We just spent a great weekend looking directly at the sun with the perfect group of people in a lovely town called Mosier. I also witnessed the delightful evisceration of the football team from the University of Oregon, by the esteemed and vastly superior University of Washington football team.
I started playing with saws and wood about 25 years ago when I realized I was wholly incompetent and incapable of even patching a wall. This was pre-YouTube, so I had to rely on craftsmen willing to part with their secrets in exchange for a little heavy lifting. I had accumulated many wooden wine boxes—I had always loved them but never knew what to do with them—and figured they would look great integrated into dressers and credenzas and the like. So I set out to find old dressers to accommodate my boxes. I realized that was impossible. So the next step was to make those dressers myself. My only obstacle was that I had never cut a piece of wood in my life. So I traded a few ounces of gold for a super shitty saw at the local pawn shop and proceeded to make an assortment of mistakes and miscalculations until I finally figured some things out. The result were these tables and night stands, credenzas, armoires, about 500 pieces over about five years, all of which were sold at wine festivals and wineries to drunk patrons of questionable taste and plenty of disposable income. After gaining some proficiency with the tools, I felt it was incumbent upon me to learn how to build a house. I don’t know, maybe the man in me, maybe the Taurus. So, again, I found some amazing guys who owned a remodeling company who were impaired enough to hire me. Years went by, I stole their secrets, and then when they retired I had a choice: customer service at T-mobile? Or continue to remodel homes. To this day I regret not getting a free phone and performance reviews and asking someone for time off, but I’m making in work. Somehow the phone keeps ringing, for which I am humbled and grateful. But yeah, wine box furniture, that’s how it started.
