Why You Should Have a Workshop and How 
THE NECESSITY FOR AN ORDERLY AND WELL EQUIPPED WORKROOM 
IN EVERY HOUSEHOLD—HOME CRAFTSMANSHIP AS A WINTER PASTIME 
by Jared Stuyvesant 
Photographs by the author and others 
T HAT man is to be pitied who 
cannot add to his vocation 
an avocation. Hugh Black, in his 
essay on Work says, “There can be 
no true rest without work, and the 
full delight of a holiday cannot be 
known except by the man who has 
earned it.” But there are various 
forms of rest, the most luxurious 
of which is a change of occupation. 
Many a man will go home from a 
day of toil and relax over a book 
or a play, refreshing his mind and 
body for the work of another day. 
Others, like a friend I call to mind, 
after working all day with his 
brain, will go to his shop in the 
attic of his home and will lose all 
account of time and fatigue in 
fashioning with his hands some bit 
of metalwork. Unless I am woe¬ 
fully lacking in observation, his is 
the greater joy in living. It mat¬ 
ters little or not at all whether your 
taste is for bookbinding, wood 
carving, photography, clay model¬ 
ing, carpentry or what not, pro¬ 
vided only that it be largely an 
avocation bringing work of a kind 
entirely different from that which 
occupies your work-day hours; by 
all means have a hobby and ride 
it. I can well imagine that a man 
who works all day with his hands 
would probably choose a more con¬ 
templative occupation for his eve¬ 
ning hours, but for those who sym¬ 
pathize with Charles Lamb’s protest 
against the “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood” there is no 
rest so refreshing as the united effort of hand and eye in crafts¬ 
manship at the bench — not to be bigoted and say in carpentry. 
I might have 
started this article 
with an argument 
on the usefulness 
of a well fitted 
workshop in the 
home. There must 
be few men who 
have not felt an 
impulse to make 
minor repairs or 
additions about the 
house when the 
need of these ap¬ 
peared, but have 
rejected the im¬ 
pulse on second 
thought because they didn't know 
just where the screw-driver had 
been put when last used, or because 
they realized at once that an auger- 
bit of the desired size was not in 
the home equipment of tools. It 
meant an hour’s work getting to¬ 
gether the tools from their scat¬ 
tered hiding-places, another hour 
spent in arranging a place to do 
the work, and then — well, you 
didn’t have a vise, and what could 
a man be expected to fix without 
a vise? Hasn't that experience 
been your own on more than one 
occasion ? It has been my own 
many times, until finally I hap¬ 
pened to drop in upon a neighbor 
one Saturday afternoon and found 
him apparently having the time of 
his life at his carpenter’s bench. 
The first sight of that orderly ar¬ 
ray of tools hanging each in its 
own groove or on its own hooks 
on the wall over the bench itself 
convinced me that I had been miss¬ 
ing a lot of real pleasure. 
“That looks interesting,” I re¬ 
marked, “but would you mind tell¬ 
ing me how you manage to keep 
those chisels in their proper racks 
rather than finding that the family 
has borrowed one for an ice-pick, 
and another to open a box of gro¬ 
ceries? There doesn’t seem to be 
any provision for locking them in.” 
“It’s entirely psychological,” he 
replied. “The whole secret of it is 
this: get a complete layout of first-class tools and arrange them 
in a convenient and perhaps even imposing manner over the 
bench — of course the tool-chest idea is played out; the tool you 
want is always at 
the bottom of the 
pile under the tray. 
The important 
thing, however, is 
to have the whole 
outfit orderly and 
impressive. That 
very impressive¬ 
ness is the most 
effectual “ Hands 
off” sign you can 
put up. The cook 
may want an ice¬ 
pick, but she will 
take one good look 
at that array and 
Do you know the joy of an avocation? If not you are 
missing the most luxurious form of rest 
The whole secret of keeping a set of tools 
intact is to make it so impressive that the 
would-be borrower will turn back 
The old tool-chest idea has gone and in its 
place has come the bench and rack or the 
wall cabinet, with every tool within reach 
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