I had to have a place to put my computer. While my desires matched those gorgeous cherry or solid oak desks found in office furniture stores, my budget called for a boxed, put-it-together-yourself (if-you-can) model from the hardware store. I contemplated my only real option with some trepidation and for good reason. My previous construction experiences reflected my lack of skill. I did not feel optimistic.
When I attended school, girls didn’t take shop classes. Because I come from a home with no male role model, I couldn’t absorb a father’s carpentry skills by example or by osmosis. Somehow, the logic of how to put two pieces of wood together at right angles eluded me. Of course, I recognized examples of the skill daily, hourly, but the requisite nailing at ninety degrees was something I couldn’t master. Ask me, I tried.
I remember my attempt to build a table for my playhouse when I was seven years old. I took the hammer and some nails from my grandmother’s junk drawer. I found a few short boards under the house. After one whacked thumb and several aborted attempts to nail the boards together, I gave up and placed one of the boards atop a short stack of bricks. A table! Similar methods worked for me all the way through school, but I used concrete blocks and one-by-eight boards. Without a nail, I made fairly sturdy shelves for my collection of several thousand books.
A couple of years after school, I married and, with marriage, I believed my construction days were over. After all, I had a man. Men are reported to be good at that kind of thing, building, that is. Truly and sweetly, my husband built shelves for me. Book shelves and plant shelves and, eventually, shelves for the baby’s things. My husband built fences in the yard, sheds for his tools; he even built a boat, but he drew the line at building a chicken coop.
I like chickens. He didn’t want chickens, but his own father surprised me with two Polish hens for my birthday.
“I’m not building a chicken coop. You do it,” my husband said.
He always says I can do anything I want if I put my mind to it and I distinctly remember him saying it then. I like to think he was building my confidence but, thinking back, I know he really didn’t want those chickens living in our yard. He only likes chicken served with gravy or barbecue sauce.
I spent hours thinking about chicken houses. A-frame homes were popular at the time and I believed a-frames required no ninety-degree angles, my nemesis. So I screwed up my courage and began to create an a-frame chicken house. In the garage, I found some pieces of plywood, not exact matches, but close, and several short two-by-fours. I started building, without rhyme or reason, as the saying goes.
Unfortunately, my chickens did not approve of the results. Chickens want their feet off the ground at night; they will perch on anything, but not my birds. Those two hens were, probably, the first of their species to roost in the dirt. I imagined them desperately clutching twigs the size of toothpicks somewhere beneath their feathers. They never went inside that a-frame chicken house or perched on it. Frankly, they stayed as far away from the structure as possible. In retrospect, I think they feared a building collapse. I understood that a Better-Coop-and-Cage award would not be forthcoming. The coop was a failure and I failed, again, at construction.
Some years later, in an effort to spend time with my husband and, at the same time, acquire a useful skill, I decided we should take a shop class. Sometimes, I am quite persuasive. “After all,” I told him, “the night class is cheap. It’s held close by, at the high school and, besides, we’ll be building something.”
I recall the instructor’s patience, especially with me, the only woman in the class. I noticed that the men really needed no instruction. Soon I realized that they only paid their registration fee to use the expensive equipment, which appeared formidable to a tyro like myself. The teacher carefully explained even the simplest tools to me, but he took all of us on a safety tour of the wonderful array of powerful, electric equipment. Drill presses, table saws, routers and every conceivable contrivance for working with wood filled the shop, including my favorite: a planer the size of my washing machine. The instructor promised I would get a chance to try all the machinery.
My husband and I decided to begin with an easy project. After all, we looked forward to an entire season of fun-in-the-woodwork-shop. First, we’d build a simple cypress bench for the yard. My husband figured the measurements. When we went shopping for the wood for our bench, we bought old cypress, really thick stuff, for almost nothing because on old lumber company was being torn down. On that old wood, I learned to use the power planer. To operate an electric planer, a woodworker gently guides a gray, scarred or old piece of wood through some very sharp blades inside the planer cabinet and, if the wood is held steady, an even, fresh-looking, smooth piece of lumber comes out the other side. I always like to look beneath the surface of things, especially when I find something good, so planing appealed to me and, besides, planed wood smells great. I planed all the wood for our bench and for anyone who would trust me with his lumber.
Our bench drawings mentioned two right angles, the legs joining the seat. I had it all worked out. I’d finally learn to nail those right angles, but, alas, it was not to be. Because our cypress wood was so thick, the bench almost stood up by itself with nothing holding it together. My job was to hold the wood pieces together (redundant!) while my husband completed the work, such as it was. We only needed to drill a few screws, no nails, to finish our project. We pre-drilled the holes for four screws and “that was that.” We finished the bench at the end of the second class.
Unfortunately, due to several scheduling problems, we completed only our bench. We didn’t go back to class and I gained no right-angle experience. So when I thought about putting together a desk for my computer, I was not sanguine. My husband had no time to help either.
“Go for it!” he said.
I went to the hardware store and looked over the packaged desks. An effortless decision, I chose the only desk small enough to fit my space. The box stated that construction required only a screwdriver and a special tool supplied in the box. Ok! I bought the desk or, rather, desk pieces.
When I got home, I opened the box and spread everything out on the floor. The outside of the package neglected to mention that the box contained a dozen assorted pieces of wood and enough screws and other metal things to put together a small house. I was intimidated. I looked, I sorted and, at last, I read the instructions. Or tried to. I’ve heard jokes about assembling things using directions written by a person with a bad command of the language. Those jokes are true. Worse, I couldn’t figure out the native language of that person. If I had, I might have found a clue to what-verb-acted-with-which-noun in the long, strange sentences or even the pithy two-word ones. The directions made no sense. I sighed. I sat. I studied the stuff before me. So many pieces, so little understanding.
After several false starts, I tried to find a pattern in the wood-and-screw chaos before me. And, four long hours later, I had built a desk. I was proud! Granted, the process took twice as long as promised on the front of that misleading box, but my desk has shelves and a level top. Perhaps only my husband will notice that the two shelves open snugly against our corner wall. Items I place on those shelves can only be retrieved by moving the desk, the computer, the printer and assorted other large objects. I’m convincing myself to think of those blocked shelves as my own safety deposit box. I can store lots of junk in there and, probably, never see it again. I chose a desk that faces the wrong way, I’m told. Thank goodness the screwdriver gouges and stripped screws are in discreet locations, and flesh tone Band-Aids hide my own boo-boos. I must admit my desk is not a pretty thing, but it’s sturdy. I think even my old chickens might approve
