Lessons From Taking My Four-Year-Old to the Lumber Yard

Last Saturday, my youngest, who is mighty in every way a four-year-old can be, climbed into my truck for a trip I'd been looking forward to for a long time: her first visit to Bohnhoff, my lumber yard. Her big sister made that same trip a couple of years ago, and I'd been waiting for our littlest to have her turn. What I didn't expect was how much I'd have riding on it that had nothing to do with lumber at all.

Four Generations of Building Someone Else's Dreams

Here's something I think about more than I probably let on: I come from a line of paper pushers. My father, his father, and his father before him all spent their careers building other people's dreams for a fee. I did too, for a long time, just in a different industry. I chose television instead of whatever came before it, but the same posture nonetheless. Meetings. Emails. Phone calls that fell into the abyss of middle management. A career, not a calling.

What I do now isn't a new path in the grand scheme of things. People have been building furniture with their hands for as long as people have needed places to rest their laurels. But it's a massive divergence from my own stock. And more than almost anything else, I want my girls to know me in this chapter. Not the version of their dad who was constantly trying to keep his head above water in someone else's org chart, but the one who chose to forge something of his own. Saturday was a small piece of that, because it was a chance to show her, not just tell her.

The Fear Before the Gate

Let me take a moment to be honest about the part right before the good part. A lumber yard on a Saturday is not the same lumber yard I usually bring my truck to. Their normal lot was closed for the weekend, so getting in meant navigating a street that mostly sees freight trucks. Once inside, there are forklifts moving huge stacks of lumber with blind spots you really don't want a small child anywhere near. She is mighty. She is also still our baby girl. I had spent days prepping her on listening and staying close to me, and as we pulled in, I genuinely didn't know if that prep would hold. I know myself well enough to know that at her age I would have tried to find at least 1000 things to mess with that could have killed me.

Then the Fear Vanished

Thankfully, it held. She stayed as aware of me as I was of her, and once we were actually inside, I was standing in one of my favorite places in town with my daughter next to me instead of home in front of the television. It's a family-owned yard, and the moment they saw her, someone brought over a little chair for her to sit in. One of the family members who works there dug up some wooden toys, and she fell hard for a wooden duck on wheels (its feet waddle like the real thing).

The part that got me most was watching the hunch I'd had about her play out in real time. She's the one who always wants to be in the shop with me, who mimics what I do without being asked. At the yard, she was genuinely curious and in no time at all was asking me, and pretty much anyone else standing nearby, what kind of wood I was looking at and what I'd use it for. At one point she borrowed my tape measure and started trying to measure boards herself. That's a moment I'll hold onto for a long time, because I wasn’t just showing her how something works, we did it together, in the real world, with the actual tool in her actual hands. She helped me pick out and load our lumber, and on the way out, they let her keep the duck.

The Ride Home

The handle on that duck, it turns out, is the exact right length to reach from a car seat to the back of my head. So I got bopped the whole ride home. You take the good with the bad. It was still tied with the other best day I've had at the yard (when I took her older sister for the first time).

If there's one thing I keep coming back to in this work, it's this: I don't just want to build furniture that gives families a place to slow down. I want to be present enough in my own to actually use it. Saturday was a good reminder that I'm getting there.

I'd love to hear from you. Is there a place your parent brought you as a kid that ended up shaping who you became? Or a skill you learned by doing it alongside them, rather than just being told how? Tell me about it.