It’s not that the Vadholma hasn’t served us well. When I purchased the stout, faux–butcher-block island from IKEA several years back, its compact footprint was an ideal fit for the snug shoe of a kitchen in what was then our home; and when we moved here I brought it with us, also buying to accompany it a few counter-height stools, upon which over the past year we’ve sat to eat countless, happy bowls of ice cream and cereal.
However, the flat-pack furniture piece isn’t without it’s flaws. For one, it’s uncomfortable to sit at, and for two, it’s difficult to sweep under—a severe drawback for a family with three young boys who frequently employ the “shotgun” method of launching popcorn into their mouths. A couple joints in the island’s particleboard frame are starting to pull apart, and its black, acrylic paint is starting to peel.
Therefore, a couple months ago, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I typically give myself three options for acquiring new furniture, and since “buy it from IKEA” seemed like a poor strategy for replacing an item I bought from IKEA, I limited myself to the other two: buy it secondhand, or make it myself. For several weeks I kept an eye on Facebook Marketplace in hopes that The One would appear, but in the end everything that looked decently sturdy cost more than what I was willing to spend, and everything within my desired price range looked flimsier than what I knew I could make myself for the same cost.
And all that is to say: This week I built a kitchen island. I sketched then pieced together a pine-stud frame, I painted the frame black, and then on top of it I stuck a 2x4-foot slab of butcher-block. Ta-da! My new island is comfortable to sit at. It’s easy to sweep under. It even looks, dare I say, lovely.
This isn’t the first time I’ve built a piece of furniture, or even a piece of furniture of which I’m proud. Nevertheless, it is the piece of furniture of which I’m proudest. In it I see reflected the wisdom I’ve gained over the course of previous projects, as well as my developing skill with the tools I’ve taught myself to use—the angled-cut feature of the circular saw, the pocket-hole jig, and the darling, little peg joinery kit, to name a few.
I also learned to use a new tool for this project. Committed to the precept that for a kitchen island, even more than for anything else I’d built before, it was important that the final result not wobble, I treated myself to a $15 carpenter’s square (which, mind you, is actually in the shape of a triangle). Gracious, do I wish I’d done so sooner.
When preparing to cut boards for previous projects, after calculating the length of wood I needed, I used to draw out my tape measure upon the board and mark two points at that exact length across its width. Next I would use my straight-edged quilting ruler to draw a line across the board, passing through my two marks along the way. Finally, I would line up my circular saw where the line began, then guide it as neatly as possible across the line. In geometric theory, this should have worked perfectly, but in reality it only worked just fine. The end of a board, despite appearances, is not always perfectly straight, which, when translated to a difference of even just a couple millimeters between my two marks, would result in a line that did not form a perfectly square angle with the length of the board. Once I’d cut the first piece from the board and moved on to measure the next using the same strategy, this effect would only compound. My lines looked clean and straight to the naked eye, but when pieced together into a table, their even-slightly imperfect angles would become apparent in joints that would not sit flush and in feet that would have to be sanded level.
Enter the carpenter’s square. With this tool, you only need to make one mark at your desired length. Then, you slide the side of the square (/triangle) up the long edge of the board until the adjacent side crosses your mark, and you draw a line that uses the contours of the board itself, rather just a calculation applied with a ruler, to form a truly perfect right angle. Not only this, but once you have your line, you can slide the square down a few inches to serve as a physical guide for your circular saw, such that even as you make the cut, the angle of your sawed line will be just as square as the angle of your drawn line. Thanks to the trusty carpenter’s square, I was able to piece my island together with neatly fitted joints and feet that sat flat, no sanding required.
One of the things that has surprised me most about carpentry (if you can call my modest efforts carpentry) is that a calculator and ruler really won’t get you far. Carpentry requires the exercise of remarkable precision. Novice logic would likely assume that the combination of calculator and ruler would guarantee the most precise result. However, novice logic takes it for granted that boards are perfectly straight and that they will meet perfectly the dimensions stated in the “Specifications” section on the Home Depot website; but neither of these is true. While newbies may at least know that a 2x2 board, despite its name, is only 1.5 by 1.5 inches thick, once you’ve built a few things with 2x2s, you’ll also have learned (usually the hard way) that each of the four sides at the end of a 2x2 might actually be anywhere between 1.25 and 1.5 inches thick. Every board, and even every cross-section of a single board, is likely to be just a little different. A quarter of an inch might not sound like much, but when you’re trying to join wood neatly, even the slightest difference can skew your angles and lines dramatically.
Calculators and rulers have their place in building furniture, but if you really want your work to feel sturdy and look clean, you must learn how to use the materials themselves as the guides for your marks and measurements. Once you cut the first leg for your table, for instance, you’re usually better off using that leg to mark the length of the next three rather than marking all four with a measuring tape. When working with diagonally-placed boards, a calculator can suggest a hypotenuse to use as a starting place in helping you identify where the boards will meet, but when it’s time to drill the holes, you’ll likely need to line up your boards by hand in order to place the joints most accurately.
A calculator and ruler, that is, will give you theoretically precise measurements, but observing the boards with your eyes and working them with your hands will give you practically precise measurements. Precision—real, elegant, and useful precision—requires engagement with material particularities, not just postulations.
And this, if you’ll forgive me for taking so long to draw the metaphor, I’ll liken to one of my biggest beefs with the encroach of generative AI into the personal functions of our human lives: Artificial intelligence interfaces, when you boil it down, are essentially just calculators—extremely elaborate ones, yes, but still in the end just digital mechanisms that make quick work of algorithmically connecting and extrapolating from various points of pre-established data. As we all know by now, current AI models can make very quick work indeed of systematically gathering, weighing, and interpreting a world of data in order to answer all of our questions and solve all our problems. The results are often incredibly thorough, and if they’re thorough, they must be precise, right?
But human lives are neither arithmetic nor geometry. They’re not even algebra, as though, allowing a change in variables, one could still employ a universal set of formulas. (Granted I don’t remember a single thing about calculus, so hey, you might have me there—but I’m willing to bet not.) Human beings, just like the God who created us, are paradoxical and unpredictable,1 and we inhabit a paradoxical and unpredictable world. The questions we ask and problems we face, no matter how similar they may seem to the naked eye, are singular in and of themselves, as well as in their relation to a host of other singularities. Human problems are personal, and the personal is always particular.
Of course, there is a spectrum here. If the problem you wish to solve is “What is the square root of 85?” then there is in fact a universal answer, and a calculator can quickly guide you to it. Similarly, if you’re wondering, “How do I change the taillight bulb in my 2016 Kia Sedona?” the personal variables are few, and AI will likely give you a sufficient answer.2 However, when we start asking AI for help in our personal lives—requesting advice for our relationships or coaching toward our goals; soliciting psychoanalyses of our work and its predicted effect upon other humans; and relying on a combination of autofill and autocorrect to piece together our interpersonal communications—then we are leaving to a calculator problems that a calculator cannot, and more importantly should not, solve.
Last week, I started to type into my Google search bar the following prompt: “How to attract a diversity of birds to your feeder.” (Ours has been overtaken by a ruffian gang of house finches, in case you were wondering.) However, I paused at “How to attract a div—” for a double-take when I noticed aghast that the first recommended prompt (which means that people, and a lot of them, are actually searching this), was “How to attract a divorced woman.” My mixture of disgust and grief here outweighed my curiosity, so I didn’t click forward, but if the results page for this prompt looked anything like the the one responding to my bird-feeder question, then at the top it would have offered an “AI Overview”—reducing to a brief list of crass and scientific tasks a matter that should be treated at the very least as delicate, intricate, and, again, irreducibly particular.
To relegate our human problems to the intelligence of even a sophisticated calculator, I’d submit, is to send ourselves up life’s creek with but a paddle—a blunt, rigid object that will propel us somewhere, in some direction. This, I’ll grant, is at least hypothetically better than the proverbial alternative; but it’s still not enough. Perhaps if we had packed the tools that could help familiarize us with our particular surroundings—a map, a compass, and a weather report, for instance—or if we had even just taken the time to look up at the sky to observe the ominous cloud in the distance, or asked a local whether there happened to be dangerous rapids ahead, we would have hung the paddle on the wall and acquiesced that for now we’re best off staying right where we are.
Human problems demand more than a paddle, more than a calculator, and more than intelligence. They demand wisdom, and the exercise of wisdom depends just as much upon observation of and familiarity with particulars as it does upon application of general principles. Just as in carpentry, gaining wisdom in life requires practice and creativity, and it requires the assistance of tools that will help you engage your problems in the specific context of where precisely you are and where precisely you are trying to go. These tools are nothing new: books, articles, or even videos created by humans whose philosophical and theological presuppositions you can gauge clearly vis-a-vis your own; earnest prayer and meditation on Scripture; and, of course, instruction, encouragement, and advice from people who know you, love you, and want to see you flourish.
Your life is a miracle, not a math fact; don’t reduce yourself to anything less.
Matters of Late
It’s been a minute since I added any new prints to my Etsy shop, but as of yesterday, my newest listing is live! It features the image of an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, printed on 5x7” watercolor paper. I noticed so many Swallowtails in our area this spring, and the way the sunlight illuminates their cheerful, yellow wings strikes me as the most delightful harbinger of the warmth of summer that is to come. I wanted to capture something of that cheer and delight in this print so I can have spring in my home year round.
Giveaway
And how cruel of me it would be to announce a new print without offering one as a giveaway! Click the button below and fill out the form by Sunday, June 28, if you’d like to be entered in the drawing for a Swallowtail Butterfly print of your own. Note that this giveaway is only open to subscribers, so if you haven’t yet subscribed, make sure to do so first (subscribing comes with a couple other perks too!).
Thanks for reading! Until next time—
Holly
To be clear, I do believe that God is “predictable” in the sense that he always keeps his promises; however, his means for doing so are often the farthest thing from predictable.
That said, even in this case I’d chose to watch a YouTube video that was written and filmed by a human rather than opting for a AI—but that’s for other reasons I won’t get into here.