In 2007, I was working two jobs—at the Cat’s Cradle as a bartender and general helper, and at Rho doing clinical trials work—and Meredith and I were living together at the Bim Street house in Carrboro. Around September of that year, the “laser shed” chapter of my life really kicked off.
I can anchor the timing because from that time there’s a photo from a visit to Martin Norland’s house where I was having an extreme asthma flare-up. Meredith and I had gone over to visit Martin and Shannon and were playing Wii Sports, but my breathing got so bad—wheezing, struggling—that we had to leave early, and it was honestly embarrassing. This flare-up had been due to mixing concrete for the foundation of the laser shed, and the dust from a bag of concrete set me off.
That shed was going into my sister Julie’s backyard, and the whole project started because I’ve been fascinated with lasers my entire life. I remember reading about them in an encyclopedia—the idea of light bouncing around inside a ruby rod, the partially reflective mirrors, the energy building up and then bursting through—and I never really lost that fascination.
A year or so earlier, around 2006, Julie and I had teamed up on this puzzle I designed: interlocking bird patterns laid over an interlocking circle pattern. The puzzle could be solved multiple ways because the circle could be re-formed with different configurations, but the bird pattern would always come out the same. Julie was studying architecture at North Carolina State and had access to a laser cutter there, so we used my model and cut multiple copies of the puzzle to give as Christmas presents. That experience planted a business idea for both of us—maybe there was a niche for doing laser cutting work for people who needed it.
Working at Rho made me feel relatively rich. Though the wage was a base salary of $50k, it was a quantum leap from the ~$10k I would make at the Cat's Cradle. Once I had “real job” money from Rho, I saved up and bought a laser cutter for about $19,000 and financed the costs of building the shed itself. It wasn’t just any shed, either—we needed a specific building setup with proper ventilation because lasers can produce toxic fumes when they burn certain materials.
The construction year came with its own mini-drama. One day turned into a kind of barn-raising where I recruited friends, Billy and Chuck, to help frame the walls. Julie’s husband, Tony, was up helping with the roof while I was working with a nail gun. At one point I hit a board on the edge, the nail didn’t sink properly, and it shot off. Immediately after, Tony said, “Hey, something just flew through my hair.” If that nail had been a centimeter lower, it would’ve hit him square in the forehead.
We also had to dig a trench to run electrical lines from Julie’s house out to the shed, and we rented a ditch witch to do it. Those machines are incredibly heavy, and once their mass starts moving, you’re along for the ride. I was operating it when it swung out of control; my hand was on the handle, and the handle slammed into a wooden pole and crushed my left ring finger. It obliterated the fingernail, which had to be pulled off, and it has never looked the same since. It stopped work that day—I was in shock, and the pain was worse than you’d expect—but I have a photo of me using the ditch witch dated December 1st, 2007.
Then December 2nd was the exciting day: the laser arrived. The cutter itself was relatively small, but it came inside a big enclosure—like a large photocopier—with a lid that opened. You’d place wood onto a hexagonal bed with a metal grid supporting the material, and the laser head moved over it like an Etch A Sketch, cutting and etching.
The twist is that the business side never really became what we imagined. We didn’t get much work, and what we did get wasn’t especially fun. There’s not much glamour in owning a laser; over time it can feel like you’re becoming a glorified photocopy technician. Plus the shed truly was more in the "shed" class than building. Plain concrete floor and no insulation. Working in it during the winter months was uncomfortably cold. I did use it for projects I loved—like making geodesic domes, which tied into a lifelong fascination I’ve had with domes—but the day-to-day reality of trying to turn it into a business wasn’t something I had thought through clearly when we started the project.
Instead of a clean ending, the laser just sort of languished for years. Five or so years later, Julie finally sold it to an architecture firm at a steep discount, around $10,000. Eventually she sold her house, and that brought our chapter of the laser shed to a close..
But the silver lining is that the project brought Julie and me closer. Growing up, our relationship had been a bit fraught in that classic brother-sister way—we didn’t get along well as kids. Building the laser shed and chasing the idea together gave us common ground and a shared project, and it changed the dynamic between us. So even though it was a financial mistake in business terms—another version of “a fool and his money are soon parted”—it was also a complicated, memorable time with real positives, and I’m glad we did it.