DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We went to meet a local cabinetmaker because we have a cabinet we want made. His shop is at the end of a long driveway at the end of a private road, at the end of another road that isn’t private but might as well be for all the traffic it gets — I’ve driven by it a hundred times and never noticed it.

The estate sprawls. “My shop is the building below the playground,” he’d said, as if I’d overlook the 1200 square foot barn with huge doors and skylights, filled with power tools, built on a hillside atop a grid of lumber-storage shelves. All the doors are custom-made; each demonstrates some boundary-pushing door-construction technique. I guess it’s his proof of education, a craftsman’s equivalent to a framed degree on the wall.

He was happy to hear we weren’t interested in kitchen cabinets. “I’m tired of doing kitchens,” he said. Later I saw his own kitchen. It’s the one room in the house that doesn’t look like he built it himself out of hand-planed, oil-rubbed teak-mahogany-walnut-maple-cherry with inlaid jatoba-purpleheart-koa; in fact I think the cabinets came from Ikea. His curvalicious California walnut bent-laminated bed organism, in contrast, has only one equal in the world, because he only ever made two of them. It looks like a mushroom.

I asked how much land he owned. “Just ten acres,” he replied. I marveled out loud that even with ten acres, we could still hear the neighbor running a lawnmower. “Oh, that’s my lawnmower,” he said. “I’ve got a guy working.”

Yep, this is one of those stories that doesn’t have an ending.