I started mucking around with wood, hammers, chisels, drills, saws and such when I was eight years old, building coaster cars to ride the hill we lived on in the Columbia Gorge. In scrounging for materials, nothing was sacred, including lumber, nails, screws or even the wheels on Dad’s lawnmower. Many years later I’m having a grand time mucking around with more tools (mostly power), wood and a variety of other materials.
After a degree in electrical engineering and several years of practicing structural and civil engineering design work I left that career to “pound nails” for a living, building custom homes at Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Moving back to Portland in 1983, I began renovating homes and have been for the last 26 years.
Along with the great pleasure I get working with clients, co-creating changes in their living spaces, I love building and finishing custom vanity cabinets, built-in library book cases, fireplace mantels, arbors and window seats, to name a few.

Project Chaboo includes several firsts for me. Build a piece for a show, design a piece where form rules, and build a piece that morphed significantly during construction. I am loving the creative atmosphere and process and my life batteries are recharged. When Ken asked me to build a chaboo I liked the idea yet had no sense of what it would look like. Then the light bulbs flashed with my cantilevered chaboo. I followed Ken’s lead from a project he’d recently finished and incorporated lead. Yea, lead (Pb)! Twenty six pounds of lead are embedded in the normal looking chaboo leg. The tapered top reduces the weight of the unsupported end and hopefully creates a visual sense of lightness and disappearing into thin air. Based on my original design I estimated the open end (no leg) would support 15 pounds. With design changes for form, that weight increased to 25 pounds. Go figure?I had lots of fun incorporating the light and dark bamboo panels and experimenting with the alternating layers and the contrasts that sculpting the panels creates.