In 2010 I was going back and forth a lot between LA and SF, so I was looking for some short term housing in each place. I hadn’t remembered the ‘coop’–the dilapidated shed in my friends’ expansive LA hillside garden–as being quite so dilapidated. So, I called them up and asked if I could fix it up into a guest house in exchange for staying there for a month or two. When I got to my future home, I saw I was in for a real project.

The first thing I hadn’t remembered was that there was no floor. The second thing I hadn’t remembered was that there weren’t really walls–it was more like a detached screen porch.

But the roof was solid, and the foundation…well the whole thing was tied to a couple of skinny, yet rugged little trees. So I felt safe enough.

The first step was to delineate outdoor space from indoor space by putting in some walls. Nothing makes a house feel like a home like a couple solid walls separating you from the vines and the neighbors.

Then, an even more radical gesture was the application of white paint. Two coats of white turned this tiny hobbit hole into a spacious and pristine hobbit hole in one day!

I found these yellow windows underneath the main house and put them together with this old door.  This addition really upped the cuteness factor, and the light was great coming through the yellow panes in the morning. Like the windows & door every single thing I used in the coop restoration project was salvaged and free–and this fact dictated its patchwork aesthetic.

Finally, I laid a floor. First I put down this tarp as a vapor shield, then I built 2×4 platforms which I screwed together and leveled, and ultimately skinned with plywood.

Though I was glad to have solid, dry and level footing, I lost about ten inches of precious vertical space in the leveling process. Fine for a small guy like me, but normal sized humans now had to watch their heads in certain corners of the coop.

Luckily, the footprint was small enough that there wasn’t much walking around and bumping your head to be done. The bed was the main attraction.

I also made some small wooden boxes for storage. And every single thing I owned had a hook or a shelf. I got rid of a lot of things that I had owned.

Needless to say, the coop was so damn cute after I finished fixing it up that I ended up living there for 2 years. Mostly escaping to SF during the occasional incidences of Southern California weather.

My friend Ian recently came through LA on tour playing, among other instruments, the saw. I hadn’t seen him in many years and we discovered a mutual newfound love of carving. So, for an upcoming wedding of our old friends Keri and Joe, Ian and I decided to embark on a cross country carving collaboration. Ian mostly carves green wood which he finds around his homeland in rural New England. Since there’s a shortage of woodlands in Los Angeles, I tend to carve out of left over scraps of dried lumber kicking around Nick’s shop.

With only some rough sketches and dimensions exchanged, our finish products ended up more or less matching in size and aura, but varied significantly in style.  Ian chopped down a sugar maple tree, carved it green, and sanded his fork to a smooth ivory sheen which he then soaked in olive oil.  My spoon, carved from a cut-off of aromatic bay laurel, has a less refined (more ‘rabid animal’) texture to it.  I left the marks of my tools only lightly sanded and finished it with walnut oil. Our two finished salad tools were united in Brooklyn, NY on February 27th, 2011 and have been happily married ever since.