs rely on people that don’t ultimately make much buying expensive things with which to not make those things more easily. Parse that sentence, college boy. Anyway, here’s a half-dozen examples of things I made that are better than things you can buy.

1. Clamping Jig – Clamps are really expensive. I’m awful if I ever see Norm making anything on that commendable show he had. Just ask my wife. “He’s making a four-dollar tabletop with four thousand dollars-worth of clamps!”  She just nods and smiles. This is why we don’t have cable. Here’s how I make glue-ups. Iron pipe with pony clamps and pads, with the whole shebang hung on the wall to save space and my back. The galvanized pipes on the right don’t leave marks on anything delicate like the black iron pipes on the left do. They should all be galvanized, but I’m cheap. BTW, that benchtop blank in the clamps will be on sale by Friday.

2. Stickers  – Stickers is an actual woodworking term, not an ad hoc one. The little bits of wood you place between boards to allow air to circulate all around them, and helps to keep wood from warping from having only one side exposed to the air, are called stickers. I make my own, hundreds of them, from little bits and pieces of off-cut wood. I use them for all sorts of things; Keeping things up off a surface when painting, props, jigs, etc. I have to test my branding iron on something before I use it on your furniture, so they all end up with one or forty SIPPICANs burned into them. The really old ones are all mellow with shellac overspray and smooth from a million hands.They’re all eleven inches long. I only measured the first one. (See item 6)

3. Featherboards – Here’s one of eleventy-jillion I’ve made. A piece of wood will go forward through a featherboard’s little wooden fingers, but will not back up. A safe way to hold wood against a fence and not have it thrown at you by the blade. I make them often, in different sizes for different setups. I suppose I could put the sacrificial wooden fence you see on the table saw on this list, too, but I’m lazy. One of the main bad ideas of most pre-made jigs you buy is too much metal near the blades, and for some reason, too much plastic everywhere else. I don’t want metal things hitting metal things. Then hitting me.This is woodworking, not the artillery.

4. The Push Stick – All woodworkers on TV are liars. They say: the blade guard is removed so the camera can see the work. Lies. All lies. They’re in the trash. Guard or no, never, NEVER put your hand between the blade and the fence. Did I mention NEVER? I push everything through the blade with a push stick. It’s got a little hook in it to hold things down as well as shove them. Stuff gets thrown at you more than any other danger you’ll encounter on a tablesaw. This push stick is about eight years old, I think. It’s a testament to the veracity of my NEVER claim that I still have this one after all this time, despite living in two different states. It is ALWAYS on my fence, so I can NEVER.

5. Tapering Jig – They sell adjustable ones that are made from steel for a lot of money. You must have been dropped on your head as a baby to push a steel anything through a table saw right next to the blade. Upon reflection, you were probably dropped on your head as an adult, too. I have dozens of these jigs, each made special for a particular tapered leg. They’re very safe, and made from garbage. Like bacon!

6. Stop Block – It’s just a leftover from a table apron or something. You clamp it to a fence and cut the same thing over and over. Measure twice, cut once! says the TV. Measure once, set the stop block, and cut 145 times, I say. Measuring twice is for dilettantes.

So, there you go. I make all sorts of things with near nothing. You have near nothing, too, I suspect, or can lay your hands on it. Make something!

Tag: home improvement

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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