You Work With Your Spouse?!
Yeah, I do, and I love it. It might sound cliché, but we’re a team. Here’s how it shakes out.
I’m an early riser; Faith sleeps in. That would be an issue except we have neighbors, and I’m not one to go running buzzsaw-sounding machines at seven in the morning. The night before, we talk about our plans for the following day. There’s a summer-to-summer dry-erase calendar on the wall of our office, which we use to plan for seasonal preparation and day-to-day tasks. Coasters, cutting boards, and tealight holders for Christmas; Adirondack chairs, planter boxes, and picnic paraphernalia for spring; playing card boxes and furniture pretty much year-round, and so on.
After breakfast and letting the dogs out to terrorize squirrels and rabbits that never stop coming back - I imagine they find the whole charade sort of cute - I head to the barn and usually hand-sand whatever needs it. Call me weird, but I find hand sanding to be an extremely relaxing and helpful exercise, particularly with furniture. It helps me get to know the piece because I look at it more carefully than when I’m blasting it with a palm sander. Fingers are fantastic at getting into nooks. I like using net discs as opposed to paper ones because they fold nicely without tearing the sanding surface, plus they just work better. I’ll also watch a video or two from the land of YouTube, research furniture designs, explore new ideas, rabbit hole, update the website, order some stuff for the shop, half the time because I saw something on YouTube, etc. I select wood for the next project and prep it for sawing. Then, Faith surfaces, conveniently when it’s no longer blatantly rude to run power tools, and we get to work. It’s the best part of my day (sorry, relationship cynics).
We don’t work on the same projects together. That would not be a recipe for success for us. We approach things differently, and we know it. But we ask for each other’s opinion pretty routinely, or for help. There are tools in the shop that I’m less comfortable with than others, one case in point being the router table. I love the palm router. It’s like some little well-trained handheld pet, a palm-sized emotional support companion that perfectly nibbles the edges of boards for me. I feel safe with it, and it’s cute. Thank you, palm router. But the router table is a different beast altogether, partly because it’s a much more powerful router, but it feels to me like a death vortex that wants to suck me into its cavernous spinning oblivion, and if I resist or approach it in a slightly inappropriate way, it will launch things at me or across the room with terrifying velocity. Faith, meanwhile, has a very cordial relationship with this demonic tool, so if I need dado grooves for my boxes, she pauses from the task at hand and does it for me. Things like that.
It’s also good to get feedback from someone you trust won’t bullshit you. There’s a brain trick that we can succumb to, involving feeling so good about pulling off a build that post-build details seem to matter significantly less. Before I go to the sanding and finishing stage, I will often ask Faith to take a look. Typical series of responses to that query include things like “OH MY GODDDD, IT LOOKS SO GOOD,” “Great job, lover” (more sorries to the relationship cynics; I should have added a trigger warning), and then two or three extremely minor and sensitively delivered observations about what could be attended to or what seems ever so slightly off that feel, to me, in the moment, like being in the lair of an angry router table. But Faith is right, I should take care of the glue-out, or be sure to sand something out, or next time I should consider a different angle for the legs because this one looks a wee bit whack. If you don’t have that in your life, your growth as a woodworker and as a person is objectively limited. So yeah, I love it.
