Handcrafted Read online

  “There are pallets everywhere,” I told Kelly. “And you know what? They’re free!” I figured it couldn’t be that hard to pull a few apart and make a table. Yes, pallets are short. And sure, they don’t typically have wood thick enough for legs. But I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

  Around that time, I caught a documentary called A Man Named Pearl, which chronicled the inspiring story of a self-taught topiary artist in Bishopville, South Carolina. Born to a sharecropper, Pearl Fryar grew up in Clinton, North Carolina, before moving to Bishopville, where he worked at a canning factory. Later, when he bought a house for his family in a predominantly white area, Pearl was spurned by neighbors who didn’t think an African American man would properly take care of his yard. Rather than battling their disdain with anger he decided he’d win yard of the month. He started rescuing plants from the waste bin of a local nursery and the magic began. Pearl carefully grew and tended his plants and turned them into beautiful topiaries.

  As I pursued my own dream of building furniture from reclaimed wood, I could not stop thinking about this artist, who took the seeds of hate and a pile of discarded plants and used them to create a garden. In fact, I talked about Pearl so much that my mentor, Paul, suggested I call him. That seemed outlandish to me.

  “Uh, right, Paul,” I said, chuckling. “I don’t even know this guy, and I’m just supposed to dial him up? Any idea how I’d even get his number?”

  “Nope,” he said, “but I’m sure you’ll find it. Call him.”

  This conversation happened five or six times before I decided I’d try. This is so stupid, I thought as I picked up the phone. First I called the Bishopville Chamber of Commerce. The woman who answered didn’t have Pearl’s number, but she knew a local professor who was Pearl’s friend, and she gave me his number instead. Minutes later, I was on the line with this friend. “What a story you have there,” he said after I’d recounted the personal journey that had led me in search of Pearl. I was shocked when he then gave me Pearl’s number.

  I called right away. His wife, Mrs. Fryar, answered and told me her husband was in the garden. She welcomed me to call back later. I thanked her profusely and rang their home every day over the next four days until I reached the man himself.

  “Hello?” answered a baritone voice I recognized from the documentary.

  “Hi, I’m Clint!” I said excitedly. “Wow, it’s great to finally talk to you, Mr. Fryar.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You can call me Pearl.”

  We talked for around fifteen minutes. I told him how inspired I was by his story, and shared a little of my own. As the conversation progressed, that magical moment I’d rehearsed in my head beforehand, when I’d hear something so extraordinary that it would totally rock my world and alter my perspective, never happened. But it didn’t have to, because his story already had. His life was this beautiful tapestry that spoke volumes. And almost as soon as I put down the phone from that call, I understood what Paul had known all along: it was never about finding Pearl. It was about being willing to set out on a journey that might seem ridiculous, to chase something that appeared unreachable. It was also about talking to someone who’d already done what I’d once been afraid to do—go out on a limb. Doing so had meant overcoming the seed of doubt that is hardwired into us. Reaching out to Pearl was, for me, a reminder of what can happen when we trade the reasonable and predictable for what is daringly possible.

  * * *

  Around the same time I quit my job, my sweet younger sister, Suzanne, was making her own leap and getting married. She’d been brave enough to venture from her sleepy hometown in North Georgia to New York City, where she had met someone and fallen in love. I was as happy for her as I was proud. And we wouldn’t have missed the wedding for the world. But as I boarded a plane to New York with Kelly and our two kids, I was thinking that it had been pretty dumb for me to quit my job before a pricey trip. Couldn’t I have waited a few more weeks? At the time, I hadn’t thought so. It was then or never.

  That trip to New York was life-changing. After celebrating my sister’s nuptials, we stayed on a few days to explore the city. Kelly and I felt like we’d been transported back to Paris, only with kids this time. New York has its own pace and heartbeat, one that thumps loud and strong. We wanted to walk everywhere, try all different kinds of foods, take in the sights, the sounds, the creativity and artistry around every corner, feel the electricity and fervor. We journeyed to Brooklyn, with its green Prospect Park, and fell in love. Back in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, we wandered into ABC Carpet & Home, a massive six-story home goods shop. The place was filled with level after level of beautiful designs, many of them handmade by and sourced from local artisans. Kelly struck up a conversation with a store employee who happened to be involved in purchasing. My wife, she’s something. Her belief in me has always been more than I could ask for. I’d not yet built a single table for our little company, and she was already selling our creations! We told the woman about our company, and she gave us a card. We kept that card for years. Though we never reached out (mostly because of my own insecurity), that connection, as well as the whole experience in New York, gave us hope for where we might end up. We were both so renewed and inspired by the experience.

  “You know what,” I daydreamed aloud to Kelly, “we could move here.” It was true: now that I was no longer tethered to a day job, we could relocate anywhere in the world. Around the time I’d quit, we’d put our house on the market, so we weren’t tied down to Houston. Everything felt wide-open to us, and New York City represented the countless possibilities. We left there feeling energized.

  We carried that motivation home with us, excitedly planning the next stage of our journey. Kelly and I didn’t want to simply make and sell beautiful things. We wanted each piece to tell a story, to have a meaning beyond its basic function. We wanted to build furniture that would bring people together, that would make them laugh and reflect and celebrate. We wanted them to feel the love and warmth and intention behind each of our creations. And by the way, it helped that I wasn’t the first entrepreneur in the family—Kelly was. A couple of years earlier, she’d begun sewing children’s clothes, as well as creating designs on towels and blankets. She set up a small business, Alacrity Designs, and had accounts in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and even one in New York City. Though she eventually folded the venture so she could focus on creating home goods for our new company, the experience had taught her plenty, and she brought those lessons to our conversations about how we should move forward.

  As soon as our bags were unpacked from the New York trip, we sat down at our kitchen table and began mapping out what our business might look like. Yes, I’d build tables, but what else would we make, and how would Kelly and I split up the responsibilities of owning a small business? What materials would we use? Would we hire employees, and if so, how would we treat them? What were our values as co-owners of a brand-new enterprise? We also discussed cobbling together a website and imagined how, with absolutely no experience, we’d sell enough of our creations to earn a living. Was it a bit insane? Absolutely. But for a couple of wide-eyed idealists, it actually sounded plausible.

  And, oh yeah, what would we call this whole thing? The original name I’d come up with but never registered, River Dog Furniture Co., was inspired by all the dogs my grandparents had running around the Roost back home on the Chattahoochee River. But Kelly wasn’t feeling it. She liked the name, but she didn’t think it fit with how our startup was evolving: we’d settled on a business plan in which I would craft furniture and Kelly would curate and sell home goods. She was convinced that our family’s name should somehow be included in the company’s name, and that it should leave us room to grow beyond furniture and home goods. She was right. That’s when it hit us: Harp Design Co. Done. It felt perfect. Now we needed a logo.

  Kelly sketched out some ideas. In the end, she used a free design program on the internet to create the final graphic, a simple but impact
ful rendering of our company’s name inside a square. We still proudly display that logo as a representation of our business and a reminder of our early days of dreaming. Every time I see it, whether on a T-shirt in my drawer, stamped on a cutting board, or on social media, I enjoy knowing that it came from the mind of my wife, who quietly sat at the table with no safety net beneath her and framed it up.

  * * *

  When the first morning rolled around where I would jump in the shop and build some tables, I grabbed my keys and drove off in search of pallets. I landed at our local H-E-B grocery store. “Do you have any old wood pallets you’re getting rid of here?” I asked the store manager. He did, and he said I was more than welcome to head to the store’s back entrance and dig through the dumpster in search of them. Unplanned by either of us, Kelly happened to show up at that same grocery store that morning. And for whatever reason, she drove into the parking lot through the back entrance. There I was, standing by the dumpster in ratty jeans and a T-shirt, holding a filthy pallet, when a black SUV rolled up next to me. From the back seat, Hudson and Holland stared at me with their jaws hanging open, as if to say, “Daddy, have you lost your mind?”

  In a way, I had. The old me, the one who had grown comfortable with a six-figure status quo, was disappearing. Old priorities, deep-seated beliefs, and preconceived notions of what my life should look like—all were fading away. In their place was a rough, raw, and humbling hunt for the materials I needed to craft our future.

  Kelly and the kids drove away, and I got back to dumpster diving. Those first pallets were pretty gnarly. But I didn’t care. I just took whatever didn’t look like it was going to make me sick. I drove a Honda Pilot at the time, and I could fit four or five pallets in the car if I didn’t close the back hatch. I’d go back and forth from my house to a store, loading the car, heading home, dropping everything off, then repeating the whole routine. In those days, I mostly found pallets that were four feet by four feet with planks just under three-quarters of an inch thick. I later discovered that pallets measuring twelve feet and longer existed. Some were even made from hardwood. But in those early days, it was me and a bunch of short pine pallets.

  Surprise, surprise: It was a lot tougher than I’d thought it would be to pry those things apart. A few of them would just pop loose, but most were as tough as the nails holding them together. It would take me a day just to tear six to eight pallets apart. A whole day! But after about a week, I had a nice stack of planks. I was creating my own lumber supply and getting one step closer to making a piece of furniture about which someone might say, “Wait, you built that from a pallet?”

  One of the greatest influences in my transformation, both personal and entrepreneurial, has been my wife. Kelly knows me better than anyone on the planet. She has pinpointed things about me that I still can’t muster the courage to admit to myself. With clairvoyant skill, she has lovingly pegged me many times. And yet, for the first few months of our insane journey, I tried my hardest to convince her that everything was fine. I was confident I could positively spin the fact that by the end of the summer, for all my dumpster diving and pallet pulling, I hadn’t actually produced anything. I had no tables. No income. No prospects. No anything. Just a pile of planks on the garage floor and a few half-baked ideas in my notebook. “Don’t worry, honey,” I’d say to convince her. “It’s all coming together.” She wasn’t buying it.

  We began clashing. All the time. There were so many arguments, they made our former “Butter Offensive” seem like the good ol’ days. It was intense: yelling, crying, awkward silences. We weren’t just in over our heads—we were at the bottom of the ocean.

  One weekend, Kelly went to visit a friend in her hometown of Tyler. She took the kids with her.

  “When you get back,” I boldly proclaimed, “I’m going to have some tables to show you.”

  “Really, Clint?” she said, smiling, one eyebrow raised.

  “You bet, babe,” I assured her. “You’ll see.”

  Kelly challenged me to see how many tables I could finish during her three days away. I was determined to show my wife just how excited she should be about how bright our future was. I kissed her and the kids good-bye and got to work.

  Day one. After hitting it hard for ten hours straight, I went out to buy some groceries. I pulled up and noticed a construction site in a nearby lot. I went over to investigate, and that’s when I spotted it: a massive woodpile headed for the landfill. Jackpot. I drove right up to the enormous garbage pile of 2x4s, 2x6s, and even 3x3s and 4x4s. I can make legs with this stuff! I thought. I was scrambling to fill our SUV when I discovered a deep little pocket of gold: lying before me were dozens of scaffolding planks made of a dense oak that had just been tossed in the trash!

  Up to then, I’d been finding and reclaiming pallets (almost always pine) and fence slats (almost always cedar). But every once in a while I would notice a little something different in a pallet and take a little closer look. The occasional walnut board was easy to identify, and oak was, too. Specifically, red oak was really common, but it was finding the rarer white oak that could really make my day. At the construction site that day with those scaffolding planks, I uncovered a whole heap of white oak, some of the richest I’d seen. A few of the boards were as long as four feet, and all were two and a quarter inches thick. By the time I’d finished loading the back of our SUV, it was sagging a bit.

  Construction sites! I kept thinking, speeding off as if I were driving a getaway car. Why didn’t I think of this before!? This was a whole new world. Sure, I’d be able to find pallets, but real lumber? That was a revelation.

  Day two. By this time, I was working with all the tools my grandfather had bought me, and I’d also started adding some others to my collection, like a planer. I’d purchased the most affordable one I could find and used it to create a uniform thickness with the pallet wood. I’d designed a tabletop that looked something like a section of wood floor. There’d be twelve rows of planks, with three boards in each row. Those three boards would be either 18, 24, or 30 inches long and would alternate by row so they’d always overlap, just like a hardwood floor. With this approach, I could use pallets to make six-foot-long tabletops. My goal was to come up with a system that would allow me to quickly produce three of those tabletops in one day, which would leave me plenty of time to craft and attach the table skirts and legs.

  It was a good plan, but I got distracted. When I walked into our garage on that second day and saw all that amazing oak scaffolding I’d collected, I could not resist. I picked up a piece and shoved it in the planer. It was a tool I couldn’t afford to replace, and yet I came dangerously close to burning out the motor as I ran that dense white oak through it. But oh, how glorious it looked! Just like with the pallet wood, it would start out looking dirty and mangled, but after I ran it through the machine, it would be gloriously transformed. I was hooked.

  I decided that in addition to the three tabletops from pallet wood, I’d also make a workbench from this thick and hefty oak. I’d build it in the same fashion as the pallet tables, with the tops looking like a wood floor. Away I went. I laid out the pieces for what would eventually become the top of the workbench. I set up the dado blade on the table saw and cut out tongue-and-groove joints on each board. I dry-fit everything and made sure it all worked together perfectly. The next morning, or day three, I glued up and clamped three tops—the workbench top and two tabletops—and started work on the bases.

  Later that afternoon, Kelly pulled up in front of our house. Spread out on the garage floor were my three tops, still in clamps and covered in hardened glue. On the other side of the garage sat the beginnings of a few legs and skirts. No finished tables.

  “Hey, babe, welcome home,” I said as she got out of the car. I met her out front so she couldn’t catch a glimpse of what was—and wasn’t—inside my makeshift shop. “Missed you guys!”

  “Aww, missed you, too!” she said. I hugged her and the kids. “Let’s take our stuff in
side and get the kids settled, and then I want to see tables!” she exclaimed.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

  When Kelly came back from Tyler and found not a single completed table, it lit a time bomb between us. I had not fulfilled my promise. Nor had I done something else I’d told her I’d do: take notes while building so we could get an idea of how we might make the business profitable. I had no excuse. I’d simply lost focus, as I sometimes do. I got excited about a new idea and allowed myself to be sidetracked at a time when I needed to concentrate. I was definitely taking the whole venture very seriously, but I was handling it all my way, and my way wasn’t cutting it.

  The arguing intensified. We were getting good at lashing out from the depths of our own personal fears and frustrations. An uneasy feeling hung over our house and affected everything and everyone inside it. Hudson and Holland, then four and one years old, respectively, could sense it. I’m sure even Maddie, our little beagle, who’d always been so emotionally connected to Kelly and me, could feel it, too. The excitement of setting off on this great adventure had evaporated, and in its place was a familiar feeling of failure that I carried around with me constantly. I knew I had to do something to get us back on track.

  During my work on the tables over the weekend I had started thinking about how similar the garage was to a sweat lodge. In some Native American cultures, I’d heard, sweat lodges were fairly common. The incredibly basic Clint understanding of the idea was that you sit inside a steamy room and sweat out your impurities in order to essentially hit the emotional or spiritual reset button. Something I was in need of. We humans often find ourselves haunted by past failures, threatened by our insecurities, and terrified that our inadequacies will catch up with us and reveal us to be phonies. Or at least I do. If these emotions build up and fester, they can destroy us from the inside out.