Plumb, Level & Square
Essays from a finish carpenter, page two · back to page one

Every piece of trim work I have ever done gets judged by three words. A thing is plumb when it is straight up and down, the way a weight hangs on a string. It is level when it is dead flat side to side, the way water lies in a pan. It is square when its corners are right angles. That's all. A door, a stair, a window casing, a bookcase, a kitchen counter: if they're plumb, level and square, they look right, and if they aren't, they don't, and people notice even when they couldn't tell you what they noticed.

The tools for checking are old and simple. A level is a straight board, these days aluminum, with a glass vial of liquid set in it and a bubble that sits between two lines when the board is true. I carry a two-foot, a four-foot and a six-foot, and a little torpedo level that rides in my apron. A plumb bob is a pointed brass weight on a string, which never lies, and which I still use on stairs, because the string doesn't care how good your level is. A square is a steel L. The big framing square, the little speed square, the combination square with the sliding head. For a big layout, a room or a deck, there's the oldest trick there is: measure three feet along one line and four feet along the other, and if the diagonal between those marks is exactly five feet, your corner is square. It's older than Pythagoras. My father knew it. Every carpenter learns it the first week and uses it the rest of his life.

Now here is the secret of finish carpentry, which took me about ten years to understand: almost nothing in a house is actually plumb, level or square. Especially not up here. The houses I work in are mostly old, a lot of them built in the twenties when Asheville was booming, and they have had seventy years to settle on mountain ground. Floors run downhill toward the chimney. Walls lean in at the top. The corner where two walls meet might be ninety-one degrees, or eighty-eight, or ninety at the floor and ninety-two at the ceiling. A framer's job is to get the house close. A finish carpenter's job is to make it look perfect when it isn't.

That means you're always deciding where to hide the difference. Take a door. The rough opening is out of plumb by a quarter inch, so you set the jamb in the opening with shims, thin tapered wedges of cedar, driven in pairs from both sides behind the hinges and the strike, a little at a time, until the hinge side of the jamb is dead plumb in both directions. If that side isn't right, the door will swing open by itself, or swing shut, and it will never stop. Then you set the casing, the flat trim around the opening, back from the edge of the jamb an eighth of an inch. That little step is the reveal. The eye reads a reveal as a straight line, and it's the straightest line on the wall, so the eye trusts it, and stops looking at the wall behind it. A good even reveal will make a crooked wall look straight. A bad one will make a straight wall look drunk.

Or baseboard. Where two walls meet in an inside corner, you'd think you could cut both pieces at forty-five degrees and push them together, a miter. But the corner isn't ninety degrees, so the miter gaps. And even if it fits the day you put it in, wood shrinks in winter when the furnace runs, and a miter opens up like a mouth. So you cope the joint instead. You run the first piece square into the corner. You cut the end of the second piece at a miter just to see the profile, then you take a coping saw and cut along that profile, back-cutting a little, so the end of the board becomes the exact shape of the face of the other board. It slides over it like a hand into a glove. A coped joint closes up tighter when the wood moves instead of opening. Mr. Holladay made me cope corners on scrap for two weeks before he let me near a customer's house.

And where a cabinet meets a wall that bows, you scribe it. You set the cabinet in place, run a compass or a pencil on a block down the wall so it draws the wall's exact shape on the cabinet's side, and plane to the line. Then the cabinet fits that wall, and only that wall, and nobody ever sees the gap that isn't there.

I've come to think that's most of what I know: the world is a little out of true, and the work is not to pretend it isn't, but to meet it where it is. Find the one line the eye will trust, make that one perfect, and let the rest take up the difference quietly. I don't know whether that applies to anything besides doors. I suspect it does.

A new house is a job site. An old house with people living in it is somebody's home, and you are a guest in it with a circular saw.

Most of my work now is remodeling, which means most of my work is in houses where the family is still there, eating supper and doing homework and getting up at night for a glass of water while I've got the kitchen torn apart. I'd guess I've worked in four hundred houses in twenty-five years. I've learned more about how people live than a preacher does, and I try to be as close-mouthed about it.

The first rule is the floor. Before I carry in a single tool, I lay down drop cloths and a path of cardboard from the door to wherever I'm working, and I tape the edges down so nobody trips. I take my boots off at the door if the family does, and if they don't, I wipe them like a Baptist on Sunday. I've worked for people who said not to bother, and I bothered anyway, because they meant it on the first day and they would not have meant it on the fifth.

The second rule is the dust. Every evening, before I leave, I clean up. Not just sweep. I run the shop vac on every flat surface, I take the scraps out to the truck, and I leave the room so that the family can walk through it in their sock feet to get to the refrigerator. It takes thirty minutes at the end of every day, and it is the most important thirty minutes of the job, because it's what they remember. They will forget the joinery. They won't forget whether they had to wipe sawdust off the cereal bowls.

Kitchens are the hardest, because the kitchen is where a family lives. When I tear out a kitchen, I set up a card table in the dining room with the microwave and the coffee maker and run a cord to it, so they have somewhere to start the morning. The mother usually cries at some point, often when the old cabinets come out and she sees the outline of them on the wall, like a photograph. I don't take it personally. I usually go out to the truck for a while and let her.

Then there are the dogs. I have worked alongside every kind. There are dogs who guard the job and bark at me every morning as if they have never seen me before. There are dogs who lean on your legs all day while you work. One collie out in the county took a carpenter's pencil from my apron every single day for three weeks and buried them in the yard, and the owner found eleven of them in the spring. I keep a box of dog biscuits in the truck. It is the best-spent money in my business.

Children watch. I let them, from a safe distance, and if they're old enough I give them a scrap of pine and a pencil and let them mark out where they think the next cut should go. Old people want to talk, and I've learned that the work can usually wait ten minutes while a woman tells me who built her house and how her husband put in those shelves himself in 1958, and I tell her truthfully that he did a good job, and we decide together which of his shelves to keep.

Never set a coffee cup on a finished surface. Never use their bathroom without asking which one. Never say anything about anybody's house that you wouldn't say to their face, not even in the truck, because the truck window is open more often than you think.

When I'm done, and the room is cleaned and the cardboard is up and the drop cloths are folded, there's usually a moment where the family comes in to look. They run their hand along the new counter or open and close the new door a few times. Then they go back to living there, and I go away, and if I've done it right, after about a week they stop noticing my work at all. It just becomes the kitchen. That's how I know it's finished.