Nurse Turned Craftsman

Bill Hergenroeder worked in hospitals first before realizing he wanted a more flexible profession and a workspace with far fewer hand sanitizer dispensers.

“I wasn’t happy in it because the environment was too rigid and the pace was too fast,” said Hergenroeder, 59, a Cockeysville custom woodworker who once worked as a nurse. “And I wasn’t doing enough with my hands in terms of cutting materials and putting things together, like I like to do in woodworking. But in my youth, I never thought I’d be a professional woodworker. It just kind of unfolded.”

Hergenroeder is scheduled to appear at April’s Fine Furnishings Show in Baltimore, showcasing several of his hand-built pieces.

But for roughly five years after graduating, Hergenroeder worked as a registered nurse. Before college graduation, summers in high school and college were spent at construction sites—first sweeping floors and removing nails from plywood—work that eventually turned into his hammering nails, applying plywood and doing basic carpentry work.

Eventually, Hergenroeder chose to follow his passion for woodworking and converted his parents’ home garage into shop space. In 1986, when Hergenroeder was 34, he moved to a new shop location on the corner of Cockeysville and York Roads, a space he has been using for 25 years to construct custom-made tables, chairs, headboards, bookshelves and built-ins.

“I’m an active kid. Hence my liking and natural affinity for doing stuff. I’m doer. I’m not a social butterfly,” he said, grinning.

In the Baltimore area, Hergenroeder has made somewhat of a name for himself. He won the Fine Craft – Body of Work award at last year’s Fine Furnishings Show. Recently Hergenroeder received a commission from architect Thomas Sutton to build several small tables, which will hold drinks and wine, for an interior renovation of posh Harbor East restaurant Pazo. Hergenroeder, who started out making bookcases and installing crown molding, bears the marks of a seasoned carpenter. His hands are calloused, brown and crusty; dust, fine wood shavings and paint chips speckle the floor of his shop—probably not much longer than an aisle at a grocery store—which maintains a 10-foot wide table saw as its focal point.

He owns multiples of nearly every tool: five belt sanders, six different nail guns, several hand drills, many hammers, and probably around 30 hand clamps. Think Baltimore’s version of the New Yankee Workshop, only spruced up a little with a copy of the September “Mad Men” cover of Rolling Stone taped to one of his shop’s stone walls.

“I have no employees. I get my independence out of that. I’m not one to want to manage people, or manage many jobs. I love the craft. I want my hands on tools and materials. I’m still happy doing that,” said Hergenroeder.

The sixth of nine children, Hergenroeder is entirely self taught. His siblings are all in white collar professions: engineers, bankers and administrative workers. His late father was a college professor, and his mother was a registered nurse at Mercy Medical Center. Instead, Hergenroeder learned woodworking from his construction jobs during his teenage summers, from watching Norm Abrams and “This Old House,” and from reading up on carpentry in woodworking journals.

“I’m learning by seeing and listening, and I’m learning by going through my trade magazines for little tidbits, little hints,” he said. “You learn by doing and making mistakes; I’ve made tons and tons of mistakes . . . [but] you hope your mistakes get less and less as time goes on.”

That seems to be the trend of Hergenroeder’s work. Before the housing market crash in 2008 and 2009, which slightly cut his hours and his workload, Hergenroeder averaged 10 to 11 hours of work a day, six days a week, making custom pieces for commercial and residential use, which, he says, makes up about 80 percent of his work. Hergenroeder generally both designs and builds his pieces; sometimes, clients will come to him with a pre-drawn design an architect or home remodeler created.

“I’ve probably designed more things than most professional interior designers and architects,” said Hergenroeder, before adding quickly, “Only because I had to.” A humble man with combed back gray hair, he peppers his conversation about his woodworking abilities with multiple references to how he doesn’t like to “toot my own horn.”

Hergenroeder’s “bread and butter,” he says, are wide built-ins—storage units for big-screen TVs that are flanked by shelving or bookcases on the left and right—which he sells for anywhere between $6,000 and $15,000.

“At least a third of my work has housed a TV,” Hergenroeder said. According to him, the stock market crash has cut his sales in half. He used to average eight big built-ins per year, although 2010 was an improved year for Hergenroeder in terms of pieces he was commissioned to do.

His true passion in woodworking, though, is inlay work, also known as marquetry. Hergenroeder has designed a number of pieces that feature intricate floral patterns; a coffee table featuring such a pattern earned him his 2010 Best in Show prize from the Fine Furnishings Show. He says the marquetry is a bit harder too sell, since it’s “more expensive” and “slower work,” but he uses trade shows like the Fine Furnishing Show to display his portfolio of work through sample and photographs in the hopes of establishing connections with remodelers, architects and homeowners looking to redecorate.

And while Hergenroeder does harbor minimal reservations about his profession given the nature of today’s housing market—“It put me the poor house,” he said—he pinpoints trade shows, to which he is only a novice, as opportunities to market himself and meet new clientele.

“I was doing a lot of great work: more variety, bigger-priced jobs, [higher] status clientele. . . .

And then Wall Street [messed] up the economy, and it impacted me a lot,” said Hergenroeder. “But I don’t want to return to health care. If half the world got destroyed because of a nuclear blast and I really had to, I could, but . . . I like this so much, I wanna stay here.”

The 2011 Fine Furnishings Show in Baltimore takes place April 15-17. For more information, go here. To see examples of Bill Hergenroeder’s woodworking, go to his website.