What About Other Making?

I mention the frustrated furniture makers who aren’t furniture makers all the time. One of them has a last name of a university he could never hope to sniff the doors of. I doubt there’s much furniture making.

What I often say is something like those folks are filing out tax forms for a living, perhaps living off of a spouses income, or maybe doing site work.

There’s no point to this post other than making it clear that when someone does site work, especially well, or interior custom joinery, that’s not to deride those trades. It’s to deride people who dabble in them and then talk as if they are some furniture tycoon.

I work with a lot of good auditors (maybe not tax preparers) and the neighbor over the fence is a contractor who does the work soup to nuts on projects that aren’t more than $50k or so. I had him fit out a room on my house and make it permanent, and all I heard from the neighbors was “did you check around? he’s not the cheapest. I heard they do good work, but their prices are high”.

Yeah, I know what the price is. I paid the guy – cash – so that I would feel the pain of paying for the work and not get suckered into scope creep that comes along when you ask if you can afford the loan vs. afford the project.

My neighbor is a master not just of basic soup to nuts site work, but he fits all of the trimwork air tight, and while I wouldn’t pay anyone to make furniture, I would gladly pay my neighbor to do trimwork at a level that I’d have to do five times to get as tight.

Good work is good work, whether it’s audit, legal, food prep, joiners work or trim or whatever else. It just would get really weird if you hired some guy to do some legal work and found out the guy practiced law one day a week, but had a hobby of going to the internet to criticize bird carvers or something. There seems to be a lot of that. It doesn’t lift the standard of anything for anyone.

We all live outcomes. People who do what they say and are honest about it and do a good job without misleading others generally raise the standard of living for everyone, whether they’re drafting a will or installing a bathroom sink.