Carpenter cuts with precision
Job and valley?s amenities appeal to Hailey craftsman
By MATT FURBER
Express Staff Writer
Hailey carpenter Wyatt Solaas cuts it close at an Adams Gulch project. With clockwork precision Solaas calculates the time it takes to complete finish work on a custom home. Photo by David N. Seelig
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Last week Hailey carpenter Wyatt Solaas bought a picture framer’s mitering blade to make the thresholds of his cabinetry cuts as precise as possible.
“The next room I am going into will be really complicated,” Solaas said speaking at the job site of a home being built on the road to the Adams Gulch trailhead, an 8000 square foot structure with an interior built nearly entirely of wood.
A Salmon native, Solaas, 42, starting building with his father while he was still in high school. Today, he works for Grabher Construction solving some of the most head scratching puzzles that go with custom woodworking on some of the most expensive homes in the Wood River Valley.
Outfitted with thousands of dollars in carpentry tools, Solaas can arrive at just about any job site ready to tackle all the problems of a project like the Adams Gulch house.
“They want that broken in cabin feel,” said veteran carpenter Gene LeClaire, one of Solaas fellow woodworkers, who has been working with Austrian born Grabher Construction founder Elmar Grabher since the 1970s.
“The house that Wyatt is working on is a log home with European accents,” said Elizabeth Grabher, president of the 38-year-old family business. “It has paneled walls and curved railings. It’s a mixed log and Austrian feel.”
Time is money in the contracting business. Perhaps more than most carpenters, Solaas is in the habit of watching his watch. He knows with precision how long it takes to do certain jobs.
“We have our own cabinetshop on-site,” Solaas said. “There will be very little exposed sheet rock when we are finished. The amount of time we spend doing mockups, it’s incredible.”
The road to Solaas current position, where clients regularly seek his input and direction when faced with design questions, has not been totally straightforward, however. As a 21-year-old Solass and his new bride Maria were in-volved in a life changing car accident. Solaas almost entirely lost the use of his left arm, which sustained massive nerve damage causing him to lose most of his motor control in the limb.
But 21 years later Solaas is at the top of his game as a carpenter, despite the debilitating accident.
“They said I was going to be an office guy,” he said. “I would rather be in prison than chained to a desk. I had to learn to compensate.”
When Solaas first decided to resurrect his woodworking career he said he felt intimidated and very self-conscious about his infirmary, but he was ready to experiment and try his hand at bidding jobs anyway.
“I lost a lot of money,” he said, but he also said he developed systems to help him keep up with the rest of his colleagues, always racing his watch trying to get faster.
“Why would people hire me if I couldn’t hold my own with other carpenters?”
Solaas said today his familiarity with tasks and the time they take makes bidding jobs one of his talents.
Over the past 20 years Solaas has worked in Phoenix and Southern California, where he built for many of the big aerospace corporations like Hughes Aircraft, McDonald Douglas and Lockheed Martin. Continuing to hone his skills as a finish carpenter in the Boise area, Solaas came to the Wood River Valley to jump on the highest end projects he could find to challenge himself.
“A lot of things on these houses you figure out as you go,” Solaas said. “Some things you can’t see in the plans. You design on the fly.”
After commuting to the Wood River Valley from Boise every week for over four years, Solaas finally bit the bullet and decided to settle here permanently.
“I never really took to the city, the lines. Here I can stop and fish on my way home from work,” Solaas said. “I will die here even if I have to rent for the rest of my life. It works with my lifestyle.”
Although he had his own cabinetry business in Boise, the repetitiveness of tasks and the long drive to enjoy one of his hobbies, tracking elk, brought Solaas to Hailey, where he rents a humble house for his family that comes with a large woodshop. The shop is his creative outlet.
Even after long days at the job site figuring out how best to install a second floor wood stove in an alcove between two gabble roofs or building a new mockup for a stairwell or porch railing, Solaas spends much of his free time creating furniture and original woodwork crafts.
“My friends ask me how I can work in my shop after I have already been working with wood all day,” he said. “I love working with wood.”
Although Solaas said he feels lucky to have landed work that pushes him in his passion and his talent, he is concerned about the challenges of making a living for carpenters in a place where a $250,000 house is considered afford-able housing for a single family.
“Even five years ago you could find an $18,000 house on a $35,000 lot ... for those who got in it’s great.”
Solaas said by his account half of the carpenters he’s known in the area figure out a way to stay. The other half leave for more affordable communities.
Solaas said he and his wife Maria could probably find an affordable home to buy in Carey for their children--Justin, 15, and Emily, 10--but the drive isn’t worth the affordability in his opinion.
“I’ve commuted already,” he said, reflecting on years spent in Los Angeles and Boise.
“I like the quality of the craftsmanship here,” Solaas said, while working on a custom cabinet for a sink space in the Adams Gulch home. “The quality is higher here than in Boise or Woodside. Owners expect more. This is a real service business. Your clientele expects things to work.”
There is also the grapevine. “If clients are happy, you can expect to find work next year,” he said.
