New Babies and Old Houses

I am sorry for taking such a long hiatus between posts! It’s been more than two weeks now, and when I started this blog, I intended to make a post once a week. There has been a change to my family which makes this a bit more understandable. Eleven days ago, my second son wriggled his way into the world, and ever since then he and his brother have kept my wife and I both very busy and rather exhausted! It seems that newborns don’t believe in keeping predictable sleep schedules and toddlers don’t believe in sleeping past 6:15 even if their brother happens to still be asleep. 

On top of all that, I have embarked on another project, and had actually begun before the wee one came on the scene. You see, my wife and I had closed on our first house a week before he was born, and since we are a young couple, and my dad and I are fairly handy, it is a house with a ton of potential… but not much in the way of modern updates. It is a small colonial house built by a Gloucester sailmaker in the early 1850s, so it had great bones, but no insulation and a fair amount of crumbling plaster. I started to work on it the afternoon after closing, and have been doing careful demolition ever since. 

My first surprise came after my first night taking down the plaster in a ceiling, when I found that instead of being a typical stick-frame house, it was actually post-and-beam construction! I was all but jumping up and down with excitement (this is because when I was young, I helped my dad with a lot of the joinery that went into building our own post-and-beam home). That made the house a slightly unusual house for the era in which it was built, but not so unusual as to put it in a different era. 

My second surprise came when my brother and I were taking the plaster out of one of the exterior walls in the first floor, and he started pulling out what we thought was a simple squirrel nest. He called me over when he found something hard, and we started to be a little more careful about removing the items that were stashed in the wall. We were both surprised when the hard thing turned out to be a concealed shoe! (you can learn more about concealed shoes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_shoes) He continued to dig, and found four more shoes, ranging from a toddlers’ shoe to a grown ladies’ shoe, as well as a three foot long saw-blade, a stick that turned out to be part of a parasol handle, some children’s toys (one of which turned out to be a miniature of a whale oil lamp refiller), and some newspaper articles that dated back to 1846! 

I invited a couple of friends to come see the house, since they are both good friends and huge history buffs. I knew they would be excited to see what I had found. They were able to tell me that the shoes I had found did indeed date back to the 1840s, as did everything else. I was very interested to learn that these articles stashed in the wall were not actually put there by a pilfering squirrel or rat, but were actually part of an ancient tradition among carpenters and house builders meant to bring good fortune to those living in the house. 

I am excited to see what else this old house has to teach me as I bring it back from its abandoned state, to a home for a young and growing family, much as it was when it was originally built.

Kayaks!

Now it is October, and since we are putting our kayaks away, my mind has turned to kayaking. Having spent most of my life here, I have realized that Gloucester is a beautiful place to put your kayak in the water and just go for a day, and Dad and I have spent many hours exploring its coast. One year, I took part in Gloucester’s annual Blackburn Challenge, and raced around our island in a kayak that we had built. We have done some kayak camping up in Nova Scotia, Canada (You can see pictures of that trip here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.931377710224889.1073741832.163034613725873&type=3 ), but for the most part, we stick to day trips, either together or with our respective families. (In fact, the first time I took my wife out kayaking, a baby seal jumped up onto the back of her kayak!)

Since we live in such a beautiful place to go kayaking, and enjoy doing it so much, we needed to have our own kayaks, but, being woodworkers, we wanted something a little more aesthetically pleasing than the typical plastic or fiberglass boats you see cruising around Cape Ann. So, when I was 10, Dad found an old book that described how to build a tandem sea-kayak out of thin strips of cedar. This is one of the first major projects that I can remember working on with Dad, and while building it took some time and was somewhat tedious at times for a 10 year old, we’ve put that boat through a lot over the past 16 years, and only now has the time come to retire it. 

The wood that we used for that tandem was beautiful, but the design was something less than gorgeous. It seemed to me to have been designed by someone who looked at it like a canoe with a roof, rather than as a sleek kayak, and over the years it earned the nickname “The Barge”. So, when it came time to build my own single kayak, six or seven years later, Dad and I took a stab at designing it ourselves. The lines of that kayak are quite sleek, but the design could use some serious tweaking for performance… We definitely discovered that we are better at designing furniture than kayaks. 

Finally, when we built Dad’s kayak, we used a design called the Guillemot Expedition. Nick Schade designed it, and it is a beautiful design, both to use and to behold. You can see the Guillemot here, as well as many of his other boats: http://www.clcboats.com/shop/boats/kayak-kits/touring-kayaks/guillemot-expedition-single-strip-built-sea-kayak-kit.html Nick sells both full kits to build the boats and just the designs. We bought the design, and milled out all of our own pieces.

We found that the Guillemot Expedition (We nick-named Dad’s the Zipper, due to the large zipper he put on the deck using marquetry!) is a great boat both for camping, due to the great amount of space in it, and for day trips, since it handles like a smaller boat and tracks very nicely. 

All in all, we greatly enjoy our time on the water, and we enjoy building these kayaks as well. Let us know if you want us to build one for you, or simply want some tips on how to get started!

Veneer... Good or Bad?

Normally I’d be posting this on Saturday, but my brother is getting married this Saturday! So that means that you get a post a couple days early! Today I want to talk about veneer and it’s use in antique and modern furniture, because I can’t tell you how many people have walked into the shop with an antique piece of furniture telling us how their empire bureau (or something of that sort) is “solid Mahogany” or “solid Birds-Eye Maple” and their face falls when we explain that their piece is actually a veneered piece. Many people think that simply because a piece has veneer, it is either not valuable, or isn’t actually an antique. Neither of these assumptions are necessarily true, though they are based in historical fact or practice. 

Veneer was actually used as far back as the Egyptian Pharaohs. That means that it was used 4,000 years ago! The guys over at Wood River have a more in-depth description of the history and how it has been used and harvested over the years. You can take a look at that here: http://wood-veneer.com/history-of-veneer.php 

The furniture we most often encounter are pieces from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and while many of these pieces are solid, there were many furniture makers who did use veneer, so as to avoid using a lot of the more expensive woods, while retaining the beauty. Because the method of slicing the veneer was different, and they didn’t have the same precision tools that we do now, the veneer varies in thickness from 1/16th of an inch to 3/16ths of an inch. This makes it relatively easy to repair. Modern veneers are about 1/64th of an inch, and are very hard to work with.  So, if you have a piece and the veneer is flaking off, or buckling, and it’s thicker than a piece of paper, bring it in and we will most likely be able to repair it! 

The reason that many people believe that if a piece is veneered it is a fake or a piece of junk, is that in the early 1900s factories began covering pieces with veneer to disguise cheaper material choices. They began using cheap plywoods and using dowels instead of traditional mortise and tenon joinery or dovetails, and so the pieces were built faster and cheaper, but they also fell apart quicker. Dad and I do use veneer and plywood occasionally but only where it doesn’t compromise quality, but improves it.  The marriage of traditional methods and modern materials is a tricky business, but that is a topic for a different post!