Nick Offerman’s Guide to Building Things That Last

NICK: I remember when I got cast as the bad guy in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, I got a small but nice chunk of change and I thought, “Oh, instead of spending this on an indiscretion or an indulgence, I’m going to buy a really nice bandsaw.”

CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.

CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.

ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin, and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.

ROSIE: Hi, guys.

CHRISTINE: Hey there.

CAIRA: Hi.

ROSIE: One thing I’ve learned about the Wirecutter team is, beyond their passion for talking about gear that hopefully will help folks live better, great chef’s knife, a sewing machine, maybe the right pen for journaling, is an inner light and excitement when that sentiment is shared by someone else in the world, particularly someone famous. In this case, I am referencing tools specifically.

CHRISTINE: Absolutely. It’s funny. It’s few and far between that there’s actually someone famous who really geeks out to the level that people at Wirecutter will geek out on different products. But about six years ago, Nick Offerman, who is famous actor. If you haven’t watched Parks and Recreation, go back and familiarize yourself with Ron Swanson. He tweeted about this Estwing hammer that he really loves, and he pointed to our hammer review, which was written by Doug Mahoney, who has been on the show before, and since then, tons of people at Wirecutter have been like, “It’d be so great to have him on the site. It would be so great to get him involved with a review. Can we get him to test hammers for us?” It’s been on our bucket list to be able to talk to him.

CAIRA: And the thing is, Ron Swanson, the character, is really big on woodworking, but I didn’t even know that Nick Offerman, the man, he’s actually been a professional woodworker for decades. He started Offerman Woodshop, his own shop, over 20 years ago before he even made it big in Hollywood. He also wrote a bunch of books, and he’s got a new one out called Little Woodchucks, which is so cute. It’s a woodworking guide for kids, but really it’s more of a love letter to anyone who wants to slow down, get their hands dirty, and learn how to build something real. This book has everything from beginner projects like carving little creatures with a whittling knife to even more ambitious builds.

CHRISTINE: We had a blast talking with Nick. He’s just as funny as you’d expect. This conversation is different from our normal episodes. We do talk about Nick’s favorite tools and gear. But we also delve into headier territory. We talk about why woodworking continues to be one of his enduring passions… what he gets out of it… and why he thinks everyone should slow down and start making things by hand.

ROSIE: It’s a great conversation. Also, this episode has some adult humor in it. So take care when listening with kids. We’ll be right back.

CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Nick Offerman, who you probably know as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation. He’s not only an accomplished actor though. He’s a skilled woodworker who’s founded his own woodworking collective in LA and it’s called Offerman Woodshop. He’s also a published author of now six incredible books, his latest being Little Woodchucks, which released on October 14th.

CHRISTINE: Nick, welcome to the show.

NICK: Thank you. Thank you for that generous introduction.

CHRISTINE: Nick, you might be interested to know that the staff at Wirecutter is pretty obsessed with you and has been for some time, because we know that you’re into tools, that you’re a woodworker, and so I think a lot of people have been curious about just the fact that you’re such a big celebrity, but, also, you’ve got this life moonlighting as a woodworker. What got you into woodworking in the first place? Was this something that you did as a kid? Is it something that you picked up as an adult? How did it start?

NICK: Well, thank you. There are some compliments in there. I appreciate it. It’s funny, to hear you describe your crowd here, this book is exactly for you all, because when I was a kid, my mom and dad brought up me and my three siblings in a farmhouse that my dad got for free and rolled down the road and set it down on a basement that he poured. And it was Little House on the Prairie for real. We made so much stuff. Mom made clothes. She and Dad both come from farm families a few miles in either direction. I grew up surrounded by family members who make things of all sorts, and the farmers, they have to be amazing mechanics and carpenters and painters and cooks and tailors and cobblers and you name it because everything has to be incredibly frugal to survive year in and year out.

And so, growing up, it was just part of my hero worship of adults, like when I grow up, when I come into my manhood, it means I’ll be able to back a wagon of corn into the crib and it means I’ll be able to hammer a nail in one blow, I’ll be able to use the chainsaw, and so forth. And so I just always had a fascination with tools, with the implements that we clever monkeys have come up with to affect change on the raw materials of life to make our lives better. And my dad was an amateur furniture maker, he made some really cool pieces of furniture, and so all of those influences combined so that, when I was strong enough as a teenager to get a labor job, I was drawn to framing houses, to swinging a hammer.

And so at age, I think, 15 or 16, I got my first job framing houses for these brothers in town, and to just suddenly be paid a man’s wage for climbing a ladder, having an adventure up on a third story roof, cutting rafters and hammering into place, just felt super heroic. And so I just always loved making some of my livelihood with tools, even though then I went to theater school. I wanted to become an actor. While I was there, there was this guy named Ken Egan running this beautiful scene shop at this facility at the University of Illinois called the Krannert Center, and this guy hired me to work in the scene shop, and so that was my first shop.

Suddenly, my mind exploded, where I learned what these big wood-shaping machines were, a planer and a joiner and a dust collection system, and how to run a great wood shop. And so even as I became a young adult, as a theater actor, that was my origin story as a woodworker, where I was like, “I can shape things with wood tools. I will thrive.”

CHRISTINE: Well, I want to know, the new book is called Little Woodchucks, and it’s really about projects to do with kids. In the intro to the book, you talk a lot about how important it is to know how to make things with your hands, and I can identify with this. I sew a lot of my own clothing, I taught my kids how to sew, I think it’s important, but it’s also a lot of work, and sometimes I’m like, “I could just go buy something for a fraction of the price and the time involved with this.” What is the argument today, in 2025, to make things with your hands, to spend the time and effort and all of that, and sometimes it’s expensive to get into making things by hand, what’s the argument?

NICK: Well, we’re going to go all the way back to soil health. Things are about to get real sexy. I agree with you, and in the intro to my last book called Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, I talk about our relationship with nature, and all my alarms start going off as I’m writing because this is not good television, this is not sexy, everybody’s going to sleep, because that’s what consumerism does so effectively is it says to you, “Why don’t you just buy what you need from the corporations and then sit on your couch and enjoy our diversions while our robots service your wife for you?” And I personally would like to take care of some of those responsibilities myself. I feel like it’s our duty as citizens to maintain, no pun intended, to keep a hand in to the construction and maintenance of our civilization.

There’s the responsibility side of it, but I also think it’s just really fun. If we were in Little House on the Prairie, they had a lot of fun. If you got a deck of cards and a sewing machine and a hammer, you can have a really good time. I feel like that’s part of the answer to that question of, if we all just say, “Why don’t we just order it off your phone?”, we’ll throw our planet in the garbage. That’s what makes me so happy to hear when people love tools. It’s becoming really rare that people know what a tool is.

ROSIE: It was important for us making this show. A lot of the conversations we end up having are about things that are built to last, what are the things that you can invest in that will last, if not a lifetime, than decades?

NICK: Oh, absolutely. Especially when you’re starting out as a woodworker, good tools are expensive, and so naturally there are all kinds of labor-saving devices and gadgets and cheap versions of things that, at first, seem like a great idea, and then, when it breaks, or breaks your heart, time after time, you finally say, “Okay, you get what you pay for, and these good, beautiful hand planes or chisels or what-have-you, or machines, are worth the money.” And incredibly, when I’m outfitting a shop, I do my damnedest, I work really hard to find machines from the ’60s and ’70s that require absolutely no maintenance or refurbishment that are 10 times better than what you can get today because things are being made for the company’s profitability rather than your use.

CHRISTINE: This book that you just came out with is about projects for kids, and I’ve noticed that with my own kids. There’s this thing that happens where they’re not on a screen, they’re in front of the sewing machine, they’re having to push through and figure out how to make this thing, and it does push them to be more patient. Working on this book, did you find that process was happening with these kids at all? Were you making these projects with the kids and they were having to push through and get past their own impatience with themselves?

NICK: For sure, and it’s really interesting to see kids today, kids that are growing up with the technology they have, versus the kids I’ve known in other generations. And thankfully, I’m really relieved to see these cool kids that agreed to come be in our book. You can see their distraction, but then you would see them click in. I would work with them to whatever operation we were doing to get them to feel the correct use of the tool, and that’s a big moment, just teaching them the difference between driving a screw with a drill horizontally versus getting your weight up on top of it and feeling how much more effective that is.

If you read the whole book, it’s a not so veiled screed, not just for the kids, it’s for the parents too. I write it with a great sense of humor so that, hopefully, people will be engaged to read it out loud to their kids. I’m hoping to awaken this in everybody, because I think there are a lot of big woodchucks as well these days who also never use tools, and so it’s a lot more fun and a lot easier to do it together.

CAIRA: I had a question because it still surprises me, and I know you wrote this in your book, you will still make mistakes, you, Nick Offerman, who’s been doing this for years, and that’s both inspiring and a little bit intimidating, I think, to a lot of people, myself included. I’m not handy. I can’t build anything. I was wondering if you have any advice for people like me who aren’t that patient, but they want to learn and they want to experience that joy of creating something by hand?

NICK: Well, yeah, I think it’s a great life lesson, because I learned early on in everything I do that if I make clumsiness part of my brand, then when I fall on my face, they laugh and they give me money and I say, “That’s what I do.”

CAIRA: Yeah, mission accomplished.

NICK: “I hope you enjoyed that.” But, with woodworking, it’s a great example. One of the fun things about making a table or anything in the shop is it’s a puzzle, it’s solving a series of problems, and understanding that you have to lay those problems out in the right order. You can’t cut this before you cut this. If you look through the steps of one of the projects in my book, I think it’s easy to understand, if you don’t maintain focus, it’s just easy to make brain fart, simple errors, but I love it. I rarely get mad at myself or at my family because I understand, if somebody makes a mistake, I’m like, “Sure, that’s what we do. We’re humans. We’re built to make mistakes. No one ever does anything perfectly on the first try,” and so I make less mistakes the older I get, knock on wood, to a certain point, I guess. Then it starts going back the other direction.

ROSIE: My wife’s uncle was a luthier, he made guitars, and he made her a guitar. And she was talking to me about how he would take the wood options and lay his hands on them and knock them and ask her to sing so that he could match wood tone with-

NICK: Wow.

ROSIE: … the tone and timbre of her voice, and it struck me as this really spiritual practice. And so I guess I’m wondering, for you, religion is personal, but is there a spiritual or meditative aspect to the way that you work with wood and the way that you work with your hands?

NICK: Oh, absolutely. One of our heroes of the field, George Nakashima … look it up, it’s gorgeous work. His daughter Mira is still running it, they’re still cranking out Nakashima pieces, and he has a wonderful book called The Soul of a Tree. And he and James Krenov, who has a school, they both are two of the spiritual hearts of woodworking. And there is that elfin sensibility of, if you’re making a guitar or a dining room table, you meet your clients, and you’re making the board on which they’re going to have their family dinners, hopefully, for generations. And so that is holy. That really feels like a wonderful and touching responsibility.

In The Soul of a Tree, George talks about the wood will tell you what it wants to be or how thick or thin. You’re trying to strive for this meditative sensibility. Sometimes there are noisy tools, sometimes things are violent or you’re bashing things, but then there are moments where you’re planing wood or shaving it or finishing it where you can have music playing or the tools in themselves are making a kind of music, where it is quite spiritual. There’s a passage Wendell Berry writes, and I think it’s in his novel, The Memory of Old Jack, where he talks about you used to get to town only at the speed of walking, or the fastest would be the speed of a horse, and so you maintained a knowledge of the health of your neighborhood. You saw the creek, you saw your neighbor’s houses, and you had time to say, “Oh, look, looks like they painted the barn,” or, “They’re taking good care of their sunflowers,” or the opposite, “Looks like Bob might be drinking again.”

The faster we go in our society, the less we are able to pay attention, and so the less we communicate with our community to say, “My laundry is well hung. Bob was successfully on the wagon,” and so forth. And so, in the shop, we try to honor that, and it’s a fine line because I’m not going for the greatest profitability. I do my best to have my shop break even, that’s my goal every year, but that allows everybody to work at the pace of a horse or walking, and I think that enjoyment goes into the beauty of the pieces that we make.

ROSIE: I was talking to a friend last night, I was telling her that you were going to be here today, and she immediately said, “Oh, I have his coasters,” and she was very excited, but it made me wonder about the actual place you do your work. Are you working on personal projects at the Offerman Woodshop or do you have a dedicated space in your home, and if so, can you give us a visual, walk us through?

NICK: Sure. I’m not allowed to make sawdust where I share a marriage bed with Megan Mullally. She’s going to hear this. I’m going to get in trouble for insinuating that we’ve made love. I have a shop across town on the east side of LA and I’m wonderfully spoiled. I used to have to make a lot of dining tables to make my rent, and now the shop, I’ve got such great woodworkers there that I’m able to … I remember when I got cast as the bad guy in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. I got a small but nice chunk of change, and I thought, “Oh, instead of spending this on an indiscretion or an indulgence, I’m going to buy a really nice bandsaw from the Laguna bandsaw folks.” And so that started a habit where every time I would get a nice acting job, I would buy a new machine. And so now I have a space up in a loft where daddy can just keep his mess.

ROSIE: That’s the pull quote.
I like the idea, though, of a wood shop full of beautiful things that are expensive and a metaphor for your career success.
That’s special.

NICK: I guess so, yeah. It’s weird. I never could have imagined how much my tool use would lend succor to my dreams of a life of artistry, to the point where they even made Ron a woodworker because of my shop, and we shot a few episodes in my shop. Ron’s shop is shot at Offerman Woodshop.

CHRISTINE: No way.

ROSIE: Yeah, that’s awesome.

NICK: And his canoes are my canoes that I built. There are a few things that Ron builds in the show that are comedy woodworking, like he builds an Irish harp overnight. And by the time we got into later episodes, there’s one where I either build a crib for Chris Traeger or we build it together or something.

ROSIE: Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

NICK: And it was like I became unavailable, where they were like, “We need a crib by Tuesday,” and I was like, “I have to learn my lives. I can’t …”

CHRISTINE: Do you find that your woodworking, your acting, and your writing feed each other? It sounds like, in that example, the woodworking kind of fed your acting in some ways and vice versa.

NICK: I think so. I think that it’s more just on a disciplinary level. They all feed into each other. The work and planning and forethought that I put into something in the wood shop gives me patience and the wherewithal to also like, right, I should sharpen things for my acting job or my tour as a humorist, and I should also understand that I’m going to make some mistakes. And all of these lessons, and I get them from my mom and dad and from Wendell Berry and also Zen koans, like the way of the art is the way of the Buddha, which will always move me, and to always maintain the attitude of a student. That all means we all have a gift within us. It’s our responsibility to figure out what that is, and then that’s how we make our life fulfilling is by performing that service for others. For me, it’s making stuff out of wood, or making funny faces as I fall down.

ROSIE: Well, we’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll chat with Nick about his favorite tools of all time. Be right back.

CAIRA: Welcome back. Nick, this is The Wirecutter Show. We have to talk about the tools that you use. Hypothetically, let’s say someone really wants to get into tools, but they don’t even know where to start. At Wirecutter, we rarely recommend pre-made tool kits where you can just buy them basically off the rack at Home Depot or whatever. We were wondering what five tools you would recommend or arrange in your own personal bag for a newbie.

NICK: And is this just for someone’s household first five tools?

CHRISTINE: Let’s start there, yeah.

NICK: First and foremost, these days I go for a nice cordless drill.

ROSIE: She’s laughing because I very, very intentionally went out and bought a drill so that I could be a bit more self-sufficient, and I was suckered into buying a corded drill because the person at the store told me that that was the one to get. And I assumed that was the right thing and I’ve been dragged ever since.

NICK: Well, I will not shame you.

ROSIE: Thank you, Nick.

NICK: You can get a lot done with a corded drill, especially if you have an extension cord.

CHRISTINE: Yeah, or you’re just close to the plug, right?

NICK: That’s right.

ROSIE: It’s absurd.

CAIRA: It just cracks me up thinking that you have to plug it in to do anything in your house.

ROSIE: It’s absurd.

NICK: It’s funny to me that you think that’s funny, where I’m like, “Well, of course. That’s how we did it for a really long time.”

CAIRA: I know. It just seems like she could get a cordless drill.

NICK: No, I get it, I get it. To make a phone call, you used to have to move your body to a place where a phone was on a wall.

CAIRA: That’s before my time, Nick.

NICK: And then you had to stay there the whole time.

CAIRA: Can’t imagine.

NICK: Yeah, you couldn’t leave the phone. But they’re incredible because, especially nowadays, you can get a kit with all the different bits and a nice set of drill bits, so you can get a lot done with those. That’s one. Number two is I also would get a nice manual screwdriver with interchangeable bits, because there are a lot of applications that a drill doesn’t fit into or that a drill is maybe too much for. Number three is a nice socket set.

CAIRA: What’s that?

NICK: It’s a set of little cylinders that fit on nuts and bolts, hexagonal nuts and bolts. And it comes with a ratchet, so …

CAIRA: Got it.

NICK: That in combination with a wrench set or a crescent wrench, that’s an adjustable wrench, that equips you to put together and take apart all nuts and bolts that are in the hexagonal family, which used to be the only game in town. Nowadays, they have all kinds of different fasteners. That complicates things, where if you have to have more than two or three kinds of screw tip, especially if you’re taking things apart and you have to figure out what tip they used. They have square tips and Phillips tips.

CAIRA: This is comparable to when iPhone kept changing the charging ports on everything, and now we’re all going back to universal, and we could have just done that forever ago.

NICK: Yeah. I don’t like that about capitalism, even that the nations are allowed to go imperial or metric. I’m like, “Come on, guys, we’re sharing this planet.”

ROSIE: Can’t we all just get along? Yeah.

CAIRA: Okay, what are we on three or four?

NICK: Well, the socket set is three, and I’m going to say a set of wrenches, and that includes your box end, your open end, and I’m going to include a crescent wrench in that as a set of wrenches.

CHRISTINE: I think you’re cheating. You’re including sets.

NICK: I don’t call it cheating. You got to have a hammer, you have to have a persuader, and then a saw, but I’ve gone over five.

CHRISTINE: You like an Estwing, is that what you like?

NICK: I do. In my day, Estwing really just nailed … they were the Nike of the available hammer brands. They feel great. They look great.

CHRISTINE: Is there something in your workshop that is an unsung hero? It’s not the obvious tool, it’s not the thing that everybody has in their toolbox, but it’s something that you think deserves more attention than it gets.

NICK: The thing that springs to mind is there’s a company in Maine called Lie Nielsen Hand Planes. They make hand planes and chisels and a few other implements of fine woodworking. Their tools are just exquisite. There’s a little hand plane that’s all in brass that fits neatly into your apron pocket. That’s what springs to mind is, invariably … and my co-author of this book, Lee, who ran my shop for 10 years, we were just talking about how it’s like your dependable Swiss Army knife, where there are so many other shavings or adjustments that you want to make to a piece, but you’ve always got that little Lie Nielsen plane.

CHRISTINE: Nick, you don’t have kids, but you collaborated with Lee Buchanan, who is the co-author of this book. I want to hear about how you went about deciding on the projects and what did you learn from Lee as you were creating this book?

NICK: When Parks and Rec looked like it was going to go, I thought, “I think my life is going to change. I think if this is anything like it seems, I’m going to have a lot less time in the shop, and so I either need to lock up the shop or get somebody working here under the auspices of Offerman Woodshop.”

And a mutual friend of ours I was working with, and he said, “I just did an install and this woman named Lee outworked, the other three guys. I just met her and you should meet her. She’s pretty special.” I had her in for a meeting. Everything about her was so wonderful. Together, we built this family over the years. We ended up doing a woodworking book for adults and everybody called Good Clean Fun. And it’s been so much fun to get to collaborate with her again. When we’re together, we come up with all of the ideas for what the projects will be. Some of them were no-brainers, and some of them we workshopped where we were like, “Okay, what bench design, what sawhorse design, what materials?” We workshopped a few different connectors for the box kite, for example. And Lee’s just so great. Whether she was running my shop or doing this from afar, working in her shop in Berkeley, she’s just amazing.

CHRISTINE: How did you decide what would be appropriate for kids? Were you really leaning on Lee to be like, “Hey, you’ve got some kids, is this appropriate?” or were you testing it out with kids in the shop?

NICK: It had mainly to do with what you could make satisfyingly with hand tools. We were trying to limit most of the projects to not needing power tools. There aren’t a lot of projects that are meant to send your kids off, like “Go out in the garage and whip up a couple sawhorses.” They’re generally meant to have adult supervision, just because in the wood shop, just like in the kitchen, there are implements that are sharp that you can really hurt yourself with. And so no matter what age we are, when anybody comes into my shop, I’m like, “Okay, always a lot of grab ass here, and we love having fun, but number one is straight up safety first. That will kill you. That’ll chop your hand off.” We wear hearing protection and protect our eyes, we protect our lungs, and we’re dead serious. If somebody is using a tool, pretend that they’re backing a bulldozer toward you, just give them respect.

And so, with kids as well, we just went through each project idea, and there were all kinds of different toys and games and fun things. And maybe the most benign thing I can think of in the book, there are two sets of tongs that we make. One of them are these, we call them, toast tongs. And you can imagine a couple of big tongue depressors, and you glue a little piece of wood between one end of those and you can make … it’s a big pair of tweezers, and it’s really fun. One of the first things you can learn in woodworking is, when you glue wood together, how strong that is. It’s so exciting. You can make whole pieces of furniture just relying on the strength of the wood glued together.

And so the tongs is such a handy implement, and that, to me, everything that we make in the shop, once its use comes into play, you let the glue dry, you sand it a little bit, and then you can pull your toast out of the toaster, or you can take these tongs and flip your hot dog on the grill, and it just feels incredible, like, “Holy cow, I made this just gluing these pieces of wood together.” And so we extrapolate off of that. Using a set of hand tools, we discerned, okay … We made some of them together, Lee and I, because we did have some times together up in her shop, but then, a lot of them, she also prototyped with her kids, and she would go through and see what they could do and what they couldn’t do.

CAIRA: Nick, we usually ask all of our guests one final question, which is what’s the last thing you bought that you really loved, but we want to ask you, what’s the last thing that you’ve built that you’ve really loved?

NICK: That is a great question. There are a couple things that I made for Megan that I’m not going to say. One of them is a sex toy, but that’s all I’m going to say. And if you are making a sex toy, just make sure, if you think you’ve sanded it enough, sand it just a little more. The last thing I made that I really loved are this batch of ukuleles, which I’ve been working on bit by bit for years. When you play an instrument that you’ve made and people don’t leave, it feels pretty incredible. One day, I will wield that in concert, and then I can retire.

CHRISTINE: Well, thank you, Nick. It’s been a pleasure.

ROSIE: Thank you so much.

CAIRA: Thank you.

NICK: You’re very patient. Thanks for putting up with me.

ROSIE: Very fun.

ROSIE: Nick Offerman’s new book with Lee Buchanan is called Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery. It’s available now wherever you like to buy books. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

CHRISTINE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today’s episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, Catherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.

CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.

ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin.

CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening.

NICK: When you’re making sex toys, first of all, just don’t even use conifers. avoid softwoods altogether. Go with deciduous hardwoods, and just don’t forget to raise the grain.