Opinion: Two new rocking chairs

What’s all the lumber for?” asks my son T.J.

“Two new rocking chairs for the front porch,” I said, looking down at the pile of oak boards outside my shop.

“Wow. That sounds hard,” he said.

“It’ll be a challenge,” I said.

“I’m sure you’ll have fun doing it,” he said.

Fun? Is he kidding? Fun?

“No way. It’ll be a miserable job. Sawdust in my nose, difficult joinery, mistakes, and I won’t get any sleep for 2 months,” I said.

“No sleep? Why not?” he asks.

“When I’m working on a furniture project, I wake up in the middle of the night and start thinking about next steps. How to make a certain joint. How to repair a mistake. That kind of thing. I can’t get back to sleep again,” I explain.

“Why do you do it?” he asks.

“We need rocking chairs,” I said.

“Buy some,” he said.

“I can’t. I have to build them,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because.”

Recently I talked to a few of my woodworking friends about this loss-of-sleep thing, and it turns out they all have the same problem. Perhaps we should just work all night and nap during the daytime.

Woodworking has many components: Planning the project. Designing the project. Figuring out what kind of wood and how much of it to buy. Preparing the wood by planing it to thickness, cutting it to the right size, forming the details. Dealing with odd angles. Learning to cuss quietly or in private — that kind of stuff.

Then, when you finally start to assemble the project, you think you’re about done and you wake up at 3:00 a.m. and start thinking about all the sanding, painting, gluing, and how to fix the stupid mistakes you have made.

Yes, it is a miserable hobby, but for three things.

1. You get to point at the finished project and say, “I built that” and when your guests exclaim in amazement, you say, “Aw, it was no big deal.”
2. You then get to point out all the mistakes. The ones your guests would never have noticed had you not pointed them out. The ones that stand out to you like a laser-light show at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert.
3. (and Best of all) You get to buy new tools.

As famed woodworker Norm Abram often said, “There’s no such thing as too many clamps.”

Most woodworkers I know expand that line of thinking to “There’s no such thing as too many tools.”

My beloved wife Marsha once asked me if I had a clamp she could borrow to hold up a widow drape she was sewing.

I took her into my shop and pointed to a big rack of all kinds of clamps. Then to a shelf with a couple of dozen more clamps. Then to a big box under a bench, filled to the brim with clamps. Next into a storeroom where the really big clamps live—we’re talking 8’ long clamps. Up under the stairway where some antique but still useful clamps hang. In a cabinet where web clamps and corner clamps abide.

“Yes, dear, I have a clamp you can use. Take your pick.”

“Why do you have so many!”

“I use them all. Or I might someday.”

While we’re down there, I’m carefully positioning my body to shield her view of two or three brand new shiny expensive tools hanging on the wall.

It’s bad enough that I have to explain that there is no such thing as too many clamps without having to explain that there’s no such thing as too many tools.

I just wish there was no such thing as too little sleep.

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Opinion: Two new rocking chairs