A native son to build wooden bathhouse at Walden Pond
As a teenager growing up in Acton, Christian Gudmand built model boats from scrap wood and floated them on Walden Pond.
As a teenager growing up in Acton, Christian Gudmand built model boats from scrap wood and floated them on Walden Pond. This month, the Acton-Carlisle High School alumnus will build the timber frame for the new Walden bathhouse.
“I wanted to do this project so bad, because it is kind of a neat structure. It’s in the town I grew up, and it’s Walden Pond,” says Gudmand, owner of Hardwick Post and Beam. “To be a part of reinvigorating Walden Pond is really special. When I got the call from the general contractor [South Coast Improvement Co. of Marion] who wanted us to do the timber frame, I was over the moon.”
Gudmand studied to be a mechanical engineer, and after college, he worked as one for three years before shifting gears to work for Hardwick.
“I loved building,” he says. “I come from a family where we would all work on a house together.”
From hobby to career
Though none of Gudmand’s immediate family are in the trades, he was most inspired by his grandfathers, who introduced him to woodworking as a hobby.
That hobby became a career when Gudmand left his office job in 2014 to become a timber cutter for Hardwick Post and Beam. A year later, he became general manager, and in 2020, he purchased the company.
“I went from mechanical engineer to cutting timber frames and just loved every minute of it,” Gudmand says.
The 140 Douglas fir timbers from the Northwest recently arrived at Gudmand’s shop in Hardwick. After the lumber is cut and made ready for fabrication, Gudmand and his team will build the frame. It will be transported in sections to Walden, where it will be erected in mid-June.
“It’s on a big slope and it’s a tight site. The hardest part of these jobs tends to be the site work, the access, getting things down there safely and efficiently, and getting all the equipment you need to put it up in a way that keeps the crew protected,” Gudmand says.
“We have a 40-foot-long timber beam being put into this building and being able to get that to the site and maneuvering it on the site, it gets challenging. Having an engineering degree certainly helps.”
A sturdy skeleton
The craft of post and beam framing fell out of favor in the 1980s, when builders shifted to using engineered materials to build multistory buildings.
According to the Hardwick Post and Beam website: “A timber frame is a sturdy wooden skeleton of a building that is made with heavy timbers and traditional joinery. The timbers are connected with dovetails and mortise-and-tenon joints secured with wooden pegs.”
“We use the modern equivalent of the old ways,” says Gudmand. “It’s all hand-held power tools. We’ll use hand chisels and mallets to clean up the joinery. The roof system and the structure itself has a lot of angles, not extreme angles, but just enough to make the joinery surprisingly complicated in areas.”
The bathhouse at Walden is Hardwick Post and Beam’s third Acton project. The others are the porch on Gudmand’s parents’ house and the pavilion at Gerow Park.
Gudmand’s favorite Acton building is the house on Ash Street where he grew up. Though he now lives in Belchertown with his wife, Michelle, and infant son Leo, he frequently returns to Acton to visit his parents and sisters, who still live here, and to bask in the loveliness of his hometown.
“When you’re downtown walking on Lexington Road towards the Acton Museum,” he says, “there are a lot of beautiful old homes.”
