The Artist
Great moments in building history: There's nothing wrong with being eccentric
I build cabinets and furniture and do just about any kind of woodworking that interests me. One day a few years ago, a neighbor knocked on my door and asked if I did fireplace mantels. Before I could answer, she told me she had a mantel that she needed to have made “just a little longer.” I hesitated. First, I didn’t think stretching a mantel could be done easily. Second, this woman was known as the neighborhood eccentric. But she explained: She and her husband were moving to a newer, larger house a few blocks away. She had told her husband to remove the old mantel from their present house so that they could install it in the new house. Now she found it was too short. She wanted a longer mantel that would look right on the new fireplace. With some hesitation, I agreed to look at it.
I met her at the new house the next day. The old mantel lay on the living-room carpet in front of a massive brick fireplace. I measured: old mantel, 6 ft.; new fireplace, just less than 9 ft. I told her it would be much simpler for me to build a new mantel. She told me she wanted an oak mantel with a wide shelf that stretched from end to end of the fireplace. I drew a sketch, and we agreed on a price. She also wanted me to build a couple of matching oak bookends. She had a few books, she said, and she wanted to use the mantel as a bookshelf. She said there was no real hurry because they were still moving in.
Two weeks later, the mantel was finished, and I had scheduled a day to install it. As I drove to her house, I estimated that the installation would take about an hour. She met me at the door and showed me to the living room. I stopped dead in my tracks. My jaw dropped. There, covering the living-room carpet, were her books. Stacks of books, some waist high, covered the floor from the fireplace to the door. There were dictionaries, medical books, sets of outdated law books. It looked like half the reference section from the local library had been transferred to this room. Seeing the look on my face, she said, “We left you a path through the books.” Sure enough, there was a winding alley about a foot wide that led to the fireplace.
I set down my toolbox and told her that I had planned to lay down a blanket on the carpet in front of the fireplace and to use that area for the mantel parts and tools and for an assembly area. “Well, move ’em,” she said. “I’d help, but I have a bad back.”
So I moved ’em. I transferred the books to the hall, the bedrooms, higher stacks against the living-room wall, anywhere I could find space. As I was sweating over the books, she told me that they were all old and valuable, that some were signed first editions and that she treasured them as much as she did the rest of her art and antiques collections.
About 45 minutes after I arrived, I finally started on the mantel. Things went smoothly from there, and I was soon nearly done. She had to leave for an appointment, so she told me she was leaving my check on the table and that I should lock the door when I left. “And don’t forget to sign the front of the mantel,” she said.
I finished up and looked for a place to sign the mantel. It had turned out pretty nice, so not wanting to mar a piece of fine workmanship, I penciled my initials in a lower front corner. I gathered my tools, picked up my check and left.
The next morning, I had to run a few errands. When I returned, there was a message from her on my answering machine. “Will you please stop by my house as soon as you can,” she asked. I began to worry. What could possibly be wrong, I thought. I got my tools and drove back to her house. On the way, it occurred to me that she had stacked all those books on the mantel and that it had collapsed.
She met me at the door, and we walked into the living room. The mantel was still in place, still perfect. She had a big blue felt-tip pen in her hand, and she thrust it toward my chest. “When I say sign it, I mean sign it. Now sign it,” she said. My impatience with her was starting to rise. She’s not just eccentric, I thought, she’s wacko. I stepped up to the mantel and started to sign. I wrote my first, middle and last names, all 20 letters, in blue ink, 8 in. high, starting in the middle of the mantel box, ending near the far right end. What the heck, I thought as I signed, I’ve already cashed her check. I finished and jammed the cap back on the marker and turned to face her. She stepped back to view the mantel. She was beaming. “Your mantel is a masterpiece, a work of art,” she said. “Now it complements the rest of my treasures.”
I guess she wasn’t crazy after all. Just eccentric. Pleasantly eccentric.
—Gary P. Westmoreland, Apple Valley, CA
Drawing by: Jackie Rogers
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