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John Gaines rubs a piece of pine with his finger — a thick finger disproportionally larger than the size of his hand — and feels a bump in the wood.
“That’ll soon be taken care of,” he tells his son who is helping him on this particular project.
Gaines walks gingerly over a floor of gravel and sawdust anthills to the wall on the far side of the shop and reaches for a plane.
With it, he shaves the wood ever so gently so as to produce a confetti-thin streamer of unwanted wood.
“There, that’s about got it,” he says, again using his hose-like finger to inspect the results, the way a sculptor might fondle a piece of newly cut marble.
Gaines slides the wood he just planed into a second piece, panelling he was asked to recreate from l-by-6 planks of pine.
“This comes from Mr. Smoot’s, who used to grind his own bits for making panelling,” Gaines said. Mr. Smoot has been out of that business for nearly 30 years. “We don’t have that because they’re so damned expensive, so we improvise,” says Gaines, who gets a full-chested chuckle out of the whole thing.
Although Gaines is this day working painfully to match new panel strips with old ones destroyed by termites, his joy comes not from small repair work but from making — creating — furniture.
But this is not just any kind of furniture. The furniture he makes from as-near-to-scratch as you can get. His furniture starts as trees standing on his land just south of Amissville; the only outside hands to touch the wood are those of the man who mills it.
Pine, poplar, oak, beech. Anything growing
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