Wood’s wonders a highlight of summer’s DIY delights

Seven feet off the ground, tormented by hordes of biting blackflies, sitting in hot sun on a sheet of as-yet-un-nailed-down plywood, and I was sistering two 10-foot-long two-by-fours onto both sides of a two-by-six to make a single beam. A job better done on the ground, but necessity is … well, you know the rest.

Sweat was stinging my eyes, I had bent myself into an odd contortion to both hold the wood in place with one hand and one leg, while screwing in structural bolts with a drill in my other hand, and as many things were going wrong as were going right.

Repeatedly.

Afterwards, my new beam safely tagged together, I put down the impact driver and realized I was happy. Very happy.

There were boreal chickadees singing in the woods, a very small audience of two blue jays watching my efforts, and a soundtrack of distant chainsaws and roof-shingle-nail-hammering in the near distance. An erratic wind was occasionally bringing small wafts of cool air from the east, the kind of breeze that makes you stop and turn your face straight-on into it, if for no other reason than to savour the cool change as it washes over you.

One task completed, a short break before the next one. A drink of sun-warmed water, a pause occasionally for a healthy handful of roast chicken-flavoured potato chips (yes, they exist), a quickly eaten small apple, the core thrown from the rooftop into the underbrush to hopefully start a new apple tree.

It was a bizarre version of “How we spent our summer holidays” — my wife Leslie and I building a 10-by-16-foot shed on top of the not-quite-square foundation of a former root cellar.

We framed, we strapped, we sheathed, we roofed. The kind of project where you lose weight not just because of the physical exertion involved, but because, eager to get back at it, you forget to eat as regularly as you usually do. The smell of wood from fresh-cut spruce in your nose and on your clothes basically on a full-time basis.

At the end of the day, wanting nothing more than to shower away the sweat and grime and itching sawdust, followed by shutting off as completely as you can, a clock that has clearly surpassed its winding.

I find working with wood to be one of the best things I can do.

The math involved clears your head of wandering worries — the power tools do, too, because they demand your full attention, if for no other reason than plain and simple safety. You write cryptic notes in fat carpenter’s pencil graphite on the sides of two-by-fours, on corners of plywood, on scraps of paper or cardboard you stuff in your pockets and forget about until they surface later — and then can make absolutely no coherent sense of anything that you read. It’s like casting pencil-lead spells.

It doesn’t always go right — I hate mismeasuring and wasting perfectly good lumber. But today’s accidental waste is often tomorrow’s essential discovery. Cleaning up when we had finished, I realized I had found a whole new space to fill with bits of leftover wood.

I have gathered — and have also, sadly, occasionally had to give up — collections of random scraps of wood in many cities and provinces now. I have salvaged Douglas fir from street-side bunk-bed scraps, have discovered bright, beautiful red oak in trashed greyed bench boards I’ve then cut down with the table saw, stashed away a quarter-sheet of oak-faced plywood. Old, rough-cut full-dimension boards from old houses. Tongue-and-groove wall board from the DBP — the days before plywood.

The fir, red oak and oak plywood have been used in a just-about-finished cabinetry project. The other wood in my current collection — clear pine boards, small triangular cedar blocks from a staircase in Saskatoon, a white-painted five-panel door, cutoff pieces of pine too useful to discard — are just awaiting their purpose.

Because there’s nothing more satisfying than possessing a wood scrap that is the perfect solution for a small problem, a problem that would otherwise require purchasing… more wood.

Last weekend, fresh from the shed project, I got into a discussion with a family member about trim. It expanded rapidly. He’d done all his own interior house trim. Had opened up rooms and taken down full-size two-by-fours from inside the walls years before — and still had some of them stashed away in his lumber collection.

He had — wait for it — a bench planer.

It’s wonderful to find, accidentally, a fellow traveller you hadn’t expected to find.

We went out to his garage to look at his superior power tools, and, of course, his collection of random scraps of wood. It was a big collection.

“You’re going to need to build a bigger garage,” I said, almost accusingly.

That was the envy talking.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca