Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop
by Nick Offerman
Added:
Nov 16, 2025
Book Description
Nick Offerman, woodworker, actor, and co-host of NBC’s Making It, invites you on a hilarious and informative wood- working adventure that takes you behind the scenes of his very own woodshop.
Nestled among the glitz and glitter of Tinseltown is a testament to American elbow grease and an honest-to-god hard day’s work: Offerman Woodshop. Captained by hirsute wood- worker, actor, comedian, and writer Nick Offerman, the shop produces not only fine handcrafted furniture, but also fun stuff — kazoos, baseball bats, ukuleles, mustache combs, even cedar-strip canoes.
Now Nick and his ragtag crew of champions want to share their experience of working at the Woodshop, tell you all about their passion for the discipline of woodworking, and teach you how to make a handful of their most popular projects along the way. This book takes readers behind the scenes of the woodshop, both inspiring and teaching them to make their own projects and besotting them with the infectious spirit behind the shop and its complement of dusty wood-elves.
In these pages you will find a variety of projects for every skill level, with personal, easy-to-follow instructions by the OWS woodworkers themselves; and, what’s more, this tutelage is augmented by mouth-watering color photos (Nick calls it “wood porn”). You will also find writings by Nick, offering recipes for both comestibles and mirth, humorous essays, odes to his own woodworking heroes, insights into the ethos of woodworking in modern America, and other assorted tomfoolery.
Whether you’ve been working in your own shop for years, or if holding this stack of compressed wood pulp is as close as you’ve ever come to milling lumber, or even if you just love Nick Offerman’s brand of bucolic yet worldly wisdom, you’ll find Good Clean Fun full of useful, illuminating, and entertaining information.
Notes & Highlights
As Wendell Berry tells us in his essay ”Poetry and Marriage“: ”It may be… that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.“ When we work in the woodshop, we crave nothing more than new problems to solve.
I really enjoy this kind of serendipity, when like-minded folks end up running into one another as though attracted by some unseen magnetic force. Ted [Moore] has a great take on this and describes it thus:
It is the defects in wood and in people that give them depth and make them interesting. They both take thought and patience to work with, but the rewards outweigh the effort.
Let the wood (or people) speak—it will tell you what it wants and what it will let you do to it. Force it and it breaks; slowly steam it and it bends. A wild grain will be ornery to work and unstable, but cut it in half and book-match it and the beauty fills your senses. Straight grain is predictable and will stay where you put it; but aside from the engineering properties, there is nothing that excites. I see people this way—might be why all the people I respect, admire, or love are beautiful people with their own kind of crazy.
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