-There's no standard.
There's no one way to do things.
-Whenever you cut into a new board,
you kind of have to study the grain, see what it wants to do.
-It's kind of meditative, and it takes forever.
-The passion is important to me.
I want to be creating, always.
-I didn't think I loved woodworking, really, at all
until [Laughing] maybe a few months ago, actually.
-My favorite moment in woodworking...
[ Sighs ] ...I got to say
it's the moment of driving back from the lumber yard
with a truck full of wood,
and then you're just like,
"This pile is gonna turn into something amazing."
-There's so many different types of wood out there.
They all act differently.
They have different colors.
They have different ways of reacting to the environment.
I think that that is invigorating.
-Here at Offerman Woodshop, I'm using a lot more hand tools.
You'll hear that distinction a lot
between carpentry and woodworking.
Carpentry utilizes a lot more power tools.
There can be some snobbery about it, like, "Real woodworkers
are keeping it pure with hand tools."
I actually really get the most out of both.
-The guys around the shop here probably make fun of me
for sanding a lot.
I kind of get into the zone
where I want everything to be, like, perfect --
every scratch, every mill mark, everything out,
so it's just -- the natural grain speaks for itself.
-The first stage is usually the design stage --
drawing things out, sketching.
Then you get to go find your wood.
And then you start building.
That's my favorite part.
Well, I started woodworking when I was a little kid.
My grandpa was a big woodworker.
He got me, like, a subscription to Fine Woodworking magazine,
which is so precocious,
'cause I was 7, and it was totally boring.
[ Giggles ]
So I ended up making skateboards,
and that kind of turned into my first entrepreneurial experience
as a 10-year-old woodworker.
[ Giggles ]
I'm drawn to woodworking, I think,
because there's a story in wood.
When you start to see sort of what's underneath in that wood,
that's a really exciting time.
No matter what kind of wood you're working with --
straight from the forest or it's from the lumber yard --
it's an organic material,
so it's always gonna be changing and moving
and adjusting to its environment.
It's always sort of a mystery being revealed.
I went and bought a bunch of poplar.
He just gave me these tree trunks, and he was like,
"Oh, there's a few bugs in it, but you can treat it, Lee.
It's gonna be fine. Like, you know, whatever."
So, I'm cutting it up on the band saw,
and I'm, like, pushing them through this enormous blade.
I'm, like, deathly afraid of worms and bugs,
like, lifelong fear,
but I'm just trying to be butch and keep going.
-[ Laughs ]
-And I make a cut, and I just see
this, like, enormous, "Rowr!" come out of one of the holes.
And we call Michele in,
'cause she's kind of the toughest guy in the shop.
[ Both laugh ]
And Michele looked in there, and we had basically --
I had, like, cut into a nest of arboreal salamanders
that live on termites,
which is what Harold had sold me --
a log full of termites and salamanders.
The moral of the story,
where I'm going with this, is it turns out
the termites made all these awesome patterns in the wood.
The termites did beautiful work.
-It's true.
-That just becomes part of the story
and what makes this piece of furniture a custom piece.
My other favorite thing -- [ Laughs ]
My other favorite thing in woodworking
is just the problem-solving that you have to do.
I think when I first started out,
I would just mess up all the time,
and I was always so depressed about how bad I was.
-There's good days, and there's bad days,
but they're mostly good days.
Like, I made drawers for a cabinet that were too big,
and I couldn't get them in. And, like, that was a bad day,
but that's not that bad of a day.
-And now I probably mess up just as much,
but when I mess up,
it's just the next challenge to figure out how to fix it,
and, actually, that's a huge part of the process.
You get so lodged in it that you can't find a way out,
and a lot of it
is also helping other people solve their problems.
This shop is much more communal in that way.
The community here at Offerman Woodshop
has kind of been evolving and growing over the last few years.
When I started here, it was me and Nick.
Nick is so much part of this shop
and is such a dear friend of mine.
-He has generously given it to us
to keep going while he's off doing his thing,
and it's like a gift.
-If it wasn't for this place, I might not be in Los Angeles.
Actually, I'm pretty certain I wouldn't be here still.
-I think people should get involved with woodworking
because I think it's very empowering.
-It's a physical, tangible thing
that when you're done, it's like,
"I made that. That's awesome."
-Recently, we had someone cut into a slab,
and they found parts of a fence.
It was in the heartwood,
so the center of the tree had grown around a fence.
It's also very exciting, 'cause you're like, "Whoa," you know?
"I thought this was just a regular piece of wood,
and now we find all of this history inside."
-What pulls at my heart
is the heirloom quality of each object that you make.
We can make up our own stories sometimes
about what these people are doing
with these objects that we've passed along to them.
You can only imagine it's gonna continue living
and get passed down amongst the family members,
amongst generations.
-Everything in my house is made by someone in my family,
myself, a friend.
Pretty much every-- I don't know, I --
Pretty much everything has a story in my apartment,
and I feel surrounded by my people
when I'm at home. -Yeah.
-It's kind of cool to imagine
that that story links back up to the original,
that there was once a tree that grew around the fence.
Oh, that's -- This part's getting hokey.
[ Both laughing ]