My grandfather passed away in March of 2013. During his last few years, his mind remained sharp as a tack, even as his body deteriorated; losing his ability to walk and see.

My poppy was a talented carpenter, having a hand in building nearly every home my mother lived in for her entire life. Growing up, they moved every couple of years as he finished a project and fell in love with a house he built. Little did he know, the spoiling effect that would have on my mom who has only lived in one place ever that wasn’t brand new when she moved in. As a family, we built both houses I grew up in including the one my parents live in now.

Poppy also made beautiful furniture: selling stools at church, and making each of his grandchildren a sofa table by which to remember him. Mine has not quite made it to Chicago yet, but as soon as Michael and I buy a condo, we’ll find the perfect spot for it. He was inspiring in that way, an artist really, making homes, furniture and even jewelry for work and hobbies during his lifetime.

We recently sold the house he built for himself and my grandma shortly before I was born. This house was truly a work of art. From the outside, the home looks like a big red barn. The inside was warm and inviting, with a large living and lofted second-floor balcony. Pop put so much love into his craft. He laid each brick in the wall he built around their fireplace. He designed and put together each cabinet and door with all the little details that makes woodworking so appealing.

If you can imagine, this was a pretty special place to have cozy Christmas mornings with my sisters and cousins or to enjoy a game of Scrabble with competing generations. It was also the home my grandparents loved to host their two daughters, two sons-in-law, five grandchildren and their spouses and nine great-grandkids for a meal, rambunctious as those great-grandkids may be.

Now that my Pop is gone, I feel I really missed an opportunity to have him pass on his lifetime of knowledge to his grandson.  After moving to Chicago, I found I was spending a lot more free time thinking about building and creating — becoming obsessed with HGTV renovation shows and Pinterest projects.

I had a small bout of unemployment in the summer of 2013 during which time, I spent over a month in my friend Jesse’s backyard sanding, staining and refinishing my kitchen table and chairs that were hand-me-downs from my parents. The experience was very rewarding and I shared pictures of the work I did refinishing with my family  who was excited to see my new interest in furniture and woodworking.

A few summers ago, I started researching craft schools in Chicago — seeking something to occupy my free time, while learning a skill and working with my hands. Luckily Chicago has a ton of options from glassblowing to metalwork, but ultimately I decided on a woodworking school (that happened to be a 10-minute walk from my place) where they specialized in furniture making and cabinetry using solid rough cut wood to make the projects. Excited and hopeful that the class would make me feel closer to my beloved grandpa, I signed up for Furniture Making 101.

My first class started a few weeks before Michael moved to Ohio for three months to attend a web dev boot camp. It may have been my favorite of three classes I took there, even though I have less to show for it. We studied the fundamentals of woodworking, using almost only hand tools to plane, chisel and saw wood into a 5×7 picture frame and a handmade sanding block. Taking a saw or chisel to a piece of wood is about the best stress reliever I’ve ever come across. It was like therapy. I loved it.

The next class was much more intense, using for the first time the big expensive power tools, planers and jointers, table saws and Domino tables. Over the course of nine weeks, we molded raw wood into a side table.

Throughout the class, I constantly self-doubted, thinking I measured wrong and went back to do it again. After you cut a piece of wood, you certainly can’t uncut it. In the end, all the pieces fit just right and I was able to to glue the whole thing together, using only two screws to hold the tabletop on. The tabletop was the only thing that didn’t turn out quite perfect, the wood I used to make it would bow every so slightly each time I planned it, forcing me to joint and plane it again until it was finally flat enough though it ended up about 1/4 inch thinner than ideal.

The table itself really turned out beautiful, though. It’s an arts-and-crafts style design from a woodworking magazine. It now sits proudly in my living room.

I took about six months off from woodworking. While certainly worth it, the classes are expensive (a little more than $400) and I didn’t think we could afford it while Michael was searching for his first programming job. I had one class to complete before “graduating.” This summer, after Michael had been working for a few months, I decided it was time to take the third and final class in their woodworking program. Of course, my supporting husband was all for it. So I paid for the class and we headed out to one of the few locations you can purchase rough sawn lumber in Chicago.

Michael and I piled a couple hundred dollars worth of walnut and hard maple into our car (with planks out both windows at the same time) and drove it over to our school to drop it off.

In the new class, we would be making a telephone table — which is a tall side table that were incredibly popular in the days when homes had one telephone, usually located in a hallway or common area. We hit the ground running, molding and transforming the huge cuts of lumber into legs, drawer parts, panels, and a beautiful tabletop.

This class somehow seemed easier than the last — something just clicked about how to cut and organize and make sure pieces fit together. Woodworking is not easy, its a lot of math (mostly in your head) and visualizing how two pieces match and fit together in a product you won’t be putting together until the very end. This piece of furniture was not without its issues. While using my favorite tool, the Festool Domino, I must have misaligned something and when I finally put my table together for the first time, nothing fit quite right. Thankfully, a few hours on a Saturday was enough to fix up the issues and I was able to complete my table with the rest of my class.

I’m not much of a spiritual person, but I do believe in human connection that can transcend distance and difference and life and death. Every time I pick up a tool to work on creating something, I feel a little closer to my grandfather, who was a great teacher, friend, and storyteller. That feeling does not leave me feeling sad, but rather happy that even a small part of him is still with me today. My tables sit in my favorite corner of the apartment, with one of my Pop’s many canes leaning against it and one of his many tools hanging on the wall just above it.