Thread: 40% wish they could be a carpenter

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

..... and I'm very quick to make the distinction between the two trades. It's like calling a surgeon a doctor.

You are a doctor first before you become a surgeon.

Originally Posted by Gabriel

...But I guess whenever I meet an electrician I assume they're like Scrooge and dive into vast pools of cash every night ........

Oh so misguided, it's when you meet a plumber.

I can relate to absolutely EVERY thought expressed here!!

Grew up in a household where money was tight and so DIY or Fixit was the order of the day.

Built my own house on the farm and did all the work except electrical and plumbing. Should have done
the latter as the job done was bloody hopeless.

Did all the work to install the drip feed irrigation on the farm, including designing the system.

Rebuilt several pieces of machinery with some help from manuals. Learned to weld.

All the skills and info acquired along the way have come in handy over the years BUT I really wanted to be a fine woodworker.
Just never seemed to get the time to acquire the really high level of hand skills needed to be anything other than frustrated
with my efforts.

Sigh!

To earn those vast pools of cash Plumbers regularly dive in large pools of .
The moulders at a foundry I worked at really knew how to get pattern makers going.
They called them carpenters.
H.

An exgirlfriend's father was a pattern maker. I told him I was a chippie to.
Hence the ex.

Originally Posted by BobL

I like the way they are envious of the skills, but don't recognise this it being prepared to pay for the skills of others do it.
Plumbers and sparkies are somewhat protected by legalities and given some of the DIY solutions I've seen I can fully understand why
Woodworking wise it's even harder, I get asked often to make stuff but my stock reply is usually "I cannot even buy the materials for what a functionally similar Ikea piece sells the product for."

I also think alot of people believe wood working isn't that difficult, probably doesn't help that most people in Aus have had some kind of wood working training either through highschool or watching their parents do something with wood. So the mentality of if my old man can do it surely its not that difficult.

Plus then there is the notion of the unknown, electrical and plumbing are often hidden and out of the way and often times when they go wrong its at an inconvenient time which gives it ever more reason to not DIY (amoung the legal issues). Plus i'm sure all the horror stories of people being killed or not having hot water or worse makes it difficult for people to want to DIY these tasks.

Whilst with wood working there is the mentality that the worse that could happen is you've just wasted a bunch of now junk timber.

Obviously all this degrades the skills a carpenter has and thus the unwillingless to pay for such a skillset

Originally Posted by Xanthorrhoeas

What I find odd, Evan, is that you equate carpentry to what we do (or in my case try to do) ... fine woodwork is nothing like carpentry in my opinion. I'm sure that the general populace value fine woodwork even lower than carpentry (yes, them's fighting words I know, but they are sadly uninformed). I look at carpentry and think "I can't be bothered" but, give me some superbly figured timber and Im thinking ... cabinet ... fine box ... woodturning ... how can I make the most of that superb figure?

Having a deck I built collapse under me would be a nightmare, I am, after all, a perfectionist, but fortunately, unlikely to happen because I am happy to pay a carpenter to build it while I play with fine woodwork.

Are you telling me that carpentry is not fine woodwork [emoji16]

DaveTTC
The Turning Cowboy
Turning Wood Into Art

Maybe on a tangent here, but if circumstances were different, i'd drop everything and go into a trade (carpentry preferably).

Unfortunately, with the wages apprentices are understandably paid (even the ever so slightly higher mature aged wage) its not a financial possibility. Im in my 30s with a young family and a mortgage. I'm the primary earner in the house so i'd have to knock 2 thirds to 3 quarters off my salary to do it (bye bye house, bye bye small luxuries like.... food). My old man was a chippy and always told us kids to stay away from trades and go to uni (didn't go to uni but i work a desk job)... Now i have the worst of both worlds really... i work a job I dislike (I'm good at it, but don't enjoy it in the slightest, it just pays the bills), and i'm also time poor so don't get to play with timber much...

Oh to be 16 or 17 again knowing what i know now... I've always loved working with my hands and building things.... I envy those that do it every day and earn a living from it...

Originally Posted by tonzeyd

I also think alot of people believe wood working isn't that difficult, probably doesn't help that most people in Aus have had some kind of wood working training either through highschool or watching their parents do something with wood. So the mentality of if my old man can do it surely its not that difficult. Whilst with wood working there is the mentality that the worse that could happen is you've just wasted a bunch of now junk timber.
Obviously all this degrades the skills a carpenter has and thus the unwillingless to pay for such a skillset

A lot of the thought of the public's thinking it's easy, comes from Lounge Room Carpenters, shows like the Block, Better Homes and Gardens etc.
It looks simple on the screen, they start a project, at the end of the hour, the jobs done, what could be simpler, never mind the thought, planning, procurement, that's gone into it. As all Council/Shires have different rulings on certain jobs, the program doesn't explain that over a certain size, approval must be gotten, a balcony, must be approved by an engineer. etc, etc.
They see this as a small job, and could be tackled by anyone, they don't see the man power behind the scenes that do most of the work.
My father built our house and a Holiday shack next door, that he rented out, doing it all himself electrics, plumbing the lot. How he got away with it I do not know, as I don't remember a sparky coming to do any of it??? He was asked by a council member to submit a plan, his comment was "I don't know how it's going to finish up yet????" This was back in the '60's.
Kryn

Originally Posted by KBs PensNmore

They see this as a small job, and could be tackled by anyone, they don't see the man power behind the scenes that do most of the work.

... And they don't allow for the fact that the manpower is a group of professionals that do that sort of work all the time.

Everything looks easy when a skilled professional worker does it.

An interesting take on DIY in the USA. Wonder if it will happen here?
From the WSJ.
As Wall Street analysts celebrate the coming of age of the millennial generation, a group of young people who were supposed to lead another revolutionary wave of consumerism if only they could work long enough to escape their parents' basement, retailers like Home Depot are panicked about selling into what will soon be America's largest demographic ... but not for the reasons you might think.While avocado resellers like Whole Foods only have to worry about creating a catchy advertising campaign to attract millennials, Home Depot is in full-on panic mode after realizing that an entire generation of Americans have absolutely no clue how to use their products. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the company has been forced to spend millions to create video tutorials and host in-store classes on how to do everything from using a tape measure to mopping a floor and hammering a nail.Home Depot's VP of marketing admits she was originally hesitant because she thought some of their videos might be a bit too "condescending" but she quickly learned they were very necessary for our pampered millennials.

Originally Posted by lesmeyer

An interesting take on DIY in the USA. Wonder if it will happen here?
From the WSJ.
As Wall Street analysts celebrate the coming of age of the millennial generation, a group of young people who were supposed to lead another revolutionary wave of consumerism if only they could work long enough to escape their parents' basement, retailers like Home Depot are panicked about selling into what will soon be America's largest demographic ... but not for the reasons you might think.While avocado resellers like Whole Foods only have to worry about creating a catchy advertising campaign to attract millennials, Home Depot is in full-on panic mode after realizing that an entire generation of Americans have absolutely no clue how to use their products. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the company has been forced to spend millions to create video tutorials and host in-store classes on how to do everything from using a tape measure to mopping a floor and hammering a nail.Home Depot's VP of marketing admits she was originally hesitant because she thought some of their videos might be a bit too "condescending" but she quickly learned they were very necessary for our pampered millennials.

Unfortunately we are moving into the age of educated idiots.
I was recently called to a unit because the tenants couldn't keep the door of there build in wardrobe shut.
I removed the cloths that were stuffed into wardrobe to the nearby bed.
And closed the door!!
And charged them my call out fee.
Explaining it would be wrong to charge the landlord.
They were not happy about that, and I didn't care
They paid
No materials needed !!!

Cheers Matt

Originally Posted by Lappa

I think if I had my time over, I’d be an electrician.

Sparky (instrument fitter) by trade here, now software engineer and part time elec engineer. I still do design electronics, but pretty rare these days.

Next year I am hoping to land some sort of job as a carpenter, preferably an adult apprenticeship. Here is the problem though, my company makes me good money and for the best part most of the time all I have to do is go on call,2 weeks on, 4 off. Not willing to give that up, so I am trying to chase up a builder that will put me on part time as an apprentice, and I dont even want to get paid, just want to learn the trade. Just not sure how legal it is to be an apprentice and not get paid. I already have some skills, have all the tools (probably more than most chippies), and have the right attitude. What do you reckon my chances are as a 40 year old? Probably nil.

It's funny how the grass is alway greener.
The son of a friend of ours was a medical science graduate but after a couple of years gave it up to be a sparky, while an ex-next door neighbour was a sparky and gave that up to got to uni and become a tax accountant now runs a retail franchise?

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronomer. 20 odd years later I was working on a NASA funded project as a cosmochemist in a research labs at the University of California in San Diego. Our labs were part of something called Calspace with thousands of scientists/engineers/computing and technical people across many locations. Sally Ride (first US female Astronaut) was the director. Up the hill from our labs was the 7 storey main Cal space building a full of astronomers and I got to know some of them and used to visit their building from where they has access to telescopes all over the word. They had a dazzling weekly seminar program that I used to attend occasionally, and remember one time there were 4 Nobel prize winners in the front row of seats. Turns out most of the younger astronomers just stared at computer screens all day or night. Very few of them ever got to visit telescopes or directly look into a telescope, just set the computer program to collect images or data and process it etc. It quickly burst my bubble about the whole astro thing and I was glad I was doing something more hands on.

Lot of people get the carpenter/cabinetmaker/woodworker thing confused for sure but its pretty easy to tell them apart:

A carpenter drives a ute with a trailer behind it full of tools that he can take to the next job whether its the next street over or the other side of the country. A cabinetmaker owns a commercial grade tablesaw thats worth more then all the chippies tools put together and a planer, and a thicknesser, drumsander, edgebander, dust extractor, and then he needs a place to put it.
A woodworker owns all the cabinetmakers tools with none of his income.

Seriously, the cost of equipment required to practice ones trade is something I encourage anyone thinking about an apprenticeship to consider, and off the top of my head there would be few trades requiring so much investment in machinery to be competitive as cabinetmaking.