Casual Carpentry and Yardfarming
I’m working on putting together a website - The Casual Specialist - with the idea that there must be other people out there who would benefit from being able to design and build greenhouses and chicken coops and customize their houses with clever shelves in essential spaces, slapped together with random materials and a sense of derring-do…
Well, to be a Casual Carpenter and Yardfarmer is not the same as being a videographer, photographer, graphic artist, web-designer or business person, but I am learning on the fly.
Case in point, I recently attempted to film my first how-to video, detailing the installation of a “door” in the chicken fence. This is one of the highlights (pay special attention to the dogs in the background):
Very exciting stuff! Now I have to work on actually conveying “instructions”.
The camera for this snippet is my iphone, in my nail-belt pocket, wedged in place with one of my younger son’s socks. Here’s how that looks:
Would you trust this person with your next video or carpentry project? That’s the question.
I think the real problem here is that I am skirting the territory of becoming a Youtuber, when I have spent the last several years lecturing my sons about how they must have better aspirations than to become Youtubers.
Self deprecation aside, I do have a keen interest in the work of people like Christopher Alexander, Edith Wharton and Lloyd Kahn, so there is a philosophical/aesthetic basis to my approach, casual as it may be. My studies in this realm have introduced me to concepts such as the Fibonacci spiral, the post-WWII built environment, generative design, permaculture and various other big concepts that I use to justify messing around with small power tools.
I am graced with a patient husband, though sometimes he will put his foot down, as when I recently tried to pitch the idea that the bubbled and peeling molding trim that I had improperly prepared could be scraped down and installed as “distressed” molding:
He told me that I was distressing him, and proceeded to repaint the trim himself and install it while I was out of town.
Grudgingly, I admit that it was probably the right decision.
If you wish to visit the website in its early generative state, you can find it here: thecasualspecialist.com. You might notice that there are no links to share the information to social media (can’t figure out how to do that) and that I somehow managed to remove the website’s “footer” (not sure how I did that, or how to put it back.) Feel free to let me know if you see anything else that is misspelled or non-functioning - all feedback is helpful. Within reason.
