Retired Man Crafts Hobby Out Of Wood

Once the Post Falls fire chief, Kelly Frazey continues working with wood, but in a different medium.

For the past, “oh, eight, maybe nine years,” the retired Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Co., employee heads first thing each day to his garage/workshop.

His job, his hobby, his therapy is making gaily painted lawn and home ornaments.

From scratch, he traces the pattern on a chunk of pine or plywood, cuts it out, sands it, paints it and adds little extras like hangers or stakes.

“I try to turn out at least one item a day,” he said, his familiar ball cap twisted at a jaunty angle. “Got nothing else to do each day.”

Frazey said he first got the idea-turned-hobby from an old issue of Good Housekeeping. “Saw a picture of a pair of Scottie dogs with a piece of wood in between to form a napkin holder.

“Told myself, ‘heck I could do that,”’ and he did - dusting off the prototype.

The hobby snowballed, “to say the least,” according to Frazey, who is eight days from his 69th birthday.

“Told a few people about my ambition and they starting bringing me ideas, things they’d seen in magazines. I started buying patterns wherever I could find them.”

To date, his collection numbers about 300. A quick tour of his two-car garage-turned-workshop uncovered paper pigs, plants, Santas, wagons and animals of all sizes and varieties lining the walls. Seldom used patterns, he said, are tucked away in boxes.

“What I’ll do is make a bunch of the items I think people will want. You know, a bunch of Santas and reindeer at Christmas, pumpkins at Halloween or bunnies for Easter.”

“Right now, I’m doing tons of flowers, what with Mother’s Day and spring coming up. At least they tell me springs’ coming up!”

Frazey’s figured it’s best to make and stockpile an assortment of his wooden pieces, leaving them unpainted.

“That way, when the people come to buy them, they can pick the colors they want,” he said.

The cost of paint, combined with $22 for a sheet of five-eighths-inch plywood, and a few bucks for sandpaper, paint thinner and brushes tends to make an overall operation somewhat costly.

“That’s where the only problem comes in,” Frazey said. “Like those flowers. I get a buck each. Maybe a couple of bucks for a painted animal, maybe $25 for a pair of those sailors that swing from a string attached to a tree limb.

“People are always telling me my prices are way too cheap. Even my wife, Mary, says I should be charging more.

“Well, it’s payment for me to see the expressions on the faces of my customers.

“I look at it as a hobby. Cripes, I’d have been dead 10 years ago if I didn’t have something like this to do every day. It’s very therapeutic,” he said.

But, sometimes, he said, “things can get real hectic. Like Christmas. A customer came by, wanted 70 candy canes, each four feet wide and eight feet tall. Wanted to decorate his driveway and the front of his house.”

“Well, it ended up to be 94 candy canes, as I remember. Each one took a certain amount of time and, boy, I was right up to the deadline with the last of the order,” he said. “I remember getting up at 3 in the morning to get the painting finished on time.”

Frazey said he tries maintaining an array of some 20 pieces of his work in the front yard of his 11th Avenue home in Post Falls.

“And you know, in my nine years of doing this, I’ve only lost two pieces, a Santa and a little reindeer. And, catch this,” he said. “Had a guy come by and want to borrow the pattern for two ornaments. Told him I’d rather not, that I had to buy each pattern.”

Frazey drove by the “customer’s” home a few days later, and found his ornaments.

All in all, “it’s worth every minute I’m able to work on my projects. Just that one problem in nine years … what the heck!”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo