A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  Normally the height of a building’s floor is determined simply by measuring up from the top of the foundation. But because of the differences among the elevations of our four footings (owing both to the slope of the site and to variations in the size of the boulders), we instead had to fix the floor height at a hypothetical point in space (whatever looked best, basically) and then measure down from there to our footings. Every other measurement in the building would be based on the coordinates of this imaginary plane.

  Does this sound confusing? It was. “I’m starting to see a pattern here,” Joe muttered as we trekked out to the site to make our field measurements. The footings were covered with a foot of snow. “Nothing about this building is normal.”

  Back in the warmth of the barn, Joe and I each took custody of a post, marking it for length (remembering to subtract 1½? for the pressure-treated wood shoe it would stand on) and then penciling on its face a 3½”-by-7½” rectangle where the notch (for our four-by-eight beam) would go. I was eager to start in on my mortise, but Joe had a lesson for the day he wanted to make sure I took to heart: “Measure twice, cut once.” Simple as it is, this is one of the carpenter’s most important axioms, aimed at averting mistakes and the waste of wood. It proved to be one I had a hard time honoring, however, probably because I was so accustomed to working in a medium in which the reworking of material is not only possible, but desirable. “Undo Typing” is actually one of the commands in my word-processing program, part of a whole raft of options designed expressly to accommodate a writer’s haste, sloppiness, or second thoughts. There being no “Undo Sawing” command, the carpenter who makes a mistake is apt to call, in jest, for the “wood stretcher”—a tool that of course doesn’t exist. The irreversibility of an action taken in wood is how the carpenter comes by his patience and deliberation, his habit of pausing to mentally walk through all the consequences of any action—to consider fully the implications for, say, the trimming of a doorjamb next month of a cut made in a rafter today. These were alien habits of mind, but ones I’d resolved to learn. So I followed Joe out the door, trudging back into the snow to double-check our measurements.

  To trade a chain saw for a chisel is to trade one way of knowing a piece of wood for another. Though the chain saw acquaints you with certain general properties—a wood’s hardness and uniformity, its aroma—the chisel discloses much finer information. Something as subtle as the variation in the relative density of two growth rings—the sort of data any machine would overwhelm—the beveled tip of the chisel’s steel blade will accurately transmit to its ash handle and through that to your hand.

  The chisel enters into the body of the fir tree, and when it is sharp, the material it encounters there feels less like wood than dense flesh. As I tapped on the handle with my ash mallet, the blade sliced easily through its salmon-colored layers, raising a plume of curled shavings I half expected to be moist to the touch. Before a well-honed blade, the substance of a piece of clear Douglas fir yields almost as if it were a slab of tuna. As the chisel slips past the dead outer skin of the timber, the wood brightens and colors, seems more alive.

  Once I grew comfortable with the tool, working the fir became thoroughly enjoyable, more pastime than chore. Mortising calls for an appealing mix of attentiveness and mindlessness, keeping part of the mind engaged while setting the rest of it free to wander. Also counting in its favor was the fact that the chisel was a tool that couldn’t easily kill me, no matter how badly I mishandled it. Having been put to the same purpose for a few thousand years, the chisel feels supremely well adapted to its task. Its blade has two different faces—one beveled at a forty-five-degree angle, the other straight. The first one wants to dig down deep into the substance of the wood, the second to slip more lightly along its grain, shaving off curls of fir thin enough to let light through them. By rotating the handle of the tool in your hand, you can carefully regulate the amount of wood the blade removes, plunging or shaving depending on how close to the borders of the notch you’re working. The challenge is to keep to the outlines you’ve drawn, being careful not to make the notch any bigger than it absolutely has to be, in order to ensure a snug fit. So every few minutes I’d test my notch by inserting a scrap piece of four-by-eight, which served as understudy for my beam.

  After some practice the tool began to feel light and alive in my hands, almost as if it knew what it was supposed to do. Which in some sense it did. Like any good hand tool, but especially one that has been fine-tuned over centuries, a well-made chisel contains in its design a wealth of experience on which the hands of a receptive user can draw. Working properly with such a tool awakens that experience, that particular knowledge of wood; at the same time it helps to preserve it. When the chiseling was going particularly well, it reminded me of what it is like to work with an exceptionally well-trained animal; if I paid close enough attention to what it wanted to do, even let it steer me a bit, the chisel had things to teach me.

  After Thoreau cut down the pine trees for the frame of his hut at Walden, he hewed and notched the logs himself, a process—an intimacy, to judge by his account of it—that he believed had somehow righted his relationship to the fallen trees. “Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree,” he wrote, even “though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.” I used to think this was a too-convenient rationalization for Thoreau’s having done something that ordinarily he would have deplored. This is, after all, the same Thoreau who once composed an elegy for a pine tree felled by a lumberman (“Why does not the village bell sound a knell?”). Now we are to believe that the care he has taken hewing these pines, the purpose to which he’s put them, and the knowledge they have yielded are enough to compensate for the sacrifice. Yet the idea no longer seemed self-serving or crazy, as Thoreau’s arguments sometimes do. It was the work that bought this intimate knowledge, the inescapable price of which is the death of a tree. Though it’s probably wrong to think that only the handworker, with his traditional tools, gains such an intimate acquaintance with trees; the lumberman working with his screaming chain saw knows trees too, he just knows different things about them. Both, however, come to know the tree better than its more distant admirers.

  My own acquaintance with Douglas fir owed as much to the desultory chatter of my chiseling companion (the pace and quiet of the work, which has a lot in common with whittling, is ideal for conversation) as it did to the clinking of my chisel. Going by the number of growth rings, I determined that seventy-five years of tree life were represented in the section I was working; the tree had to be still older than that, however, since the section contained neither its innermost nor outermost ring. As I chiseled my way down to a depth of three inches, slowing as I neared my target, I noticed that the rings were not evenly spaced. The innermost ones were as thick as my finger, and they narrowed as they moved out from the core, until they were so slender as to be barely discernible. According to Joe, this indicated that the tree had probably started life out in the open, allowing it to make rapid growth during its first few years. As the forest grew up around it, however, sunlight became progressively more scarce and the tree’s growth slowed accordingly. The pattern suggested my fir tree was probably second-growth, and that it may have been planted on the site of a clear-cut.

  I noticed too that each ring was made up of two distinct layers: Rings of reddish-brown, dense-looking wood alternated with ones that were softer and pinkish-yellow in hue. Joe explained that a fir tree puts on two distinct kinds of growth every year. It seems the tree grows very rapidly in the spring, laying down a wide, porous layer of cambium in order to speed the passage of water and nutrients to its flush of new leaves. Growth slows in the summer, and the tree adds a thinner layer of hardwood, the main purpose of which is to strengthen the trunk. Fir is known for laying down a consistently high proportion of strong, dense summerwood, which is what makes it such a good structural timber. As I chiseled, I could feel the difference between spring
- and summerwood as a slight change in resistance.

  While we worked on our respective notches, Joe and I passed the time talking about the intricacies of post-and-beam construction. The joints we were making were relatively simple ones—no dovetails or, for that matter, true tenons to worry about—but even so, Joe had dozens of tips, big and small, to pass on, most of them having to do with the choice and handling of chisels and the behavior of wood grain; you could see that, behind this process, stood an old and intricate culture of woodwork. But much as I enjoyed making my notches, I was somewhat relieved there weren’t many more of them to make. The work proceeded slowly, its progress measured in fractions of inches. You worried constantly about trespassing the borders of your notch, a transgression that couldn’t be taken back. When I saw how long it took us to make two mortises in a single post (one to hold the floor beam, another for the header), the idea of erecting an entire building by this method—hewing the timbers, chiseling hundreds of joints far more elaborate than ours, and then raising the frame all by hand—well, all this now seemed about as improbable to me as building a pyramid.

  When I grumbled about the cumbersomeness of mortising compared to hammering together a frame of two-by-fours with nails, Joe sprang to the defense of post-and-beam construction. He claimed that timber frames were structurally superior to modern balloon frames (and indeed there are post-and-beam frames from the Middle Ages still standing in Europe) and that they made a more economical use of wood; the additional passes through a saw required to transform a log into two-by-fours wasted far more wood (in the form of sawdust), not to mention energy.

  There was a certain poetic economy in post-and-beam framing, in the way it seemed to carry the “treeness” of lumber forward into a building. The vertical posts performed like trunks, exploiting the strength of wood fibers in compression, while the horizontal beams acted very much like limbs, drawing on their strength in tension. And as I realized the first time we fitted a beam into its notch, the two members locked together in a satisfyingly knotlike way; instead of the superficial attachment made by a nail, the beam nested into the body of the post almost as if it were a bough. But, soundness and sentiment aside, it seemed to me that, as much as anything else, it was the very difficulty and mystique of traditional framing that commended it to Joe. Since not everybody could do it, those who could were entitled to a special status.

  Up until the second half of the nineteenth century, the joiner, or housewright—to use the two terms by which carpenters were then known—possessed the cultural authority and prestige that architects possess today. They ruled the house-building process from design to completion. And the chief source of the housewright’s authority was his expertise in the ways of joining wood timbers, since joinery was easily the most critical and dangerous operation in the making of a building. The status of the carpenter has never fully recovered from the invention of the balloon frame, which replaced posts and beams and mortised joints with slender studs, sills, and joists that just about anybody with a hammer could join with cheap nails. By insisting we mortise our joints, a decision that immediately cast me as his pupil and himself as master, Joe was reclaiming some of the joiner’s lost authority for himself. Without challenging Charlie directly, he had removed the making of my building to a time before architects mattered, when the carpenter was sovereign.

  The shift from post-and-beam to balloon framing (named for the dubious-seeming lightness of the new structure) marks an important change not only in the history of wood construction, but also in the practice of architecture, the work of building, and even, it seems, in the way that people think about space and place. For between the two types of frame stands a gulf of sensibility as well as technology. This is something my building helped me to at least begin to appreciate, since its frame was a hybrid that acquainted me with both traditions. After Joe and I had raised the front corner posts onto their rock feet and then fitted our floor beams into their notches, we traded our chisels for hammers and nails. The floor, the eighteen-inch “knee wall” at the middle of the building where it stepped down with the ground plane, and the lower sections of its end walls were all to be framed out of conventional two-by-fours and -sixes, in the way most wooden structures have been framed since about 1850 or so.

  Now that we were swinging hammers rather than tapping chisels, I felt like I was back on at least semifamiliar ground. But on the first morning of floor framing, I noticed Joe watching me closely as I pounded nails, clearly weighing whether or not to interrupt.

  “Can I show you a better way to do that?”

  “What—to hammer a nail?” I was incredulous, and then, after he explained what I was doing wrong, crestfallen: it turned out I didn’t even know the proper way to swing a hammer. It seems I was holding the side of the hammer with my thumb, a grip that forced my wrist to deliver most of the force needed to drive the nail. Joe reached over and moved my thumb down around the shank of the hammer. Now as I brought the hammer down I felt a slight loss of control but a substantial gain in power, for suddenly the tool had become an extension of my whole arm and not just my hand. Joe never said it, but I’d been holding my hammer as if it were a tennis racket poised for a backhand, a realization that heated my cheeks with embarrassment. Once I’d corrected my grip, I found I could drive a big, ten-penny nail through a piece of two-by with half as many blows as before (this was still twice as many as it took Joe, however), and the business of framing moved smartly along.

  It wasn’t hard to see why balloon framing had caught on. Where it had taken the two of us to raise and manhandle our posts and beams into position, a process akin to standing a tree trunk on a dime (the dime here being the pin jutting up from the rock through the pressure-treated pad), I was able to frame most of the floor and the entire knee wall by myself in considerably less time than it had taken me to chisel a pair of notches. As soon as I acquired the knack of toe-nailing (angling a nail through the tip of a stud or joist and then into a beam), the work just flew. Only after struggling with six-by-ten posts can you understand how carpenters could ever have thought of two-by-four studs as “sticks”—by comparison, these seemed about as light and easy to handle as toothpicks. Almost without looking, I could pick a two-by-four out of the pile (they were more or less interchangeable), mark it for length, cut it, and toe-nail it into place—all by myself.

  Though this wood too was Douglas fir, I was only dimly aware of this fact, and might not have noticed had the yard slipped in a few pieces of spruce or pine. Balloon framing doesn’t acquaint you with the particularities of wood in the way post-and-beam framing does, and it’s easy to forget these are trees you’re working with. It’s geometry you worry about—with so many more elements to keep square—rather than the idiosyncrasies of wood. In this sense two-by-four framing is a more abstract kind of work than timber framing, with an industrial rhythm that places a far greater premium on the repetitive task and the interchangeable part. Which is why an amateur like me could frame a knee wall in an afternoon without help from anyone.

  What I was discovering in the course of framing my little building, an entire culture had discovered in the middle of the last century. Contemporary accounts of the new technology brim with a kind of giddiness at the rapid feats of construction it had suddenly made possible—houses put up in days, whole towns rising in weeks. “A man and a boy can now attain the same results, with ease, that twenty men could on an old-fashioned frame,” wrote one Chicago observer in 1869. There was, too, a lingering skepticism, reflected in the derisiveness of the term “balloon frame,” that a structure consisting of nothing more substantial than sticks held together with nails could actually stand up or last. What a revolutionary, and unsettling, notion this must have been; imagine if contractors today were suddenly to start building houses out of cardboard. People thought the new frames looked as flimsy as the baskets they resembled.

  Though still a technology based on wood, balloon framing is a product of the machine age: it would never
have developed if not for the invention of the steam-powered sawmill (which ensured a ready supply of lumber of consistent dimensions) and manufactured nails. Prior to 1830 or so, nails were hand-forged, making them far too precious to be used in the quantities that a balloon frame required. It was the industrial revolution that, by turning nails into a cheap commodity and trees into lumber, prepared the ground for this radical new way of putting together a building.

  But if the machine made the balloon frame possible, it was, more than anything else, the ecology of the Great Plains that made it necessary. In the days before the railroad, timber framing depended on an ample supply of trees too large to be transported any great distance. In most places, building in wood had been essentially a local process of translating the native forest into the various shapes of habitation. But as soon as the American frontier slipped west of Chicago, pioneers found themselves for the first time trying to settle a grassland rather than a forest. It was the development of the balloon frame, with its easily transportable materials, that opened such an ecosystem to settlement. The translation of forest into habitation could now take place on the national rather than local level, with Chicago playing the role of middleman, milling wood from the northern forest and shipping it into the unwooded plains. Chicago, and the balloon frame, had transformed the tree into lumber.

  Since a couple of men could assemble one of the new frames without the kind of group effort or specialized skills needed to raise a timber frame, a pioneer family now could build a house just about anywhere they wanted. By comparison, the technology of timber framing—communal and hierarchical by its very nature—had been supremely well adapted to the kind of close-knit religious communities that had settled the forested East. Looked at from this perspective, the new building method added a powerful centrifugal force—and a force for individualism—to the settlement of the American West.