Roughhousing for Beginners
how to design and build for your specific needs
I have my stepfather, Leigh Berglund, to thank for making me comfortable with power tools. He took it for granted that a teenaged girl should be able to change a tire, operate a hand drill and cut decorative forms out of sheetmetal on a bandsaw, and he made sure that I could do these things without harming myself.
This did not inspire a career in restoration carpentry. However, it empowered me to make things for myself, from the materials at hand, and to my own specifications. I have never spent days lovingly planing a bookcase, creating dovetail joints, or stripping decades of paint from old wooden molding. I prefer to keep things simple: a drill, set of bits, hammer, screwdrivers, measuring tape, small pry, scissors capable of cutting metal, some clamps, stud finder and either a handsaw and miter box, or a chop saw, are basically all I need to make shelves, or a bed or a chicken coop. These items will not necessarily be finely finished, but they will be an attractive shape and the right size and they will be sturdy and comfortable. And I can make them within an afternoon, or over a few days.
If you want to hire someone to build you small things, you run into three issues:
The carpenter is scheduled out for the next eight months, so you will have to wait.
The job is so small that the carpenter will have to charge you a tidy sum to make it worth their while to do it.
The job is so small that they can’t be bothered, so you are out of luck.
So, rather than have a custom-built item that is the perfect proportion for where it is being placed, you have the option of seeking a ready-made solution - perhaps a plastic shelving system from the Home Depot or Lowes (I have one in an upstairs closet - it fills a need, in its ungainly way), or something from Ikea, or elsewhere on the internet, or maybe Goodwill… perhaps you will get lucky!
I am not suggesting that I custom rough-build every component of my home - most of the items have been purchased or scavenged. But for some situations, the ability to custom build something that is just right for the space gives you the power to design and build your surroundings in a coherent way - a shelf here, a perfectly-shaped desktop there… some solutions simply can’t be purchased in standard sizes. And if you are clever about your materials, you can do it all on the cheap.
I have many inspirations for hand-built design: Christopher Alexander and his book A Pattern Language for all his work on generative design; Lloyd Kahn (substack here, Shelter book here and Home Work book here) for his extensive research on hand-built shelter; Edith Wharton for her very exacting taste in her excellent book with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses; and Catharine Beecher, for her early work on home economics, in which she gets into all aspects of domestic design and living (with a good dose of morality, which you can take or leave according to your taste) - that is a partial list, but a good start - all should be available through your local library.
What these works have in common is a shared sense that there are better ways to build and organize things, and whether you manifest them in marble or rough-hewn wood, if you get the proportions right, the windows placed sensibly, and put your chairs in places where people will actually want to sit, you should be off to a good start. It is all about paying attention to how we inhabit spaces, and designing to make that experience as rich and homey as possible.
The projects that I write about may or may not have a place in your home, but I hope that they can teach you a basic approach to building and problem solving, that you can then adapt to your particular needs. To begin, my next article will go over my toolkit, some safety tips and an easy approach to identifying problems and designing solutions. Time to get out your measuring tape!
FULL DISCLOSURE! Sometimes I include Affiliate Links in my articles. This means that if you purchase an item from these links, I will receive a small commission. I only ever recommend items or companies that I have used and am VERY happy with - and if I ever link to an item that I haven’t used, I make this clear in the article.