Our shops, ourselves
Contrary to popular belief, the home handyperson is alive
and sawing
By Leighton Klein, Globe Staff, 3/18/2004
The home workshop. It was the bench your parents put in their basement, the
place your grandfather had out in the barn. There was a hammer and saw in
there, a few wrenches, maybe a vise. They were used mostly for repairs, but
they were also good for occasional projects - a weathervane here, a footstool
there. Some people went much further, building small temples in which they
could exercise their inalienable right to putter. Cutting boards, fly rods,
bookcases, and coffee tables without number came tumbling out of their doors.
As retirement stretched into the beyond, however, the workshops fell into
disuse and evaporated one by one. Mass production wiped out craftsmanship and
with it the entire system of necessity and interest that kept it alive.
Today our passions are still swathed in silicon. And our houses? Buy 'em new,
and get a condo when the kids go off to college. Want to see a workshop? Go to
Amish country.
But if this is all true, why is my neighborhood filled with the whine of
tablesaws and the buzz of routers every weekend? Whoever is firing those babies
up, they aren't playing computer games with them. The final straw came when I
read - in this paper, of all places - that the home handyman is as good as
extinct. An investigation seemed in order.
A knock on a door led to one shop, and that person knew of two others. A
casual question in the snaking checkout line of the local hardware store led to
a few more, and pretty soon they seemed to be everywhere. If the home workshop
has suffered its share of indignities over the years, the reports of its death
are, as Mark Twain wrote in one form or another, greatly exaggerated.
What today's shops have in common is diversity, as do the people who built
them. They can be found almost anywhere -- from the basement of a Waltham house
to a converted barn in Milton, to a tiny room I have on the top floor of a
Cambridge apartment building -- and they're used for things way beyond what one
traditionally envisions.
"I can do everything in my shop, literally anything," says Beth
Ireland of Roslindale. "I have all the tools I need and there's nothing
that's come along that I can't handle."
Her workspace is in the basement of a three-decker, and in the five years
since she bought the building, she's installed benches against the foundation's
fieldstone walls and added one piece of equipment after another. Ireland, 48,
loves to carve wood and make built-in furniture, and has a particular weakness
for lathes. With the six she now has, she can turn anything from a fountain pen
to a porch column. Her next addition will be an area for tool sharpening. When
that's done, she'll get around to building the new laundry room. Eventually.
Like many people, Ireland found her passion by a circuitous route. She worked
as a restaurant manager and illustrator, but was hungry for something more
tangible. "Someday I wanted to own a house, and I really wanted to be able
to do carpentry." With more than a little persistence, she managed to talk
someone into hiring her -- with no experience -- to work on a home construction
site. "I never drew again -- other than designing furniture."
Then there's Philip DesAutels, 36, who describes himself as "an escapee
from the tech world." He'd always been intrigued by the idea of
woodworking, but found himself constantly frustrated. An acquaintance
recommended taking some courses, and with them a door opened. One of the reasons
he and his wife bought their Waltham house was because its basement, with its
high ceilings, would be perfect for a shop. "The rest of it we'll just sort
of terraform into the house we want."
People who work with their hands at home, with or without a shop, fall into a
half-dozen or so overlapping categories. Carpenters can make anything from a set
of kitchen cabinets to a house. "Woodworker" is a more general term,
but can apply to those who like carving or making furniture. Do-it-yourselfers
are usually found painting and plastering, tiling bathrooms, or putting up
shelves. Tinkerers do as much of the above as they can between episodes of
"This Old House." And putterers? The same as tinkerers, but slower.
According to Tim Schreiner, publisher of Fine Woodworking magazine, there are
anywhere from 16 million to 20 million woodworkers in the United States.
"That's `small w' woodworkers," he adds, meaning anybody who does a
little work around the house all the way up to professionals. He adds that women
are the fastest-growing segment, and estimates that they're around 20 percent of
the total.
Heather Proffitt of Malden, 25, is part of this trend. She graduates in May
from Boston's North Bennet Street School, which was founded in 1885 to train
people for employment in the trades. Today, 32 percent of its 150 full-time
students are women. The school broadened its reach in 1991 when it began to
offer one- to 10-day workshops for "anybody who's interested," says
Robert Delaney, the school's director of admissions. Starting with just two
workshops and 60 students, they now offer 65 different part-time courses and
last year had more than 600 people -- many of them novices -- enrolled in them.
Proffitt became interested in carpentry at an age when most people's
experience with woodworking consists of playing with
Lincoln Logs
. "I had an aunt and uncle who were restoring an Italianate farmhouse in
Virginia. I remember being a kid and thinking that was the greatest thing
ever."
When she graduates, she'll receive a degree in preservation carpentry, but
she's already working on her home shop. She just finished the workbench, which
she made of curly maple and spruce. Next up is a lumber rack and some drawers.
"I may not know everything, but at least I have an idea how to go about it,
and what questions I need to be asking myself," she says with no small
degree of pride.
Workshops aren't restricted just to woodworkers, of course. Just ask Phil
Manker, 53, of Milton.
"I don't work in wood," he says simply, and one look at the airy
shop behind his home confirms the assertion. There's a numerically controlled
milling machine (a sort of drill press on steroids), and next to it, a lathe
that looks powerful enough to spin a Range Rover on its axis. A table saw, a
chop saw, a towering case of power tools, a welding bench, and a constellation
of rolling cabinets for nuts, bolts, screws, and widgets beyond identification
fill out the space.
Some of what Manker -- who has an English degree -- creates with all this
industrial-strength hardware is surprisingly delicate: translucent furniture,
much of it in Lucite. His aesthetic is reflected in the design of his workshop:
all right angles, with light streaming through from end to end. It was once a
barn from the mid-1800s, but a construction permit took care of that. On its
foundation he raised a masonry cube with glass-inset garage doors in the front
and back. In winter the sunlight sets the shop aglow, and in summer he can open
both doors while he works. It's not so far from heaven.
And the stories go on and on. Each person comes to it his or her own way, and
the workspaces they create are as unique as a fingerprint -- and a slightly
grimy one at that. Some are zen minimalist, others a sort of Luddite baroque,
many a thicket of motors and blades. Some people turn inward, spending more and
more time working on the shop itself; for others, it can expand without limits.
"You've got to talk to my friend Adrienne," a co-worker said.
"Her whole house is a workshop."
Adrienne Benton, 44, lives near the crest of Roxbury's Mission Hill. She's
renovating her 1929 multifamily building by herself, with occasional help from
professionals. Her workshop is indeed the entire building, but not in the sense
you'd think. Instead, her tools are to be found wherever she's working, and
right now that's the top front room.
"I used to do a lot with my father," Benton says, describing how
she got started. "He would fix the front steps, I'd help him out with
little chores around the house. Then when I was 15 or 16 I got this bright idea
that I'd start giving parties in the basement and charge people like 25 cents.
So I had to do some work to get it ready."
Two houses later, her mobile workshop is in full swing. She tosses around
terms like "miter," "coping," and "retaining
wall," and her eyes sparkle when she talks about upcoming projects. There's
a mantle to be built, French doors to be installed, and a new kitchen that
glitters in her imagination. It's a long way from her days spent patching the
basement walls of her parents' New Jersey home, but she's learned something
every step of the way.
When you talk with people about their workshops and what they do there, words
such as "precision," "accuracy," and "efficiency"
come up again and again. But what they're really about is dreams. They're the
place where you make them real, and the dreams, like the shops themselves, are
without end.
Leighton Klein can be reached at lklein@globe.com.
