Simplicity at its finest

Jon Sammis of Sammis Woodworking in Petersham, Mass., has always taken business matters in stride, navigating the industry as he goes. His innate passion for sawdust has earned him a stellar reputation over a 40-year career. The secret to enjoying it all, he says, is to keep things simple.

“Well, I still have one employee. I walk to work. I’ve got two shop dogs, and I go home for lunch every day,” says Sammis, previously featured (“A plan to keep it simple”) in the June 2006 issue Woodshop News.

The big change, between then and now, is a different shop. Sammis moved into a freshly constructed, 5,000-sq.-ft. building in the fall of 2006.

“The shop is a major difference,” says Sammis. “We became more productive immediately.”

Sammis, who grew up in Cooperstown, N.Y., naturally fell into the trades as he routinely followed his carpenter father to jobsites and took shop classes throughout high school, then joined the Navy.

After serving, he became acquainted with his sister’s boyfriend, an architect in Boston, who led him to work as cabinetmaker for Tom Pugliese Woodworking in Petersham in 1985. Pugliese was a general contractor with an in-house cabinetry division. There, Sammis worked alongside Pugliese’s father-in-law, Larry Nettie, a skilled woodworker, boatbuilder and piano maker, who taught Sammis everything about the trade.

“I didn’t know this kind of work existed outside of carpentry, that you could just be in the shop all day making things. I was only going to stay four months while my wife finished school, but four months turned into 10 years.”

Pugliese retired in 1995 and offered Sammis the opportunity to take over the business. He gladly accepted and later changed the company name.

He went through a few employees before Josh Johnson arrived.

“[Josh] came to me when he was just finishing high school, and he’s been here 22 years this year. He started right out of high school. Now he’s got a wife and kids and a house. We work great together.”

Sammis had the advantage of taking over Pugliese’s clientele, a well-developed network of builders and designers serving residential homeowners in the Massachusetts’s communities of Wellesley, Newton, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, for example. He and Josh stayed busy for years fabricating, finishing and installing products.

While the shop still produces work for the same markets, Sammis rarely deals directly with clients anymore. About 90 percent of his work is for other companies who rely on him as a subcontractor.

“For the past five years I’ve been working for a really good finish carpenter and installer from Boston, Mattie Forde. He feeds me all kinds of work, and he deals with the designers, architects, homeowners. It’s nice that he deals with them, so I don’t have to.

“He picks everything up here and delivers it,” adds Sammis. “It’s easier now that I don’t have to pack up all my tools, do the drive, do the installation, come back and unload all my tools. The installations could mean a 10-plus hour day with the drive to Boston. It was a lot. Josh and I used to drive everywhere delivering furniture and it took time away from the shop.”

The shop is producing built-ins, kitchens, architectural millwork, and window and door frames for Forde. It also supplies custom stair parts such as curved treads, handrails, and newel posts.

Sammis Woodworking also does plenty of work for Ponders Hollow, an architectural millwork firm in Westfield, Mass.

“I do all their curved work like archways, moldings, baseboards, stair treads. We do all the millwork for a house, sometimes thousands and thousands of feet of curved work and ellipticals, specialty work. We’ve been working with them for 10 years. Their truck is here once a week. Again, I’m not dealing with the homeowners,” says Sammis.

Occasionally, commercial projects pop up. Sammis made extensive renovations to the Athol Public Library in Athol, Mass., about five years ago. The job, which included reception and greeter’s desks, conference room tables, and a donors’ tree, kept the shop busy for a year and a half.

Sammis says building the new shop, which amounted to a $200,000 investment, was a no-brainer. His previous 2,800-sq.-ft. shop, just two miles down the road, had steps between rooms, a finishing room on the second floor, and other inconvenient features. Now, everything is on one level floor.

“I rented the old shop for 10 years. I added it up one day and found I had spent $100,000 on rent. This started with a friend who was selling his house. It had three-phase power and a nice big corner lot, so I bought the house and the land. I rented out the house for a year while the shop was being built, then moved into the house and shop when they were finished.”

Sammis’ wife, Kathy, does the bookkeeping and helps with other tasks, such as deliveries and pickups.

Two English mastiffs, Stanley and Walter, roam the property and are the ultimate shop dogs.

“I deal with the business end of things, the office, shop drawings, billing, ordering. I’m in the shop, but not as much as I like. Once I get the shop drawings approved, Josh and I will cut the parts.”

The shop’s machinery includes a DeWalt radial arm saw, Laguna band saw and jointer, Powermatic 66 table saw, Invicta and Whitney shapers, Mikron M645 multi-molder, SCM 24” planer, JLT clamp rack, Belfab dust collector, and a state-of-the-art finishing room.

Sammis has seen dramatic changes in consumer preferences over the years and has adapted his methods accordingly.

“When I started 40 years ago, everything was raised panel cherry kitchens. We did those for years. Now all the built-ins, furniture for the homes, everything these days is flat panel and painted, mostly white. It’s been like that for the last five years or so. White oak is the only wood people want showing for the last four years for things like stair treads and countertops. That’s what the market is and they’re all higher-end homes.”

He also used to fabricate Corian countertops, a lucrative boost to business, but that’s also changed.

“Now it’s all stone and granite. We’re still doing wood countertops, but Corian is nonexistent except for dog cleaning stations and vanities.”

With the occasional lull in contracted work, Sammis makes sure there’s no downtime. An avid turner, he creates bowls, segmented seashells, spheres, and more.

Another hobby is restoring Chris-Craft boats, with the current project being a 1936 model.

“I’ve always had a boat in the shop for the last 10 years. It took us about three years to do the first boat. Every now and then when an architect is working on plans or something, I’ll work on a boat. They’ve got curves. We do a lot of curved work, and boats curve every way. The more curves, the more fun.”

The onset of Covid shut the business down for about six months, but the shop has been busy ever since. Sammis isn’t worried about economic uncertainty affecting him anytime soon.

“They’re all high-end clients, so no I’m not worried about work drying up. Mattie is booked through summer and Ponders Hollow sold thousands of lineal feet last month. I don’t think they’re going anywhere.”

For more, visit sammiswoodworking.com.  

This article was originally published in the June 2023 issue.