Hammer. Nail. Wood.: The Complusion to Build

Building a home is truly an organic process. By "building" I am not speaking of paying some one or some company to put up a house for you, I am speaking of constructing a house, a home from the ground up to the rafters and beyond with your own two hands. Being an organic process, house building is by extension, if not definition, messy. It's messy in terms in terms of the mud and materials, the dust and the destruction so necessary a part of construction. It is messy because of the muck that comes from creating a home out of a dizzying whirl of creative, financial, and family dynamics. It's messy because to truly build one's own home piece by piece means getting one's hands dirty. Thomas Glynn's book "Hammer. Nail. Wood: The Compulsion to Build" is not really it about the "nuts and bolts" of the building process, there is very little how-to knowledge imparted here. Glynn focuses instead on the nuts of a different sort required to build one's own home. What doesn't scare you about Glynn's unusual book just might serve to inspire you. In short: A worth read. Interesesting word construction.

This book is every bit as good as all the praise on its back cover, and its additional reviews promise. Thomas Glynn is a clear-headed, self-deprecating, and slyly reverent wise man. Often in this book he seems nearly egoless. It's part of how good and smart he is, and how well he tells his story.This is a seemingly simple but actually multi-layered book, on its surface about the building of a small house that Glynn and his wife planned on "cheap land," that they bought. The land appealed to him despite the fact that he knew "I didn't really want to live on a farm, I wanted to live on the idea of a farm." And he really does build a house, and on a tight budget. He hires helpers, and is part of a little team. "Years ago I realized I wasn't much good at making money. I don't know why it took me so long to realize this." But he knows what it is that he loves, and one of those things is the work of carpentry.Glynn's book is divided into neat, short chapters. Some are almost meditative. He thinks deeply about a lot of things. He writes about himself, and several people and places who in the course of this project become important to him. There's a lot about wood, tools, and building, and somehow it is all very interesting, whether or not you liked Woodshop class. You learn about as much about the characters as you might know had you lived around there for twenty or thirty years. One of Glynn's incredible abilities is that he never tells too much about a person. It works well in this book. Whittled-to-the-bone declarative sentences reveal deep inner lives, complex and layered thinking, real emotion. It's a guide to run-down things, to parts of the northeast US that don't show up in the guidebooks, to persistence, to the value of things that might not have a price tag, or might be had for free if one knows where to look or how to ask - and a meditation, really, on nature, work, creativity, human (and canine, come to think of it) oddness and will. Glynn would seem to be a man who without any self-consciousness is, in fact, in tune with his surroundings and his fellow man - and can teach us a lot about love and acceptance. A great read, I have bought copies to give away, and you definitely do not need an interest in carpentry to enjoy it.

I picked this book up after being attracted to the title and the pen-and-ink sketches of hardware and tools that appear sporadically; it's all very Eric Sloane-ish.But this book is only marginally about tools and wood and carpentry. The short chapters document the building of a house in passing, true, but they also tell the stories of Donald and Eldon, a pair of brothers whose farms neighbored Glynn's; Harlow, who shot cows when he didn't take his medicine; and numerous other local people and places.In passing, you do learn a bit about timber framing, woodworking tools and other construction lore, but it's really the story of Glynn and the town he picked to build his house in. And it's very good.It's

I picked up this book because of the title, and stayed with it because of the story. There's a lot to this book, undercurrents of meaning that you may not see the first time around. No, it won't teach you how to use a chisel. But it might teach you how to seize the moment and carve with it.