"Some days you're the hammer, and some days you are the nail."
From time to time during my early childhood, my father worked as a carpenter. Even when carpentry wasn’t his paying job, our garage was filled with wood, tools and a project in progress: Bird houses for the Cub Scouts, shelves for my bedroom, furniture for Barbee, a cabinet for a friend. My grandfather worked as a carpenter all his life, and though I never met him, I have seen a child’s doll cradle that he made in the late 1920’s for his neighbor’s daughter at Christmas. When I started working on the family tree, I found from an early census that my great-great-grandfather started work at age 18 as what he called a “tinker,” and he later listed his job as farmer and carpenter, so I have about 150 or so years of sawdust in my history. I love the smell and feel of wood and am always entranced by all that can be done with different types of wood and a capable carpenter, so I was very interested to meet Brent Slosser and his crew at Outer Banks Finish Carpentry.
The hardest part about deciding on the style of trim work to be done was learning what to call the images I had in mind. I wanted something simple enough to effectively “disappear” but distinctive enough to add shape and texture to the spaces. After an afternoon of hunting through books about trim work, Vince and I decided on a Craftsman style finish, and that turned out to be a good choice for this house. As it is, the work is lovely and can easily stand on its own merit, and the simplicity of the design will allow the addition of other textures or ornaments in time.
Like so many other things, this trade has its own vocabulary. I didn’t have any real knowledge of what to call the pieces and parts that would fit together around the windows and doors or those that would comprise the stairwell. It is hard to understand the difference between a window sill and a window stool, but the most interesting term was a “plinth block,” which sits at the bottom of the door casings. Brent asked me early on if I wanted to use plinth blocks, and I simply had no idea, though the answer turned out to be “no.” “Plinth” sounds like a term that someone mispronounced and forever created a word that sounds like a stifled sneeze!
Take a look:
