What started as a fishing-cleaning mini-project became
a community centerpiece that enhanced our family’s life.The Neighborhood
Wo r k b e n c h
/ BY C.J. CHIVERS /
@PopularMechanics _ July/August 2019 43HE IDEA THAT we needed an outdoor butcher’s table
formed from what felt like necessity.
While living overseas in 2005, we bought our first fam-
ily home, a century-old, single-family house in a former
mill town in coastal Rhode Island. We were not due back
in the states anytime soon, so tenants would occupy the
place while we were away. But our longer plan, to be real-
ized at some time unknown, was to treat the house as a base camp
and homestead—a home in which we might raise our family near
the sea, and from where we might also grow and catch a portion of
our food from habitats we chose to call our own.
Near the center of it all would be saltwater fishing. The fish we
would catch around the mouth of Narragansett Bay and Block
Island would form a large share of our diets. Fish carcasses, bur-
ied in the soil of our small lot, would in turn fuel the gardens and
the fruit trees I intended to plant.
When we returned in mid-2008, this old plan became our new
lives. Gradually we equipped for it.
First came fishing tackle and coolers, which we filled with fresh-
caught fish and squid we cleaned on the tailgate of the pickup, or pine
boards over collapsible sawhorses.
Over several years we developed a routine. We would cover our
fish with ice on the boat and bring the catch home to clean in the
yard or the drive, thereby keeping the messy work out of the kitchen
while saving the carcasses to fertilize the ever-richer dirt.
Our routine was conceptually sound but had practical draw-
backs. The truck tailgate was not an ideal fish-cleaning surface.
And while collapsible sawhorses were not all bad (they broke down
easily and all but vanished when not in use), they were also tippy
and a little short, requiring stooping. They invited a sore back when
a box of 50 to 100 fish needed to meet the knives.
I’d been raised cleaning fish and was teaching my children the
old arts. And fish-cleaning, an ancient skill and part of the joy of
plenty, was becoming an unpleasant chore.
My oldest son, Jack, was 14 when we decided to upgrade to
something permanent, sturdy, and more functional. That sum-
mer I realized that with a few modifications, an all-weather
workbench would do. We briefly searched the internet and found
a bench plan that could be assembled with framing lumber, ply-
wood, and fasteners.
The adaptation was simple. Instead of using a sheet of heavy ply
for the top, we ordered a sheet of HDPE, the common plastic used
for restaurant and kitchen cutting boards.
One choice drove the next: Our tabletop surface of 24 by 63
inches matched the largest piece of HDPE that we could find that
would be sent to our home for the cost of ground shipping. Next we
opted for a table height of 37 inches, just over the common stan-
dard for kitchen counters.
These dimensions and surface materials were eminently prac-
tical. A table of that size would not hold every fish a family might
catch in the waters around Rhode Island. But it would hold most of
them, and allow two people with knives to work comfortably, safely,
and side by side, and thereby process fish fast. And then we’d be able
to scrub and bleach a restaurant-grade surface for the next round.T
↓ HOMESTEADING
PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE