When Paul Humber recently retired as a hydro worker, he didn’t have to think very long about what his next chapter would be. He'd already been doing it part-time for the past 20 years: building handmade custom wood furniture for family and friends.
“What I really enjoy is creating something that isn’t a piece of particle board that’s going to fall apart when you move it,” Humber says, while showing off his handmade pieces to ThoroldToday. “In a sense, it’s a bit of an heirloom. The way I try to build it is so it lasts a long, long time.”
Humber got into woodworking when he moved to Port Robinson in the early 2000s.
“It all started with the house we bought,” he explains. “It was a bit of a fixer-upper and it needed a lot of things. One of the first projects I did was due to a big ash tree that ended up dying and we had to take it down. I thought: 'I’m not going to let this wood go to waste.' I had it milled up and I ended up turning that into our kitchen cabinets.”
It might seem like a big undertaking for just one man, but Humber says he is used to putting his hands to good use.
“I was a construction worker, crane operator and then I was lineman with the Hydro, so I’m used to working with tools and machinery and all that sort of stuff,” he says. “I inherited a few woodworking tools from my father when he passed away. He did teach me some things, a little bit about it, and then I’m kind of self-taught. I’m always learning, different techniques or things like that. ”
Humber uses rough wood for his furniture because of the story the wood tells.
“What I enjoy is taking a piece of wood that looks like a normal piece of plank, but doesn’t look anything spectacular,” says Humber. “When you start cleaning it and getting it into the shapes you want to smooth it, it’s just amazing—some of the grain and the colours.”
Humber is not the only one at home who spends most of his spare time on his hobby. His wife, Peggy, is a seamstress with projects of her own.
“We’re very resourceful people,” Humber says. “If we see something we like, we basically look at it and say: ‘Can we make this rather than buying?’ And usually we can. We both work from home. She has numerous sewing machines in the house, and I have my shop in the garage.”
One of Humber’s most recent pieces is a closet door featuring a stencil of the map of Canada.
“That was a collaboration between my wife and I,” Humber explains. “We are into camping and kayaking, we’re really into Canadiana. That’s a big closet and we did three bypassing doors and my wife had the idea of doing a stencil and whitewash of the map of Canada. I made the doors, she did the stencilling, and we did the whitewash together.”
Now that he’s retired, Humber can finally fully dedicate himself to woodworking.
“I have plans to do my own cedar strip kayak,” he says. “It’s very nice to be able to go on out to my shop in the mornings. A lot of people say when they have hobbies after retirement: ‘I have no one tell me what to do except me.’ ”
