The lessons Larry wants us to learn from his last published work (Larry passed away on Monday, October 24), are important enough to require reiteration. As Larry writes:

Change, even minor change, can be tough to face and doesn’t come easy for most of us. We get used to our habitual ways of living, even when things are not what we would like; we prefer to stick with ‘the tried and the true.’ Even a change like switching off a mindless TV program to read a good book is not easy. We get in a rut and find it difficult to get out. But is not change really all there is?

Accepting and adapting to change is what A Carpenter’s Life, and a craftsman’s life, is all about: making mistakes, learning, then repairing your work and avoiding the same mistakes later. If we don’t dedicate our present moment towards appreciating and understanding our past, how we can ever hope to manage our future?

A Carpenter’s Life is a trip through Larry’s past, told by the houses he lived in and the homes he built, right up until the end of his miraculously simple yet endearing career. The book is filled with hands-on homilies and simple life-truths, sometimes expressed through bumper stickers and maxims from folklore. Larry says: “Times do change, but not necessarily for the better. We do have more things, but do we have more happiness? I was born at a time and in a place where no one had electricity, people talked to each other face-to-face because there was no radio, TV, or telephone.”

It is these stories and perceptions that punctuate each chapter of A Carpenter’s Life, lessons Larry returns to repeatedly—maybe to make sure we are listening, that we understand, that we remember: hard work, accomplishment, and consciousness of the present moment form our core strength, and that is what we miss from the “good old days, when we were more in touch with the earth and our place on it.” As Larry puts it so poetically: “We long to feel, sometimes in the evening, that gentle breeze that comes, touches our faces, and tells us who we are.”

The publication of this book is miraculous, too, and a testament to Larry’s discipline and drive—his ‘won’t give up’ attitude. As Larry told me on the phone last year: “No one wanted to publish it! So I just started writing it, chapter by chapter, and sending the chapters to Peter Chapman at Taunton. Finally, I don’t know why, I guess I just wore them down, Taunton decided to publish it.”

As usual, Larry’s self-deprecating humor hid the truth: the editors at Taunton recognized the importance of the book almost immediately, and even though it had no place in their catalogue, they knew real value when they saw it. As Peter Chapman, Editor of Taunton Books said in a recent New York Time’s article: “There was this wellspring of feeling [at Taunton Press]. Everybody who read it found something in it. I knew Larry was a good writer who could clearly explain how to install a step. But I kept wondering where this other stuff was coming from. It’s a very spiritual view of the world.”

I can’t imagine any carpenter not being moved by Larry’s book, by the experience of his life, the years he spent in construction, the revolution he lived through, and his simultaneous search for meaning and value in what he saw as an America run wild with materialism and greed. Ironically, Larry played a part in that wild and greedy growth—he helped change the way we build homes, ushering in a new system, abandoning the traditional bib-overall all-around carpenter who could do anything, and ushering in the new leather-aproned specialist: the Southern California piece-work Framer.

Larry’s book brings to mind George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, published in 1923, which provides a rich history of a rapidly changing craft at the close of the 19th century, when hand skills were giving way to machine skills. Just think of the late-19th century song John Henry: The Steel Driving Man: “Before I let your steam drill beat me down, I’m gonna hammer myself to death, Lord Lord, I’ll hammer my poo’ self to death.” This was a time when wooden wheels were being replaced by steel tracks.

Larry reminds me of John Henry, too. Even Kevin Ireton, past editor of Fine Homebuilding, uses similar iconography when describing an early encounter with Larry: “Over and over, he drove sixteen-penny spikes with two licks—one to set and one to sink. The nails disappeared so fast I wondered if some magician’s trick were secretly pulling them into the wood ahead of the hammer blows.”

Like The Wheelwright’s Shop, Larry’s book describes a time when revolutionary new methods changed an industry. “I’ve heard people say, ‘We don’t build them like we used to.’ That’s true,” Larry Haun writes. “After tearing down and remodeling many older buildings, my observation is that we build houses better than we used to.”

Larry Haun (photo by Dean DellaVentura)

Larry helped build out the San Fernando Valley in northern Los Angeles, during an expansionary period that this country hasn’t seen since—at least not one that was sustainable. In a country hungry for new homes, when “for the first and probably the last time in our nation’s history, masses of ordinary workers could afford to buy and actually own homes,” Larry developed production methods for laying out and framing walls, cutting roofs, installing windows and doors—methods that didn’t “sacrifice quality for quantity.” As Larry puts it, “We weren’t building gingerbread houses, McMansions, or starter castles. We were building solid, one-and two-story tract houses that working-class families could afford to buy.”

Through a collection of articles and videos, Larry eagerly passed those methods on to other carpenters and framers—he taught classes, he built Habitat For Humanity homes, he installed ramps for the disabled.

For all the ways that Larry has changed how we work, I think his last gift to us is his best. He wanted to change the way we think. Rather than working so hard to forget our past, Larry says, “We need to educate ourselves about where we have been, what we have done wrong, and what a sustainable world will look like.”

“My mother always told me not to make a mess of things for others to clean up,” Larry says. And he shares with us the same advice he gave his granddaughter: “It is not our seed that sustains the world. It is the seeds from the trees, plants, and grasses that sustain us.”

Like his mother, Larry loved plants and seeds and gardening; he measured his life by seasons: “I like to remember, though, that even if I live to be a hundred I will only have seen a hundred planting seasons.”

Larry Haun lived to be eighty, and though he saw fewer than eighty planting seasons, he sowed seeds that will continue to grow in all of us—first, because of the changes he brought to framing and carpentry, but more so for his good will, his care for others, and this last book, in which he shares lessons learned the hard way, from a lifetime of building houses.

How can we give our work that quality—to the homes we build, to their interior and exterior woodwork; a beauty that will live through the ages and not look clumsy, pretentious, or just plain ignorant?

This is important! As carpenters and woodworkers, our work is our life. It will be here long after we’re gone. And I, for one, desperately don’t want my legacy to be a big pile of trees wasted in bad and ugly work.

Here in New England, I can look at classic architecture: Colonial, Federal, all types of Victorian homes, and try to puzzle it out—learn how to replicate the look of a well-designed home or detail. But it’s still hard for me to tease out everything—the proper proportions, the symmetry—all on my own, and I’ve worked in these old houses for years. And what about my friend Gary Katz? He lives in California. He thinks a craftsman house built in 1920 is as old as the Parthenon. How is he ever going to learn to design a graceful Georgian-style mantle?

Amazingly, I discovered a book that makes it all much simpler. It turns out that there are rules of thumb and basic concepts we can use to design architectural woodwork that looks right. Not only that, but these rules were well known by the builders of the 19th and 18th century in this country, and even by builders going back to the old world in Europe and ancient Greece. Lucky for us, a group of authors and illustrators have put these rules and suggestions into a form that even us carpenters can understand. This awesome book is Get Your House Right (GYHR).

Everyone who has anything to do with building homes should own this book. And they should read it, too. In fact, we should do more than read this book—we should study it.

I first recommended this book to Gary Katz almost three years go (where would he be without me? Sometimes I think I’m the wizard pulling his strings—oh, that’s a mixed metaphor, isn’t it?). Now I notice that other carpenters are reading this book, too. That’s encouraging. We should take our craft seriously; we should try to do good work, work that is not only built to last, but work that is beautiful so that it should last. Get Your House Right is a good first step toward designing beautiful work.

The book begins with a great introduction, titled: “Why You Need This Book.” Don’t skip that introduction. It should be required reading by anyone who picks up a hammer and calls him/herself a carpenter; or by anyone who picks up a pencil (or a CAD program) and calls him/herself an architect!

And the book ends with a delightful explanation of rules and how they apply to architecture. Obviously, if Frank Lloyd Wright had followed all the rules in GYHR, we would never have enjoyed Falling Water or the Prairie Style; and I sure wish this book had included rules about Gothic architecture, too. But even the authors admit that GYHR is about classical rules, what they refer to as “The Great Game”. They write: “To know how to play any game, you need to understand the rules. But to play it well, you need to learn to break the rules, too.” But you can’t break the rules unless you know the rules.

Like a good 18th century pattern book, GYHR begins with a discussion of unity and a review of the Classic Orders, and soon delves down into the specifics, with easy-to-follow examples of proper molding design and placement, from base to cornice.

The authors cover every aspect of a home, from arches to windows to doors, and in exciting detail. Don’t miss the mullion and muttin layouts, the sill details, or the right and wrong brick designs.

In our age of zero lot line McMansions (the recession hasn’t been all bad!), we’ve seen enough architectural sins to last several lifetimes. If you aren’t familiar with some of them, but still get a queasy feeling when you look at many contemporary homes, you’ll learn a lot from the first chapter of this book: “Nine Things You Need to Know”: a concise and focused essay on how to design buildings with grace and simplicity; how to design homes with sustainable materials and sustainable features!

I’ve always felt that one of the best ways to teach someone how to do something is to show them the wrong way, then show them the right way. The authors of Get Your House Right must have felt the same way. They frequently compare examples of what to AVOID with examples of what you should USE.

If you’ve ever wondered about proportions—how wide or how tall something should be—you’ll find the answer in this book.

Here at TiC, we’ve already taken subjects from GYHR and turned them into comprehensive and easy-to-follow articles (like The Misused & Confused Chair Rail, and Terminating Versus Supporting Moldings), and I’m sure there will be more in the future. This is one useful book.

I apologize. I read this book more than a year ago and wanted to write a review but never made the time, and I should have. Sure, we’re all busy and short of time, but the truth is, if something is important to you, you make the time, even if it means sacrificing something else that isn’t as important—at least for a little while. And that’s often what it takes to read a good book. This is one I recommend highly to anyone interested in classical architecture and the design of traditional American homes.

When computers became popular, people started saying that one day there won’t be any books. With the popularity of e-books and readers like the Kindle and the iPad, I hear that even more often. Traditional American Rooms is a great example of why books will never disappear. Learning something new (or something old) involves two parts—studying, and understanding what you’re studying. Studying a book means spending real time with it, looking at the same pages over and over again. Understanding something, at least for carpenters, means touching it with your hands; figuring out how it works. For me, this book satisfies both parts of learning.

Ever since I discovered The Elements of Style, I’ve hungered for a book that covered the same subjects but more comprehensively—at least when it comes to Colonial and Traditional styles. As a carpenter, I’ve wanted a reference for molding styles and sizes, as well as classical terminology. And I wanted pictures and drawings that made it all easy to understand.

Brent Hull and Christine Frank have more than fulfilled that need.

With great photographs from the decorative rooms of Winterthur, Traditional American Rooms begins with a lively introduction to the Classical orders, the influence of Vitruvius and Palladio, and the impact those building-blocks had on neo-classical American architecture. Hull and Frank have an academic background, but they use it to teach, not expound, and their text is easy to follow.

Every element and all terminology is defined and described by photographs and line drawings.

From baseboard to casing (architrave molding!), from mantelpieces to full-size trabeated doorways—everything a carpenter needs to know about identifying and describing traditional architectural elements and ornamentation is in this book. Clear communication—between contractors and customers, between architects and clients—is based on vocabulary. This book will help you learn and appreciate the vocabulary of traditional architecture and improve your communication skills.

Hull and Frank’s wonderful book is also a great resource for design ideas that truly work, and that’s the irony of architecture. Unlike the carpenters who craft homes, if a design looked good two hundred years ago, it’ll probably look pretty good today. And that’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Traditional American Rooms will help you get there.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff K. Burks for the tremendous effort he makes to discover, copy, and share these jewels! Years ago, Jeff introduced me and countless other carpenters to C Howard Walker’s seminal book, The Theory of Moldings. Here, Jeff provides us with a telescopic view of the past: timeless lessons that carpenters should heed today about building better business practices.

“What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?”
–Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: Penquin Press, 2009

I recently taught a class on Mastering the Miter Saw to a group of mixed-age students at the West Valley Occupational Center, near my home in Los Angeles. I’ve volunteered to teach classes there before. The instructors teach drafting, framing, electrical, drywall—a general hands-on course covering everything about construction with blackboard backup. It’s a great program for anyone new to the trades. But I was surprised to find the class stalled by a lack of building materials. One instructor was digging into his own pocket to keep his class going.

Every time there’s a fiscal mess in California, the first budget cuts are always made to shop classes, after all, building materials are expensive and manual trades aren’t ‘higher education’; our educational culture believes that computer classes support the type of knowledge that workers need today.

Most people reading this magazine would probably have the same gut reaction as me about California’s budget decision. But after reading Michael Crawford’s new book Shop Class as Soulcraft, I’ve found concrete reasons that support the need for a new educational direction in our country.

Crawford begins his book by borrowing a description of the Fibonacci series—which forms the basis for Architecture’s golden ratio—from Tom Hull, a shop instructor in Coos Bay, Oregon.

Hull says, “‘the sequence portrays a human characteristic as well, as the ratio is not immediately achieved, but gets closer and closer, and not by some steady slope to perfection but by selfcorrecting oscillations’.”

Crawford adds: “This seems to capture the kind of iterated self-criticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art. You give it your best, learn from your mistakes and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head.”

No description could better capture the act of carpentry. We imagine the project we’re about to tackle, maybe we even have exact dimensional drawings, but no matter how experienced or how hard we try, we’re never able to achieve the perfect image we begin with, the ideal of perfection we originally imagined: there’s always some small mistake or error, some imperfection that most people wouldn’t notice, but we know it’s there. In fact, when you look at a finished project, sometimes all you see are the mistakes, even if there’s just one.

But perfection is never the real goal of carpentry or the real reward. The goal is to get as close as possible to the original idea; the reward is to see your work—and judge yourself—at the end of every day.

This process of learning the hard way, through experience of both mind and hand—along with the personal judgment and frequent sense of failure that follows, is at the center of Crawford’s book, and forms the foundation for what Crawford refers to as “agency:” the act of engaging the world around us with our hands and tools—of ‘fixing
or making’ things, what Crawford refers to as “instrumentality.”

The loss of instrumentality infuses Crawford’s book and his theory of education: “…we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality,” Crawford writes, “We have too few occasions to do anything.”

“Doing” is the most important part of learning, yet ‘doing’ has been removed from our educational system: the tangible experience of failure, which leads to competence and confidence, has been replaced by the hollow support of a hollow ideal—self-esteem. Too often these days, students never learn from failure. They’re taught to pass tests. But failing a test isn’t failure. Making an 1/8-in. mistake while cutting a piece of radius crown that costs $1,000—now that’s failure!

If you ever felt sleepy in trigonometry and couldn’t grasp the meaning or the use of tangent, sine, and cosine formulas, and if you’re now happily using a framing square or Rise and Run functions on a calculator, then you know exactly what I mean. There is an effective difference between teaching abstract theory—what Crawford calls  “interpretive knowledge,” and hand’s-on experience—what Crawford calls “objective standards.” The former is open to interpretation and opinion; the latter is either right or wrong, like a door that either latches or doesn’t; a miter or cope joint that’s either tight or isn’t.

Throughout this book, Crawford’s background in philosophy is clear and present (he has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago). Many pages overwhelmed me. But his gritty anecdotal examples, mostly taken from the experience of working on motorcycles in his own shop (he’s a motorcycle mechanic/philosopher), were landmarks that helped me follow the trail of his thoughts with ease.

Yes, this book is about motorcycles. It will remind many readers of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But while Robert Pirsig struggled with inner and sometimes untouchable demons, and deeper philosophical issues, Crawford offers a simple suggestion on what can be done to improve our educational system and the underlying value system of our culture.

Though he has been attacked by some critics as misjudging the value of office work and stereotyping management, progress—like carpentry—can’t be made without failure, pain, and passion. In respect to this book, progress takes on a special irony, because changing our educational system would be more like removing an old dam than building a new one—changing the simple belief that manual work isn’t worth teaching in our school system. Of course, we all know better than that because we’re carpenters. We know what works and we know what doesn’t.