Mike "Chip" Bordwell's Shop

Mike "Chip" Bordwell

As I've mentioned before once Mike left Krauss furniture to be self employed he worked in various places At first it was the attic of the house my parents were renting.  Laying in bed at night I could hear his footsteps above my head as he shuffled to different positions while carving.  Then it was moved to the basement.  Mainly the move was due to convenience since the basement had a door through a cellar entrance.  No more carrying lumber through the house and up the attic stairs.  As you can imagine being self employed meant a lot of long hours which meant a lot of work, this meant a lot of noise from power tools into the wee hours of the morning.  Often I fell asleep to the sound of a band saw or some other equipment, you actually get use to it after awhile.

Eventually this all became too much.  Mike need more space and the noise and dust was getting intense.  Reluctantly he moved to a building on the farm of his in-laws.  The building was a hog house that was no longer being used.  So we set to work cleaning it out and insulating it.  It was a long process but Mike finally had a space he could call a shop even if it was under the watchful eye of his wife's parents.  It was still a livestock building however and although it was now insulated  the winter winds would howl through it causing the sliding doors to rattle on their tracks.  Some corners of the shop even collected snow at times but again he struggled through cranking out enough carvings to get by and feed his growing family of two kids and another on the way.

Through a family member an opportunity arose. They wanted to sell a small house and building in the tiny town of Irving Iowa.  When I say tiny I mean it, the total population was about 100.  Of course this hardly qualifies as a town and the state of Iowa indeed only saw it as a rural area.  It did however have a few places left from it's booming days and one of them was a large dance hall.  This was the building to become Mike's final shop.

Chip displaying something off camera.

We moved in the house was across the street from the shop.  It was a small building with basically four rooms and a bathroom and was once a church, and before that it was the town's school.  Mike and his wife Pat raised 5 children from this house that was only heated by a wood stove.  The huge shop with 12 ft ceilings was also was also wood only heat and difficult to keep warm.  So we chopped a lot of wood.  Dad would say, "Cutting wood heats you twice. Once when you cut it and once when you burn it." I reluctantly agreed."

The dance hall had everything you'd expect an early 1900's dance hall to have, a huge dance floor, a stage, and even an attached outhouse.  I was sent under the stage to pull out whatever was left from centuries of partying.  It was filled with old cork booze bottles and huge chunks of coal that I fished out like a child miner. Mike walled off the stage and it became the room to hold the duplicating machine.  Mother and I spent a lot of time on that machine roughing out blanks of dad's projects.  Mike also created a spray room for varnishing and a carving/showroom with a glass window looking out onto the shop.  Inside the office hung a sign I still quote to this day, "It's only good if it's made of wood."

Patricia Bordwell varnishing.

Even with 5 kids his wife Pat was not free from pitching in. She often got the task of sanding which if you ask me is the worse part of woodworking.  But really she was there to help with anything to get that order out.  Often they were both there late when the final hours of a deadline came.

The attic of the shop was for drying wood stock.  Whenever Mike got in a load of lumber we would need to fish the long board up through a tiny attic hole and rick it in stacks so the hot air could move around it.  This place scared the crap out of me.  Not that it was a creepy attic but that there was hundreds and hundreds of pounds of weight up there and as you walked it would bounce.  I was terrified it would give and everything would go crashing down 12 feet into wood shop machinery.  But it never happened.

Over time Mike even installed a dust system that would suck all the dust and wood shavings away from the machines and into a small room.  I personally loved this because even though you had to clean the room out every so often the shop needed sweeping much less than it used to and sweeping was often a job for the kids.

Mike named the shop Country Customs although I don't remember him using the name much.  It was a place where you never really knew who was going to walk through the door and simply amazing artistic work went out the door.  Some days he would even lock the doors so he could avoid visitors get work done.  After Mike's passing the building fell into disrepair, the equipment was sold to cover debts and it's just not there anymore.  It's pretty hard for me to imagine it's gone and I very often swell with guilt that I wasn't there to carry it on into this generation.  Looking back it was a magical place of creation.