I got my start with woodworking as a kid refinishing and repairing old furniture. This led to designing and building my own pieces during my early 20's after realizing that I couldn’t afford anything that I wanted or that what I could afford wasn’t built very well. Lacking tools and a shop, my early pieces were put together using traditional methods, hand tools, and whatever scrap lumber I could find and incorporate. This sometimes meant that some of my work was an assembly of other pieces that I had salvaged, disassembled, and reused; table legs, for instance, were a very important find for me given how hard it was to hand form them on my own without a table saw. This also meant that I have cut more than my share of circular table tops using just a hand saw – a valuable learning experience, but not something to do very often.
My first chance at power tools and shop space came through a campus woodshop at the University of Oregon and through shared garage space in Portland, Oregon. I spent most of my time making simple cabinet boxes that could be repurposed and modified in size and scale for use as bookcases, side tables, and audio-video storage cubes. No masterpieces ever emerged from that workshop that I knew of, but it was there that my life working wood began alongside real woodworkers, and I learned a lot by watching and working alongside while they built pieces that were much more complex than my boxes and cubes.
The carpentry style of the Pacific Northwest is heavily influenced by Arts and Crafts, mid-century modern, and Asian design, and I came to appreciate, understand, and use the construction methods specific to furniture of these styles. On one hand, this requires intricate and absolutely accurate joints and assembly that borders on the oppressive, while on the other hand the joinery and structure allows for counterbalance and load-transfer that makes possible elegant and organic final construction. Initial concept and design stages require a well-thought plan either painstakingly sketched out on paper or managed in a computer layout, followed by marking out cut lines on stock, meticulous cutting and shaping of the wood by a variety of hand and mechanical means, and brought together with glue and clamps. I use mechanical fasteners when necessary such as outdoors, attaching table top to an apron, and on interior casework (crown molding, baseboard, door and window trim), but prefer to work with traditional joinery.