Making & Building

Working with your hands is a good counterbalance to a job that mostly happens on a screen.

I remodelled my own house, which turned out to be a fairly comprehensive education in everything that goes wrong when you make decisions about a space without thinking them through properly first. Lessons were learned. Some walls came down.

The furniture I’m most happy with is the stuff I use every day: a bed frame I built from scratch, a walk-in wardrobe that actually uses the space well, some knieschotten (Dutch wall panelling — a detail thing, but it makes a difference). Mostly solid wood — oak and pine.

I don’t have a large workshop, so it’s all done in the living space with portable tools. That forces you to think carefully before cutting, because you can’t uncut a piece of wood. Not unlike debugging code, except the error messages are less helpful.

I like building things in general — furniture, data pipelines, whatever. The satisfaction is the same.