To Build by Hand (and to blog about it):

So, a little about me. I’ve taken a meandering path through life. I went to college to be a biologist, but organic chemistry never lined up in my head, and I spent all my study time tinkering with computers in the dorms, so I walked out with a computer science degree (and a philosophy minor cause I’m either a deep thinker or a bullshitter, depending on whether you ask me or my wife). Staring down a future of cubicles and the dot-com crash, I decided that the coding gigs that paid the bills during college were no place for me after college, so I got into law school but deferred a year to intern/work in politics in the State Capitol (that’s in CA, if you haven’t cyberstalked me and figured that out yet).

When I started law school, I thought I wanted to be an IP lawyer, then I thought I wanted to do social justice/human rights work, I spent so much effort teetering about what I wanted to do, I neglected to do anything that would actually line me up for a career after law school. So I took the bar exam, and while I was waiting the 3.5 months it takes the state bar to score our tests, I volunteered for a Congressional campaign. That turned into a paid gig, my guy won, which turned into a paid staffing gig in Washington, D.C. That wasn’t really the life for me, but I met my wife and brought her back to California with me (which wasn’t a hard sell, she grew up here too, our hometowns were about a 45-minute drive from one-another).

I tried out small-firm practice (basically solo lawyering with neighbors, the way the practice I joined was set up), it turns out I wasn’t really skilled at asking for money from people who have bigger problems than me and I come to care about, so the small firm/solo clientele got some decent, nearly free representation, and I got a life lesson on basic economics: when your clients don’t feed the business, the business doesn’t feed you.

I got married right around the time I lost that job. Actually, I lost that job the day I came back to work after my honeymoon. It was a rocky road. My wife also lost a job, then another one, while I was unemployed (she actually got back on the horse twice while I was still fumbling around trying to find a paycheck). We took turns keeping each other together and falling apart, it wasn’t pretty. We decided to relocate close to San Francisco, which had better job prospects (at least for me) than the Sacramento area where we had been. After a short (eternity) living with our parents, we had both landed decent jobs in the bay area and we bought a house in Oakland.

Something about buying that house triggered something in my brain: I didn’t just want to be handy (I am, for a computer nerd), I wanted to be a craftsman. I wanted to build things that made this house our home. I wanted to build the table my children would eat at, I wanted to design furniture to fit into the nooks and crannies of our life, to make our living space functional, enjoyable and hopefully a little more beautiful.

So I started to read.

First it was online, magazines, forums, blogs, anything that talked about woodworking. My wife got me a beginning woodworking book. Then I stumbled upon Jim Tolpin’s The New Traditional Woodworker and I fell in love with the notion of hand tools. I wanted to feel that connection with my work, to push the steel through the wood and leave behind something I could be proud of (or at least not ashamed of). Then I read Chris Schwarz’ The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.

Here’s where the story gets rolling... because here’s where it stops being a story and starts getting real. I’ve read those books. I have a very small collection of hand tools. I have no stock. I have no workshop. I have a dream. I have ambition.

This blog is a chronicle of my journey into handtool woodworking. I’m sure there will be some ‘cheating’ at the beginning. There’s stuff we’ll just need, and I’d rather build a piece of shit, learn a little about wood, and replace it later than buy some plastic-wrapped particle board shit and replace that later.

--TDD