Handcrafted Read online

  We stayed with friends at first. Then a couple of other friends left town for a few weeks and offered us their place. We also had to borrow friends’ cars here and there, as we were without wheels. Neither Kelly nor I had ever bought a vehicle, but after working a few months, we scraped together our nickels for a minuscule down payment on an incredibly cheap and incredibly used Honda Civic. It even came with a cigarette hole burned in the driver’s seat. We bought it with our own hard-earned money, and we loved it. It was as perfect as it was purple. Kelly made her way through Dallas traffic every day in what sounded like a sewing machine on wheels. As for me, I rode my bike, which I loved. It reminded me of our time in Amsterdam, when our Euro adventure was still shiny and new—plus, I didn’t have to spend on gas. I’d roll into work a bit early so the sweat on my forehead could dry before my coworkers arrived.

  Soon after we settled into our jobs, we rented a little two-bedroom apartment down the road from some friends. The place was, frankly, a pit stop, nice enough for the time being but not so much for the long term. We settled in and began paying off that tax bill and more of my student loans. We even managed to save a bit and began daydreaming about eventually buying a home. Years earlier, when Kelly had had the privilege of meeting my grandmother Harp for the first time, my grandmom had broken out the family albums. In one black-and-white photo from Donald and Camille’s first year of marriage, they sat on the front of their house holding paintbrushes. That photo, which we always remembered, brought us new inspiration for our lives ahead. We wanted to be them.

  When Kelly mentioned that white house on Ross Avenue and we drove by to see it, I was unimpressed. The neighborhood was an eclectic gathering of homes, very random and worn. Some yards looked cared for, but others were brown and overgrown with weeds. It was the kind of street where you’d see someone strutting around in a fringed vest and bare feet holding a baby wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. Very bohemian. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. Paris had changed me and I’d returned home a much more cultured person than I was before, but this was a bridge too far. We were back in Texas again. Adventure over, man.

  The 1940s cottage was as charming of a fixer-upper as Kelly had told me it was, or at least it appeared that way from the exterior, but that was a moot point since I wasn’t sold on the neighborhood.

  Kelly persisted. “It could be really cute!” she kept saying. “The outside isn’t that bad, and maybe it won’t need too much work on the inside. Besides, it’s all we can afford if we don’t want to move to the suburbs. And this neighborhood is a good investment.” I couldn’t see it at the time, but Kelly was right. The neighborhood was growing with new restaurants and renovations, and it was clear people were buying in.

  At the time, the country was in a housing boom, and I spent my days helping people lock down mortgage brokers and lenders licenses. To be honest, when I’d first started that job, I hadn’t truly known what a mortgage was. My boss had to explain it to me. You can imagine how that must have inspired confidence. But it was the knowledge I’d gleaned from that job that had planted the seed of possibility of home ownership in the heart and mind of a lifelong renter. Maybe one day we could indeed be like my grandparents and own our own house. I just wasn’t as sure as my wife that this should be our first rodeo. But Kelly seemed so dang passionate about it, I relented. “I really don’t love the neighborhood,” I told her a few days into her campaign, “but if you think it’s a good idea, then let’s call the Realtor.”

  Kelly was fearless. Her absolute confidence that we could buy and renovate this home bolstered my own. She was excited and ready to rip into the project. We just had to figure out how we’d pay for it.

  The following week, the Realtor walked us through the house—all 968 square feet of it, with popcorn ceilings throughout. The place looked like it had last been remodeled in the 1960s. The previous owner had already moved out and left the house clean, but it was in desperate need of an update. In the backyard, an outdoor shed was home to the washer and dryer; not ideal, but we could live with it. And on the outside of the house was a giant satellite dish sitting atop a large pole cemented into the ground that seemed big enough to contact life-forms on other planets. If we looked past all that, the place was a darling two-bedroom, one-bath. The asking price was $150,000. My confidence started brewing, and I suddenly felt like I could learn whatever I needed to in order to make that house right.

  “Clint, let’s offer a hundred thousand,” Kelly suggested. Though she’d never owned property herself, her parents had bought and sold several homes, and that gave her the self-assurance that I, a bidding rookie, lacked.

  “What?” I said. “That’s over thirty percent off the asking price!”

  “Have you seen what we’re going to have to do to it?” she shot back.

  I paused, recalling the popcorn ceilings and outdated interior. “Good point,” I said. “Okay, but I really hope we don’t piss the seller off.”

  I’ll never know if the guy was ticked, because we had no contact with him. But through our agents, we eventually settled on a purchase price of $120,000. And because we were right smack in the middle of a housing boom, the bank didn’t require us to put any money down. In fact, the seller even covered our closing costs. I still don’t know how it all worked out, but it did. And in July 2005, a little over a year after our European misadventure ended, Kelly and I were packing up to move into our first home. The kid with the big head, tight red sweatpants, and buckteeth was finally getting somewhere.

  Moving day arrived. A buddy and I strapped down a hutch I’d purchased at an estate sale, securing it with ties to the back of our borrowed pickup truck. When I got to the house, we began unloading the hutch. “Hey, Blake,” I said, “did you already grab the two small drawers that were here on the top?

  “Nope, I don’t think so,” he told me.

  “Huh, that’s weird,” I said. “Maybe they’re still back at the apartment.”

  But they weren’t. When I retraced my path, I found them on the side of the road, in tatters, right at the spot where I’d thought I heard something fall but was too tired to stop and investigate. I’ve moved over thirty times in my life and have rarely broken anything. Those smashed drawers were my first major casualties, and it stung. We’d keep that hutch with the missing drawers for the next six years. “One day,” I kept saying, “I’ll build new drawers to match.” Never did.

  I don’t know what excited me more: purchasing the house, or knowing I’d get to buy some tools to remodel the place. In all the gifts we received at our wedding, there wasn’t a single hammer, screwdriver, or wrench. I’d always been jealous of guys who were given “tool showers” before they tied the knot, and now I had a chance to remedy things. We came up with a modest budget of $5,000 for the whole house remodel, the limit on our credit card and an amount we knew we could pay off. I bought a budget-friendly combo pack of battery-powered tools, a hammer, and a few other must-haves. “Kelly, come look at these!” I announced as soon as I got home. I beamed as I showed her the set.

  It was scary to max out our credit card again, but we figured we were saving such a huge amount on renovations doing them ourselves that it would be worth it. We scraped the popcorn off the ceilings; installed a new countertop; painted the interior; closed off an internal door that had no use; and hung, taped, and mudded a lot of drywall. We also completely overhauled the bathroom, which wasn’t part of the original plan. But Kelly came home one day and found me in the middle of it, gutting the whole thing. The small bathroom was covered in cedar planks that we thought we’d paint, but I pulled one board down to see what was behind it, and then the next thing you know, I’d pulled everything down. My bad! With the help of a friend, and using the skills I’d picked up as a handyman in St. Pete, as well as a few nuggets I’d learned from Granddad Martin, we made that thing happen. Kelly tiled the entire shower herself. I can still see her sitting on the edge of the new tub covered i
n grout, with her hair pulled back, wearing a long-sleeved Baylor T-shirt and feeling so proud of what we were doing. We gave that little house every bit of love we could muster. Even our friends came over and threw in some effort. It was a rich time.

  * * *

  We actually stopped going to church when we got back from Europe. Church was the reason we’d moved abroad, but church was the last place we wanted to be when we returned. It’s not that we’d given up on our faith. But our year of trying to launch a new congregation had been so intense, we just craved a hiatus to catch our breath. This was the first time in my life I hadn’t attended services, which is probably why it initially felt strange not to go.

  One Sunday morning when we were at home, probably doing some work on the house, the phone rang. It was Meredith, Kelly’s childhood friend from Tyler.

  “Kelly,” she said without pause, “Kyle died this morning at church. He’s dead.”

  Kyle, who’d grown up in Kelly’s hometown and was beloved by everyone, was the same Kyle who had made me want to go to Baylor. The guy who had once made an awkward kid from Georgia feel comfortable and welcome was gone. After I met him, Kyle eventually became the pastor at Waco’s University Baptist Church, a congregation of misfits, doubters, and outliers. Everyone knew and loved him. On that Sunday morning, Meredith explained to Kelly through tears, Kyle had climbed into the baptismal pool to baptize a young girl. Realizing that the congregation couldn’t hear him, he reached out to adjust a microphone that was set up just in front of the pool. No one knew that the water Kyle was standing in had a current running through it due to a mistake in the electrical grounding. Within moments, Kyle was gone.

  Late that afternoon, my heart heavy with sorrow, I went out to a tennis court by myself. I took six balls and served them, one by one, across the court. After serving all six, I’d walk to the other side of the net, gather up the balls, and serve them all again. I did that over and over and over until the sun set. I felt like I’d been socked in the gut. One minute, Kyle had been helping a young woman take the next step on her own personal faith journey. The next, he was taking his final breath.

  Kyle and his congregation had been among those who’d supported us financially in Europe. Not only had he been a friend, but he’d also gone out of his way to help us raise money for our dream. On the day we all lost him, he’d been planning to give a sermon that he had no doubt spent some time preparing. It was all about loving God, building something beautiful during our days here on earth, and living life to the fullest. The content of that sermon, which existed in the form of notes found later in his Bible, eventually became the church’s guiding principles and motto “Love God, embrace beauty, and live life to the fullest.” And in the years to come, as Kelly and I fumbled our way forward, trying to figure out what to do next, I also made it my own: #lovebuildrun.

  Life is messy. It comes with bumps, bruises, and uneven surfaces. Like wood, you can’t predict its grain or its texture, or how it’ll all eventually fit together. What Kyle left for me and so many others was a legacy: embrace the mess. Let your kids roll all over you on the living room floor. Let the dishes go undone for now and spend the time connecting with the people you love. If you have to wallow in the mud, really jump in. And if you’re going to live on planet Earth, then do it, and do it well. It’s all just part of the madness and unpredictability of life, and we should enjoy it while we have it.

  * * *

  When it came to living life to the fullest, I can’t say Kelly and I were actually doing so in our jobs, but we were thankful to have work that covered our expenses and to be making a dent in our debt. That reality began to shift as we sunk more and more cash into our fixer-upper. While we could cover all our bases, things were definitely tight, and I liked the idea of finding a job with a higher ceiling. It was time for me to go in search of greener pastures.

  The father-in-law of a friend of mine owned a company that sold copy machines around Dallas. I decided to reach out, and got set up with an interview. I hated the idea of a sales job, and making cold calls in particular sounded like the Fifth Circle of Hell, but we needed more cash than I was bringing in. “We’d love to hire you to work here as a salesman. When can you start?” I was asked by my eventual manager who interviewed me. “Amazing, I’ll put in my two weeks notice,” I heard myself say.

  I hated it from day one. It was a wonderful company with great people . . . but I wasn’t cut out for it.

  I tried to make the most of the job, really I did. I walked into and out of every place that might possibly need a copier or a printer. Day after day, I’d drive around the city, trying to make a sale to any creature with breath. The answer was almost always no, and more often than not, it came with a distant stare that spoke volumes: Shoo, fly. I can’t be bothered. It was a lonely existence that left me feeling defeated and worn out. But through it all there was one thing that kept me going: building furniture.

  Back when we first returned to Dallas and were still in the two-bedroom “place holder” apartment, I’d taken on my first ever furniture project. My friend Jordan and his wife, Christy, had a family table they wanted to fix up. I’d mentioned to Jordan that I wanted to try my hand at bringing old furniture back to life. He was into it.

  “Here you go, Clint,” Jordan told me one day. “Take this antique family heirloom of ours and do your thing!”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you bet. Have fun!” I loved that he was so willing to give me a chance.

  I got after it. In the evening and on weekends for a whole month, I stripped that table down. After removing all the old varnish, I attempted to stain it. Not knowing anything about stain and paying little attention to the instructions, I did everything wrong. Not only did I brush it on real thick without wiping it off, I did it all indoors. Our upstairs neighbor, suffocating from the fumes, was at our door moments later, asking what in the world we were up to. I finally finished the project and took it back to my friends. They loved it. They also wouldn’t have told me if they hated it. My next project was an antique Jenny Lind bed from Kelly’s mom. Filled with turnings, it was incredibly difficult to strip. Thankfully, because I was planning to paint it, not every bit of old paint or stain had to be removed. That one turned out really nice, and I was hungry for more.

  By “more,” I don’t mean more refinishing, though. Frankly, as satisfying as those first two restoration projects had been, and as much as I’d loved losing myself in the process for hours, it wasn’t enough. I had this nagging sense of wanting to actually build something from scratch—to create furniture of my own.

  So on the weekends, when I wasn’t selling copiers, I went to work on the back patio of our first house on Ross Ave. First, I dusted off the few tools I’d bought for our home remodel: a miter saw (aka chop saw), a circular saw, and a battery-powered drill. One day I woke up and just decided to make two tall green desks (I was really into this “working while standing” kick at the time). The legs, which I assembled using 2x4s, had hand-cut tapers. I also sawed a hole in the skirt of each table to make room for a drawer, although just as I never got around to replacing the drawers missing from the hutch, I never made those drawers, either. I nailed the whole thing together with roofing nails, and though the tables were a bit wobbly, they looked really cool and Kelly loved them. I now wanted to go bigger.

  Our little house, in the way of closets, had one in the entryway and a small one off the living room, but that was it. I remembered how the old apartments in Paris seldom had closets, so most everyone used armoires. I decided Kelly should have one, too. I set out to make her both an armoire and a dining table.

  With only two basic skinny desks in my portfolio, I was a total rookie. I figured that if a table was slats, a skirt, and legs, then an armoire must be a box with doors. I ran to the store, picked up some pine, and brought it home like a proud puppy with a squirrel in its mouth. I set everything up on our back patio and threw a tarp on it each evening to protect it fr
om any rain. The end products were rudimentary at best, but Kelly adored them. And I was hooked. I had no doubt that I’d build more furniture. The only question was when.

  A few weeks later, Kelly and I visited my granddad Martin. He was living in North Georgia, in the mountain house he’d built by hand. When we walked in, he was sitting by the window, just as I remembered him doing at the Roost. I was eager to show him my creations, so I’d brought some pictures with me. I handed him the photos. He studied the images for a long moment, glanced at me, looked back at my work, looked back at me, and then finally gave me his stamp of approval, Martin-style:

  “Well,” he said, “you’re not a dumbass!”

  Seriously, from him that was like “I love you.”

  Later that night, he called me at my mom’s place.

  “Hey, cowboy,” he said. “When are you leaving town?”

  “Day after tomorrow,” I told him. “Need some help with something?”

  “Just come by the house tomorrow morning?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I arose early the next day and traveled solo to my granddad’s house. Again, I found him sitting by the window.

  “What did you use to build that stuff?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a chop saw, a circular saw, and a drill.”

  “Do you have a table saw?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you have a drill press?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well then, what the hell else do you have?” he pressed.

  “Well, Granddad, that’s it, really. Those three tools. Oh, and a hammer.”

  “And you really liked building those pieces?”

  I nodded.

  “Well then,” he said, “you’re going to need some more tools. I’ll give you some money to go and buy yourself some. Get a pencil. I’ll tell you what you need. Then you go back home and research how much it’ll be and give me a price.” I was blown away.