Nick Offerman's Guide to Building Things That Last

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Speaker 13 I remember when I got cast as the bad guy in Miss Congeniality 2, Armed and Fabulous. I got a small but nice chunk of change.

Speaker 13 And I thought, oh, instead of spending this on an indiscretion or an indulgence, I'm going to buy a really nice bandsaw.

Speaker 14 I'm Christine Zeer-Clissette. I'm Kyra Kyra Blackwell.
I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to The Wire Cutter Show.

Speaker 14 Hi, guys.

Speaker 13 Hey, you there.

Speaker 14 One thing I've learned about the Wire Cutter team is beyond their passion for talking about gear that hopefully will help folks live better, you know, great chef's knife, a sewing machine, maybe the the right pen for journaling, is an inner light and excitement when

Speaker 14 that sentiment is shared by someone else in the world, particularly someone famous. In this case, I'm referencing tools specifically.
Absolutely. It's kind of funny.

Speaker 14 It's few and far between that there's actually someone famous who really geeks out to the level that people at Wirecutter will geek out on different products.

Speaker 14 But about six years ago, Nick Offerman, who is famous actor, if you haven't watched Parks and Recreation, go back and familiarize yourself with Ron Swanson.

Speaker 14 He tweeted about this S-Wing hammer that he really loves. And he pointed to our hammer review, which was written by Doug Mahoney, who has been on the show before.

Speaker 14 And since then, tons of people at Wire Cutter have been like, it would be so great to have him on the site. It would be so great to get him involved with the review.

Speaker 14 Can we get him to test hammers for us? You know, it's been on our bucket list to be able to talk to him.

Speaker 14 And the thing is, Ron Swanson, the character, is really big on woodworking, but I didn't even know that Nick Offerman, the man, he's actually been a professional woodworker for decades.

Speaker 14 He started Offerman Woodshop, his own shop, over 20 years ago, before he even made it big in Hollywood.

Speaker 14 He also wrote a bunch of books and he's got a new one out called Little Woodchucks, which is so cute.

Speaker 14 It's a woodworking guide for kids, but really it's more of a love letter to anyone who wants to slow down, get their hands dirty, and learn how to build something real.

Speaker 14 This book has everything from beginner projects, like carving little creatures with a whittling knife, to even more ambitious builds. We had a blast talking with Nick.

Speaker 14 He is just as funny as you would expect. And this conversation is actually a bit different than we usually have in our episodes.

Speaker 14 We do talk with Nick about his favorite tools and gear, but we also delve into some headier territory.

Speaker 14 We talk about why woodworking continues to be one of his enduring passions, what he gets out of it, and why he thinks that everyone should really slow down and start making things by hand.

Speaker 14 It's a great conversation. We should also say this episode does have some adult humor in it.
So please take care when you're listening with your kids. We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support.

Speaker 11 They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list.

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Speaker 14 The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling.

Speaker 14 The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.

Speaker 13 It's just easier to navigate that way. There is something for everyone.

Speaker 14 The personalized page, the U tab. That one's my favorite.
I can also save my articles easily in this area.

Speaker 13 Right under the byline, it says, click here if you'd like to listen to this article.

Speaker 14 I like that the cooking tab on top is really easily accessible. So if I'm on my way home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I going to make for dinner?

Speaker 14 I'll just quickly go on to cooking and say, oh, I've got this. in my pantry.

Speaker 13 I'm going to try out some of these recipes I see in here.

Speaker 14 I go to games always.

Speaker 13 Doing the mini, doing the wordle.

Speaker 14 I loved how much content it exposed me to, things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for.

Speaker 13 This app is essential: the New York Times app.

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Speaker 13 Welcome back.

Speaker 14 With us now is Nick Offerman, who you probably know as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation.

Speaker 14 He's not only an accomplished actor, though, he's a skilled woodworker who's founded his own woodworking collective in LA, and it's called Offerman Woodshop.

Speaker 14 He's also a published author of now six incredible books, his latest being Little Woodchucks, which released on October 14th. Nick, welcome to the show.

Speaker 13 Thank you. Thank you for that generous introduction.

Speaker 14 Nick, you might be interested to know that the staff at Wirecutter is pretty obsessed with you and has been for some time because we know that you're into tools, that you're a woodworker.

Speaker 14 And so I think a lot of people have been curious about just the fact that you're such a big celebrity, but you're also you've got this life moonlighting as a, as a woodworker.

Speaker 14 What got you into woodworking in the first place? Was this something that you did as a kid? Is it something that you picked up as an adult? How did it start?

Speaker 13 Well, thank you.

Speaker 13 There are some compliments in there. I appreciate it.

Speaker 13 You know, it's funny to hear you describe your crowd here.

Speaker 13 This book is exactly for you all because when I was a kid, my mom and dad brought up me and my three siblings in a farmhouse that my dad got for free and rolled down the road to like a and set it down on a basement that he poured.

Speaker 13 And it was a little house on the prairie, like for real. We made so much stuff.
Mom made clothes. She and dad both come from farm families a few miles in either direction.

Speaker 13 So I grew up surrounded by family members who make things of all sorts.

Speaker 13 And the farmers, you know, they have to be amazing mechanics and carpenters and painters and cooks and tailors and cobblers and you name it,

Speaker 13 because everything has to be incredibly frugal to survive year in and year out.

Speaker 13 And so growing up, it was just part of my hero worship of adults.

Speaker 13 Like when I grow up, when I come into my manhood, it means I'll be able to back a wagon of corn into the crib, and it means I'll be able to hammer a nail in one blow.

Speaker 13 I'll be able to use the chainsaw and so forth.

Speaker 13 And so I just always had a fascination with tools, with the implements that we clever monkeys have come up with to affect change on the raw materials of life to like make our lives better.

Speaker 13 And my dad was an amateur furniture maker. He made some really cool pieces of furniture.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, all of those influences combined so that when I was strong enough as a teenager to like get a labor job, I was drawn to framing houses to like swinging a hammer.

Speaker 13 And so at age, I think, 15 or 16, I got my first job framing houses for these brothers in town.

Speaker 13 And to just suddenly be paid a man's wage for climbing a ladder, like having an adventure up on a third story roof, like cutting rafters and hammering into place, just felt super heroic.

Speaker 13 And so I just always loved making some of my livelihood with tools, even though then I went to theater school. I wanted to become an actor.

Speaker 13 So while I was there, there was this guy named Ken Egan running this beautiful scene shop at this facility at the University of Illinois. called the Kranner Center.

Speaker 13 And this guy hired me to work in the scene shop. And so that was my first shop.

Speaker 13 Suddenly, my mind exploded where I was like, I learned what these big wood shaping shaping machines were, a planer and a joiner and a dust collection system and like how to run a great wood shop.

Speaker 13 And so even as I became a young adult as a theater actor, I also, that was my origin story as a woodworker where I was like, I can shape things with wood tools.

Speaker 13 I will thrive.

Speaker 14 Well, I want to know that the new book is called Little Woodchucks, and it's really about projects to do with kids.

Speaker 14 In the intro to the book, you talk a lot about how important it is to know how to make things with your hands. And I can identify with this.
I sew a lot of my own clothing.

Speaker 14 I taught my kids how to sew. I think it's important, but it's also a lot of work.
And sometimes I'm like, I could just go buy something for a fraction of the price and the time involved with this.

Speaker 14 What is the argument? today in 2025 to make things with your hands, to spend the time and effort and all of that. And sometimes it's kind of expensive to get into making things by hand.

Speaker 14 What's the argument?

Speaker 13 Well, let me, we're going to go all the way back to soil health.

Speaker 13 Things are about to get real sexy. I agree with you.
And in the intro to my last book called Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, I talk about our relationship with nature.

Speaker 13 And all my alarms start going off as I'm writing because this is not good television. This is not sexy.
Like everybody's going to sleep.

Speaker 13 Because that's what consumerism does so effectively is it says to you why don't you just buy what you need from the corporations and then sit on your couch and enjoy our diversions while our robots service your wife for you you know and i personally would like to take care of some of those responsibilities myself i feel like it's our duty as citizens to maintain to you know no pun intended to like keep a hand in to the construction and maintenance of our civilization.

Speaker 13 So there's the responsibility side of it, but I also think it's just really fun.

Speaker 13 If we were in Little House on the Prairie, they had a lot of fun. Like if you got a deck of cards and a sewing machine and a hammer, you can have a really good time.

Speaker 13 I feel like that's part of the answer to that question of like, if we all just say, why don't we just order it off your phone?

Speaker 13 We'll throw our planet in the garbage. That's what makes me happy to hear when people love tools.
I mean, mean, it's becoming really rare that people know what a tool is.

Speaker 14 It was important for us making this show. A lot of the conversations we end up having are about things that are built to last.

Speaker 14 What are the things that you can invest in that will last, if not a lifetime, then decades.

Speaker 13 Oh, absolutely. I mean, especially when you're starting out as a woodworker, good tools are expensive.

Speaker 13 And so naturally, there are all kinds of labor-saving devices and gadgets and cheap versions of things that at first seem like a great idea.

Speaker 13 And then when it breaks or breaks your heart, time after time, you finally say, okay, you get what you pay for.

Speaker 13 And these good, beautiful hand planes or chisels or what have you or machines are worth the money. And incredibly, like when I'm outfitting a shop, I do my damnedest.

Speaker 13 I work really hard to find machines from the 60s and 70s that require absolutely no maintenance or refurbishment that are 10 times better than what you can get today because things are being made for the company's profitability rather than your use.

Speaker 14 This book that you just came out with is about projects for kids. And I've noticed that with my own kids, there's this thing that happens where they're not on a screen.

Speaker 14 They're like in front of the sewing machine. They're having to push through and figure out how to make this thing.
And it does kind of push them to be more patient.

Speaker 14 Working on this book, did you find that process was happening with these kids at all?

Speaker 14 Like, were you making these projects with the kids and they were having to kind of push through and get past their own impatience with themselves?

Speaker 13 For sure. And it's really interesting to see kids today, like kids that are growing up with the technology they have, versus the kids I've known in other generations.

Speaker 13 And thankfully, I mean, I'm really relieved to see these cool kids that agreed to come be in our book. You can see their distraction, but then you would see them click in.

Speaker 13 I would work with them to whatever operation we were doing to get them to feel the correct use of the tool.

Speaker 13 And that's a big moment, just teaching them the difference between driving a screw with a drill horizontally versus getting your weight up on top of it and feeling how much more effective that is.

Speaker 13 If you read the whole book, it's kind of a not-so-veiled screed, not just for the kids, it's for the parents, too.

Speaker 13 I write it with a great sense of humor so that hopefully people will be engaged to read it out loud to their kids.

Speaker 13 So I'm hoping to awaken this in everybody because I think there are a lot of big woodchucks as well these days who also never use tools. And so it's a lot more fun and a lot easier to do it together.

Speaker 14 I had a question because it still surprises me, and I know you wrote this in your book.

Speaker 14 You will still make mistakes you nick offerman who's been doing this for years and that's both inspiring and a little bit intimidating i think to a lot of people myself included i'm not handy i can't build anything i was wondering if you have any advice for people like me who aren't that patient but they want to learn and they want to experience that joy of like creating something by hand well yeah i mean i think it's a great life lesson because i mean i learned early on in everything i do that if i make clumsiness part of my brand, then when I fall on my face, they laugh and they give me money and I say,

Speaker 13 that's what I do. Yeah, mission accomplished.
I hope you enjoyed that.

Speaker 13 But I mean, with woodworking, it's a great example. Like, one of the fun things about making a table or anything in the shop is it's a puzzle.

Speaker 13 It's solving a series of problems and understanding that you have to lay those problems out in the right order. You can't cut this before you cut this.

Speaker 13 If you look through the steps of one of the projects in my book, I think it's easy to understand.

Speaker 13 If you don't maintain focus, it's just easy to make brain fart, you know, like simple errors. But I love it.
It makes me, I

Speaker 13 rarely get mad at myself or at my family because I understand if somebody makes a mistake, I'm like, sure, that's what we do. We're humans.
Like we're built to make mistakes.

Speaker 13 No one ever does anything perfectly on the first try. And so I make less mistakes the older I get.
Knock on wood to a certain point. And then I guess then it starts going back the other direction.

Speaker 14 My wife's uncle was a luthier. He made guitars, and he made her a guitar.
And she was talking to me about how he...

Speaker 14 would take the wood options and lay his hands on them and kind of knock and ask her to sing so that he could match wood tone

Speaker 14 with the tone and timbre of her voice. And it struck me as like this really spiritual

Speaker 13 practice.

Speaker 14 And so I guess I'm wondering for you

Speaker 14 religion is personal, but is there kind of a spiritual or meditative

Speaker 14 aspect to the way that you work with wood and the way that you work with your hands?

Speaker 13 Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of our heroes of the field, George Nakashima, look it up.
It's gorgeous works. His daughter Mira is still running it.
They're still cranking out Nakashima pieces.

Speaker 13 And he has a wonderful book called The Soul of a Tree. And he and James Krenov, who has a school, they both are sort of two of the spiritual hearts of woodworking.

Speaker 13 And there is that elfin sensibility of like, if you're making a guitar or a dining room table, you know, you meet your clients and you're making the board on which they're going to have their family dinners, hopefully for generations.

Speaker 13 And so that is holy. I mean, that really feels like a wonderful and touching responsibility.
In the soul of a tree, George talks about, you know, the wood will tell you sort of what it wants to be or

Speaker 13 how thick or thin. You're trying to strive for this meditative sensibility.
Sometimes there are noisy tools, sometimes things are violent or you're bashing things, you know.

Speaker 13 But then there are moments where you're planing wood or shaving it or finishing it, where you can have music playing or the tools themselves are making a kind of music where it is quite spiritual.

Speaker 13 There's a passage Wendell Berry writes, and I think it's in his novel, The Memory of Old Jack, where he talks about

Speaker 13 you used to get to town only at the speed of walking, or the fastest would be the speed of a horse. And so you maintained a knowledge of the health of your neighborhood.

Speaker 13 You saw the creek, you saw your neighbors' houses, and you had time to say, oh, look, looks like they painted the barn. They're taking good care of their sunflowers or the opposite.
Like,

Speaker 13 looks like Bob might be drinking again.

Speaker 13 The faster we go in our society, the less we are able to pay attention. And so the less we communicate with our community to say, my laundry is well hung,

Speaker 13 was successfully on the wagon and so forth. And so in the shop, we try to honor that.
And it's a fine line because I'm not going for the greatest profitability.

Speaker 13 I do my best to have my shop break even. That's my goal every year.
But that allows everybody to work at the pace of a horse or walking.

Speaker 13 And I think that enjoyment goes into the beauty of the pieces that we make.

Speaker 14 I was talking to a friend last night who said, I was telling her that you were going to be here today. And she immediately said, oh, I have his coasters.
And she was very excited.

Speaker 14 But it made me wonder about the actual place you do your work. So are you working on personal projects at...
the Offerman Woodshop or do you have a dedicated space in your home?

Speaker 14 And if so, can you give us a visual? Walk us through.

Speaker 13 Sure.

Speaker 13 I'm not allowed to make sawdust where I share a marriage bed with Megan Mullally.

Speaker 13 She's going to hear this. I'm going to get in trouble

Speaker 13 for insinuating that we've made love.

Speaker 13 So I have a shop across town on the east side of L.A., and I'm wonderfully spoiled. I mean,

Speaker 13 you know, I used to have to make a lot of dining tables to make my rent, and now the the shop is, I've got such great woodworkers there that I'm able to, you know, I remember when I got cast as the bad guy in Miss Congeniality 2, armed and fabulous, and I got a nice, small but nice chunk of change.

Speaker 13 And I thought, oh, instead of spending this on an indiscretion or an indulgence, I'm going to buy a really nice bandsaw from the Laguna Bandsaw folks.

Speaker 13 And so that started a habit where every time I would get a nice acting job, I would buy a new machine. And so now I have a space sort of up in a loft where daddy can just keep his mess.

Speaker 13 That's the pull quote. Yeah.

Speaker 14 I like the idea, though, of a wood shop full of beautiful things that are expensive and a metaphor for your career success. Yeah.
That's kind of special.

Speaker 13 I guess so, yeah. It's weird.

Speaker 13 I never could have imagined how much my tool use

Speaker 13 would lend succor to my dreams of a life of artistry to the point where, like,

Speaker 13 they even made Ron a woodworker because of my shop. And we shot a few episodes in my shop.
Like, Ron's shop is shot at Offerman Woodshop. No way.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's awesome. And those, his canoes are my canoes that I built.
Like, there are a few things that Ron builds in the show that are comedy woodworking. Like, he builds an Irish harp overnight.

Speaker 13 And by the time we got into later episodes, there's one where I either build a crib for Chris Traeger or we build it together or something.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And it was like

Speaker 13 I became unavailable where they were like, we need a crib by Tuesday. And I was like,

Speaker 13 I have to learn my lines.

Speaker 13 I can't build a crib.

Speaker 14 Do you find that your woodworking, your acting, and your writing kind of feed each other? It sounds like in that example, like the woodworking kind of fed your acting in some ways and vice versa.

Speaker 13 I think so.

Speaker 13 I think that more, it's more just on a disciplinary level, like they all feed into each other.

Speaker 13 The work and planning and forethought that I put into something in the woodshop gives me patience and the wherewithal to also like,

Speaker 13 all right, I should sharpen sharpen things for my acting job or my tour as a humorist.

Speaker 13 And I should also understand that I'm going to make some mistakes.

Speaker 13 You know, and all of these lessons, and I get them from my mom and dad, and from Wendell Berry, and also, you know, Zen Cohen's, like, the way of the art is the way of the Buddha, which will always move me.

Speaker 13 And to always maintain the attitude of a student. You know, that all means like we all have a gift within us.
It's our responsibility to figure out what that is.

Speaker 13 And then that's how we make our life life fulfilling: by performing that

Speaker 13 service for others. For me, it's making stuff out of wood or making funny faces as I fall down.

Speaker 14 Well, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll chat with Nick about his favorite tools of all time.

Speaker 13 Be right back.

Speaker 2 It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technologies' biggest sale of the year.

Speaker 5 Enjoy huge savings on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus, featuring Intel Core ultra-processors.

Speaker 4 And with built-in advanced features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster.

Speaker 1 Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support.

Speaker 11 They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list.

Speaker 2 Shop now at dell.com/slash deals.

Speaker 15 I'm Dan Barry and I'm a longtime reporter with the New York Times. I've been here for 30 years and I've seen a lot of things change.
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Speaker 13 Welcome back.

Speaker 14 So, Nick, this is the Wirecutter Show. We have to talk about the tools that you use.
So, hypothetically, let's say someone really wants to get into tools, but they don't even know where to start.

Speaker 14 At Wirecutter, we rarely recommend like pre-made toolkits where you can just buy them basically off the rack, you know, at Home Depot or whatever.

Speaker 14 So we were wondering what five tools you would recommend or arrange in your own personal bag for a newbie.

Speaker 13 And is this just for someone's like household first five tools? Let's start there. Yeah.
First and foremost, these days I go for

Speaker 13 a nice cordless drill.

Speaker 14 She's laughing because I very, very intentionally went out and bought a drill so that I could be a bit more self-sufficient.

Speaker 14 And I was suckered into buying a corded drill because the person in the store told me that that was the one to get and I assumed that was the right thing and I've been dragged ever since.

Speaker 13 Well, I will not shame you.

Speaker 14 Thank you, Nick.

Speaker 13 You can get a lot done with a corded drill, especially if you have an extension cord.

Speaker 14 Yeah, or you're just close to the plug, right?

Speaker 14 It just cracks me up thinking that you have to plug it in to do anything in your house. It's absurd.

Speaker 13 It's funny to me that you think that's funny, where I'm like, well, of course.

Speaker 13 That's how we did it for a really long time.

Speaker 14 I know. It just seems like it's just, it's, you know, cheating cordless drugs.

Speaker 13 No, I get it. I get it.
I mean, we used to, to make a phone call, you used to have to move your body to a place where a phone was on a wall. Before my time, Nick.

Speaker 13 And then you had to stay there the whole time. Can't imagine.
Yeah, you couldn't leave the phone.

Speaker 13 But those, they're incredible because especially nowadays, you can get a kit with all the the different bits and a nice set of drill bits. So you can get a lot done with those.

Speaker 13 That's one.

Speaker 13 Number two is I also would get a nice manual screwdriver with interchangeable bits because there are a lot of applications that a drill doesn't fit into or that a drill is maybe too much for.

Speaker 13 Number three is a nice socket set.

Speaker 13 What's that? It's a set of little cylinders that fit on nuts and bolts, hexagonal nuts and bolts. And it comes with a ratchet.

Speaker 13 Got it.

Speaker 13 So that in combination with a wrench set or a crescent wrench that's an adjustable wrench, that kind of equips you to put together and take apart all nuts and bolts that are in the hexagonal family, which used to be kind of the only game in town.

Speaker 13 Nowadays, they have all kinds of different fasteners that complicates things, where if you have to have more than two or three kinds of screw tip, especially if you're taking things apart and you have to figure out what tip they use, they have square tips and Phillips tips.

Speaker 14 So this is like comparable to like when iPhone kept changing the charging ports on everything and now we're all going back to like universal and we could have just done that forever.

Speaker 13 How could that? Yeah, I mean, how is that even? I don't like that about capitalism.

Speaker 13 Even that the nations are allowed to go imperial or metric. I'm like, come on, guys.

Speaker 13 We're sharing this plan. Get along.

Speaker 14 Okay, what are we on? Three or four?

Speaker 13 Well, if the socket set is three, and I'm going to say a set of wrenches, and that includes your box end, your open end, and I'm going to include a crescent wrench in that as a set of wrenches.

Speaker 14 I think you're cheating. You're including specs.

Speaker 13 I don't call it cheating.

Speaker 13 You got to have a hammer. You have to have a persuader.
And then a saw. I mean, those

Speaker 13 but I've gone over five.

Speaker 14 You like an S-Wing? Is that what you like?

Speaker 13 I do. I mean, you know, in my day, S-Wing really just nailed the,

Speaker 13 they were like the Nike of the available hammer brands. They feel great.
They look great.

Speaker 14 Is there something in your workshop that is kind of an unsung hero? It's not the obvious tool.

Speaker 14 It's not the thing that everybody has in their toolbox, but it's something that you think deserves more attention than it gets.

Speaker 13 The thing that springs to mind is there's a company in Maine called Lee Lee-Nielson Hand Planes. They make hand planes and chisels and a few other implements of fine woodworking.

Speaker 13 Their tools are just exquisite. There's a little

Speaker 13 hand plane that's all in brass that fits neatly into like your apron pocket.

Speaker 13 So that's what springs to mind is invariably in my co-author of this book, Lee, who ran my shop for 10 years, we were just talking about how it's like your dependable Swiss Army knife where there are so many other shavings or adjustments that you want to make to a piece, but you've always got that little Lee Nielsen plane.

Speaker 14 Nick, you don't have kids, but you collaborated with Lee Buchanan, who is the co-author of this book.

Speaker 14 I want to hear about how you went about deciding on the projects, and what did you learn from Lee as you were creating this book when parks and rec looked like it was going to go

Speaker 13 i thought i think my life is going to change i think if this is anything like it seems i'm going to have a lot less time in the shop and so i either need to like lock up the shop or get somebody working here under the auspices of offerman woodshop And a mutual friend of ours, I was working with, and he said, you know, I just did an install, and this woman named Lee outworked the other three guys.

Speaker 13 I just met her and you should meet her. She's pretty special.
So I had her in for a meeting. Everything about her was so wonderful.
So together we sort of built this family over the years.

Speaker 13 We ended up doing a woodworking book for adults and everybody called Good Clean Fun. And it's been so much fun to get to collaborate with her again.

Speaker 13 When we're together, we come up with all of the ideas for what the projects will be.

Speaker 13 Some of them were no-brainers, and some of them we kind of workshopped, where we were like, okay, what bench design, what sawhorse design, what materials?

Speaker 13 You know, we workshopped a few different connectors for the box kite, for example. And Lee is just so great, whether she was running my shop or doing this from afar, working in her shop in Berkeley.

Speaker 13 She's just amazing.

Speaker 14 How did you decide what would be appropriate for kids? Were you really leaning on Lee to kind of be be like, hey, you've got some kids, is this appropriate?

Speaker 14 Or were you testing it out with kids in the shop?

Speaker 13 It had mainly to do with what you could make satisfyingly with hand tools. We were trying to limit most of the projects to not needing power tools.

Speaker 13 There aren't a lot of projects that are meant to send your kids off, like go out in the garage and whip up a couple sawhorses.

Speaker 13 They're generally meant to have adult supervision just because in the the wood shop, you know, just like in the kitchen, there are implements that are sharp that you can really hurt yourself with.

Speaker 13 And so no matter what age we are, when anybody comes into my shop, I'm like, okay,

Speaker 13 always a lot of grab ass here. And like, we love having fun.
But number one is straight up, like, safety first. That will kill you.
That'll chop your hand off. We wear hearing protection.

Speaker 13 We protect our eyes. We protect our lungs.
And we're dead serious. Like, don't, if somebody's using a tool, pretend that they're backing a bulldozer toward you.
Just give them respect.

Speaker 13 And so with kids as well, we just went through each project idea, and there were all kinds of different toys and games and fun things. And maybe the most benign thing I can think of in the book,

Speaker 13 there are two sets of tongs that we make. One of them are these, we call them toast tongs.

Speaker 13 And you can imagine a couple of big tongue depressors, and you you glue a little piece of wood between one end of those and you can make it's a big pair of tweezers.

Speaker 13 And it's really fun. One of the first things you can learn in woodworking is when you glue wood together, how strong that is.
It's so exciting.

Speaker 13 I mean, you can make whole pieces of furniture just relying on the strength of the wood glued together. And so the tongs is such a handy implement.

Speaker 13 And that, to me, everything that we make in the shop, once its use comes into play, like you let the glue dry, you sand it a little bit, and then you can pull your toast out of the toaster, or you can take these tongs and flip your hot dog on the grill.

Speaker 13 And it just feels incredible. Like, holy cow, I made this just by gluing these pieces of wood together.
And so we sort of extrapolate off of that.

Speaker 13 You know, using a set of hand tools, we kind of discerned, okay,

Speaker 13 most of what we did, we made some of them together, Lee and I, because we did have some times together up in her shop.

Speaker 13 But then a lot of them she also prototyped with her kids and she would go through and see what they could do and what they couldn't do.

Speaker 14 Nick, we usually ask all of our guests one final question, which is, what's the last thing you bought that you've really loved?

Speaker 14 But we want to ask you, what's the last thing that you've built that you've really loved?

Speaker 13 That is a great question.

Speaker 13 There are a couple things that I made for Megan

Speaker 13 that I'm not going to say.

Speaker 13 One of them is a sex toy, but

Speaker 13 that's all I'm going to say.

Speaker 13 And if you are making a sex toy, just make sure, if you think you've sanded it enough, sand it just a little more.

Speaker 13 The last thing I made that I really loved are this batch of ukuleles, which I've been working on bit by bit for years.

Speaker 13 When you play an instrument that you've made and people don't leave, it feels pretty incredible. One day I will wield that in concert and then I can retire.

Speaker 14 Well, thank you, Nick. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker 13 You're very patient. Thanks for putting up with me.

Speaker 14 Very fun.

Speaker 14 Nick Offerman's new book with Lee Buchanan is called Little Woodchucks, Offerman Wood Shop's Guide to Tools and Tom Foolery. It's available now wherever you like to buy books.

Speaker 14 Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Speaker 14 The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Matty Mazziello and Nick Pittman.
Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson.

Speaker 14 Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nimosto, Catherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is WireCutter's deputy publisher and general manager.

Speaker 14 Ben Freuman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. I'm Christine Sierra Clissette.
I'm Kyra Blackwell. And I'm Rosie Guerin.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 13 So when you're making sex toys,

Speaker 13 first of all, just don't even use conifers. Like, don't avoid softwoods altogether.
Go with deciduous hardwoods. And just don't forget to raise the grain.

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