Craftsmanship versus Quality
An interview with A1DesignBuild Project Manager Chris Wigen, discussing his love of building things.
To me, as a house builder, craftsmanship is the art of knowing how people interact with the home. It’s about making the benches just the right height. So when you sit down, it's just so comfortable and natural. Craftsmanship is making sure the windows and doors work perfectly so you don't have to fight them. It's creating beautiful lines with the finish and the trim that you don't even see, because if we're doing it right, you often don't really even notice. So there's a craft and a craftsmanship to understanding how the eye feels, the woodworking that we do, how the hands interact with what you’re making.
So you develop an understanding of the ability it takes to create these comfortable, beautiful spaces. That's home building and craftsmanship.
My father was a carpenter, and we grew up in a neighborhood where there was lots of construction going on. The first day that I knew I really enjoyed building, I was about 14. I helped my dad one afternoon place a bunch of trusses on a home, and we turned around at the end of the day, and I mean, we had practically put a whole house together. It was really a great feeling. I really enjoyed it. I was hooked.
Later, I had my own house and I had done a bunch of work on it and friends started coming by and asking if I could do that for them. I wasn't working as a carpenter, but suddenly I was helping them install a window or teaching them how to hang a door. That got me thinking about making this into more than just a hobby.
The skill set and the creativity needed to do a remodel is constant puzzle solving. How do we do this? How do we make this look like we want it to? I've got a structure that I'm working in, and I have to create the homeowner's vision within the bounds of that structure, and there’s a budget, and a schedule, and multiple spaces. I mean, it's a crazy amount of puzzle-solving.
Building a brand new home is similar. You've got your drawing and you've got your raw materials and you just go. It's an art form.
Chris talking about the magic of 8-Penny Brights.
I do a lot of woodworking and a little bit of sculpture and mold making. And I own a lathe, so there's a little bit of woodturning, and I kind of flit around from medium to medium. I’ve also dabbled with some paints, very much beginner stuff, where I experiment with materials. It's not so much that I needed to paint 60 little flower pots and flowers as much as I wanted to experiment with the colors and experiment with the brushes and the brushstrokes. And so any of the new skills or any of the new crafts is really just experimentation. I learned a thousand different ways not to do things, and maybe one way to do it, and that's terrific.
I think the difference between quality and craftsmanship is that a machine can make something of quality, and that's great. That has its utilitarian value. But for somebody to sit down and throw a pot and understand the glazing and take the risk with new materials or new colors and then maybe gift it to someone, or sell it to someone, that's craftsmanship. That's craft. There's heart in it, which makes it better.
That's the difference between quality and craftsmanship, as far as I can tell.
I sure enjoy watching the younger carpenters learn how to do things. I give them their basic instructions, show 'em the project, explain their parameters on how they can make decisions, and let them do it. And then I come back and maybe say, ‘Oh, yeah, maybe we could have done this or this.’ Or I come back and say, ‘Wow, that's excellent. That’s first rate.’ And the big smiles they get on their faces, I like that.
I remember when I was a kid, a friend of my dad’s went to his truck and brought us back a half box of 8-Penny Brights to play with, and it was like a pot of gold. I guess you could call me a house geek, or a house nerd. I often say that building is the only work I've done that doesn't feel like work at all.
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