Rude Mechanicals Press Blog

I am extraordinarily lucky to have the job I do today, and to do work that I love. It is almost entirely due to Christopher Schwarz.

In the summer of 2005, I notified my supervisor that I was leaving my Creative Services job after seven years (wherein my duties included writing marketing materials for Popular Woodworking Magazine and the WoodWorker’s Book Club) to return to school full time in pursuit of a teaching career in higher education.

About a week later, Christopher Schwarz and Steve Shanesy asked if I was interested in becoming the managing editor for Popular Woodworking Magazine. Sure – why not. So my resignation turned into a department transfer. I wasn’t committed to staying long-term; we worked it out so I could take the necessary coursework for a Ph.D. I planned to leave after I finished my dissertation (it was a four-year plan).

Fast forward to February 2009. I took (and passed – whew!) my candidacy exams (already behind on that four-year plan) after taking almost all of my 2008 vacation in December, and my 2009 vacation in January and early February. If Chris hadn’t covered my essential duties during those months, that would simply not have been possible. For that, he has my eternal gratitude. (I know exactly how much it sucks to work two full-time jobs while getting paid for only one.)

Fast forward to now. Little did I know in 2005 that I’d fall in love with making big sticks of wood into smaller sticks of wood then sticking them back together. And while I’ve had the good fortune to learn in person from many incredibly gifted woodworkers, it was Chris’ love for the craft that inspired me most to keep learning, to keep trying new things and to become proficient (most of the time, anyway) at the subversive and rewarding act of making things instead of buying them (read “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (Lost Art Press) for more on that). Or maybe I just respond well to his squirrel jokes. (Time-limited on writing a dissertation, I resigned my candidacy in 2015. While I miss talking about and teaching Shakespeare, I’d miss woodworking and being around woodworkers full time a lot more. So much for plans!)

Chris is an excellent teacher of woodworking, editing, writing, life and appreciation for craft beer; he is my éminence grise, and my friend. Yep – I’m extraordinarily lucky.

But he hates this kind of thing…so he might not ever talk to me again.

Note: January is National Mentoring Month; the above is in response to Joshua Klein’s request to post about our woodworking mentors; check out more at Instagram under the hashtag #woodworkingmentors.

I’d not read much of John Updike’s poetry until recently, (though I’ve long counted his “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000) and “The Centaur” (1963) among my favorite contemporary novels). It’s engaging stuff, and this one in particular spoke to me as I used my great-grandfather’s farriers’ pliers to pull nails this weekend.

Tools

Tell me, how do the manufacturers of tools
turn a profit? I have used the same clawed hammer
for forty years. The screwdriver misted with rust
once slipped into my young hand, a new householder’s.
Obliviously, tools wait to be used: the pliers,
notched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench
with its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough
to take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit
still fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought;
the tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk;
the carpenter’s angle, still absolutely right though I
have strayed; the wooden bubble level from my father’s
meagre horde. Their stubborn shapes pervade the cellar,
enduring with a thrift that shames our wastrel lives.

This is one heinous bathroom.

After writing two checks on November 9 (one to the ACLU, the other to Planned Parenthood), I gathered my implements of destruction and started hitting things with a vengeance. I’m still angry, but at least I’m making progress on the long-overdue bathroom rehab.

First to go was that stunning gold-tone mirror; behind its strip of lovely lights was a bit of a shock, in the form of exposed wiring.

I’m no electrician, but I’m certain that’s not to code.

With that monstrosity relegated to the ever-growing trash heap, I turned to the walls, ripping off the layer of vinyl wallpaper to expose two layers of hardboard attached with plaster bolts and construction adhesive. And whatever that adhesive was, I’m guessing it’s now illegal; it works too well.

Looks better already.

I’m not sure what that material is around the top, but it wraps onto the ceiling and I can’t manage to cut it with any of my various utility blades – so I’m leaving it for now. I don’t want to pull the ceiling down on my head. Yet. It’s going to be a long time before I get around to plaster repair.

Oooooh! Original, but unsalvageable, anaglypta. (That wall is coming down.)

The rough plan is to knock a door through from my bedroom (after I take out the bathtub in the way), and knock through into what was a pantry (behind the wall above) in the second-floor kitchen, and put a bath/shower there.

Hallway to the bath. No, the chimney cupboard doesn’t usually live there.

The door at the back right above is how one currently gets into the bathroom, and the picture is snapped from just outside my bedroom door. The wall straight ahead is the side of the old pantry; that wall is toast. The door to the left is the entryway to the former kitchen, which will become a stupidly large laundry room/second bathroom sometime before the next presidential election (giving me two things to which to look forward). In the meantime, the plumber is going to do the rough-ins…so I’m tearing out that room, too.

Below is the current floor plan(ish). The red line in the hall will be a new wall; the red in the wall will be the new door. Then the hallway (and old pantry) becomes part of my en suite bath. The one possible structural fly in my ointment is that the wall on the right of the hall – the one into which I’m putting a large opening for the shower (basically, doubling the size of the current doorway) – is load-bearing. There are king studs and big beams in my future. Or perhaps my future holds a massive pile of bricks formerly in the shape of a house.

I don’t really have the whole plan worked out yet (like what the heck to do about the pesky HVAC duct). I just had to break something.