Home - Garden
Ben Napier Shares His Favorite Hometown Woodworking DIYs & Tricks
By RON BAKER
The woodworking Ben Napier creates in his workshop are often the emotional and historical glue that pulls HGTV’s "Home Town" renovations together. Here are a few of his favorites.
Dining Table
In Season 2, Episode 7, Napier used the homeowners’ reclaimed wood, specifically a long cypress board, pine flooring, and a few big Douglas fir blocks, to make a table.
The rustic table featured the cypress board down the middle, framed with the pine flooring along the sides and breadboard ends. The legs were simple posts cut from the fir blocks.
Buffet
After demolishing an old glassed-in porch in Season 2, Episode 4, Napier salvaged the windows and the beautiful grain of their old-growth pine trim and framing.
He built a 36-inch-tall buffet by shortening four wavy-glass windows to make two sets of doors with shelving in the middle — a perfect expression of his woodworking philosophy.
Coffee Table
Since Napier wanted to match his wife Erin’s light, neutral palette in the living room featured in Season 2, Episode 5, he constructed an upholstered coffee table.
While this coffee table doesn’t have a wood top, he was very particular about turning the legs on his new lathe. Erin finished it with fabric on top that ties the room together.
Tip
In a video called "Talkin' Shop: Ben's Best Builds," he explained how to make matching designs by transferring the model’s shape to the turned piece using small pencil marks.
The marks indicated the location of each shape change. Then, with the lathe spinning, he held the pencil against the workpiece so the reference marks encircled the new piece.