SUNSET — Every piece of wood in Adam Doucet's shop has a story. There's the spalted oak recovered from a ditch in Arnaudville, the sinker cypress dug up from along the Atchafalaya Basin and New Orleans sycamore felled by Hurricane Ida.

"Sycamore is a dream to turn," Doucet said. "You learn as you go. I try to always know exactly what species I'm working with."

Sometime identifying the species is like solving a mystery, matching characteristics he knows to new pieces he's found.

Doucet, 36, has pieces of at least 20 different species of wood on hand, about nine of which are native to Louisiana — his specialty.

He uses a lathe to turn blocks of wood into bowls, pens, tools, knife handles and more, which he sells online through an Etsy store called Nonc's Shop. The name comes from his nickname, which is a Cajun French title used to refer to an uncle.

He does all the wood-work on weekends. During the week he's a full-time French teacher at Paul Breaux Middle School.

"As a teacher, it's a little too much at the end of the day," Doucet said.

So come Saturday and Sunday, he puts on music, sometimes lights incense and gets to work in the shop behind his home in Sunset.

"I treat it like a meditative state," he said. "It's definitely therapeutic. I get lost in the work. It's meticulous."

The duration of a project depends on the intricacy and the type of wood, but it often can take 45 minutes to an hour to complete an item, Doucet said.

All the money from his hobby-turned-side-hustle goes back into it.

"I got a new chisel in the mail today," he said. 

The chisel will hang in one of the well-organized rows of tools of different shapes and sizes next to a sign on the shop wall that says "merci pour tout" — thanks for everything in French.

Doucet's shop also includes several types of saws as well as bevels, flutes and micro-tools for fine work, plus sanding mesh, mineral oil and shellac to produce different finishes. 

"I've been doing woodwork almost my whole life," Doucet said. "I piddled in the shop with my dad."

Over the years he also learned to weld and work on different machines like the lathe, which he learned from mentors he's never met thanks to the internet. It's a lesson he passes on to his seventh- and eighth-graders at school.

"I always tell my kids, who use YouTube a lot, that they can use it for good or evil," Doucet said. "I've never sat with a wood-turner. It's how I learned. I'm an introvert, so that's fine with me."

The Port Barre native has been teaching seven years and also is a musician. He's been playing the accordion since he was 10 and also plays fiddle, guitar and bass, clearly a hands-on person.

He got a lathe three years ago, one that had been a friend's father-in-law's machine. He recently upgraded to a new machine in June. The new Laguna brand machine spins the wood and can go from 50 to 3,500 rpms.

He started by making knives and quickly had so many that he was giving some away. Then he started making bowls.

"What I'm-a do with all these knives?" he said tongue-in-cheek. "I love producing, but my wife and I only need so many bowls. These are things I don't really want, but I want to make them."

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So he started his Etsy shop in January 2020 and has sold some at markets in Opelousas.

"I got about a hundred ideas," Doucet said. "But I try to keep it light. I don't want to corner myself with too much work. I don't want it to feel like work.

His shop is full of wood — finished products and some yet to be. He rarely buys lumber and instead relies on friends and himself to find hidden treasure around him. 

"When there's a big storm, the parish comes and clears the road, we drive around and pick up logs that are already cut to workable size," Doucet said. "I see something in the ditch I know it can be something beautiful."

He gets small bits of sinker cypress from Eric Couvillion in Breaux Bridge. The master craftsman behind Live Edge Woodworks owns about 5,000 acres on the Atchafalaya Basin and digs the ancient trees out of the ground.

Doucet uses larger chunks to make bowls or platters and smaller pieces for pens or wine bottle stoppers. 

"It's just about getting the most out of the wood," Doucet said. "I have a deep connection with nature. I don't want to waste any."

What he can't find locally he looks for online. He bought some beams of old growth pine from someone on Craigslist. This type of wood existed before the modern lumber industry and can only be salvaged from homes and barns, Doucet said.

Contact children's issues reporter Leigh Guidry at Lguidry@theadvertiser.com or on Twitter @LeighGGuidry.