Measuring up

Blair Toland had already worked six consecutive 16-hour days. On the seventh day, something had to give. Unfortunately, that something was his nail gun.

Toland, the amiable Allston-based carpenter, was trying to finish as much woodwork as time would allow on a 6,000-square-foot home in Weston before leaving for Los Angeles. When he entered the house on a Sunday morning, he was sleep deprived and his 6-foot-9 frame was aching, but he was buzzed on caffeine and frantic to complete whatever he could. In two days, he was arriving in LA to work as an on-air carpenter on Bravo's reality show "Top Design." Before then, he needed to tend to less glamorous tasks, such as hanging doors and windows in the suburbs.

In his sleepy-jittery state, he first accidentally sliced his hand with a utility knife. He wrapped it in gauze and got back to work. Shortly thereafter, he fired off his nail gun -- sending a 2 1/2-inch finishing nail deep into his leg.

"I didn't feel anything go in," he says. "And then I realized that the nail was in fact in there and gone. There was nothing visible. I started getting a little woozy and light-headed. So I went to the window to get some air. I realized that there was a very good chance I was going to fall out of the window if I stayed there. And given how things were going that day, I decided to step away from the window."

He made his flight to Los Angeles, the nail stayed in his leg (he was given a doctor's note to hand to security in the event that his new leg hardware set off the airport metal detector -- in fact, the nail is still in his leg ), and he has since proven himself to be one of the calmest participants on the show where interior designers compete à la "Project Runway."

"You can see watching the show that it can get stressful between designers and carpenters," says contestant Andrea Keller, a Los Angeles-based architect who owns the firm Berry/Keller Architects. "And that's the last thing you need. So I felt like I had won the lottery working with Blair. People were at each other's throats, and he'd be walking around doing this amazing Borat impersonation that had us laughing."

Stressful settings and deadlines were not unusual for the 31-year-old Toland. Before turning to carpentry, he had a career as a chef in some of Boston's most exclusive kitchens. He worked at Radius, the East Coast Grill, the Vault, and was the sous chef when Via Matta in Park Square first opened its doors. "Being at Radius was so rigorous," he says over coffee in Chestnut Hill. "You really learned a respect for cooking there. It wasn't just cooking, it was being a craftsman, and you really don't find that in a lot of places."

Toland studied culinary arts at Newbury College and spent his 20s working in restaurants, but the long hours and stressful kitchens, plus counters designed for people about a foot shorter than 6 foot 9, convinced him it was time to look for a new vocation. His first post-chef job was painting, a natural fit for someone who doesn't require a ladder to reach the top of 8-foot walls. Painting led to jobs as a handyman. If someone wanted their toilet fixed or a window repaired, he would eventually figure out how -- by trial and error. The odd jobs brought him to carpentry, where he was again able to use his creativity.

"It's a trip to look at," he says. "Going back four years ago, the kind of jobs that I had were putting cribs together. Now I'm bidding on seven-figure homes that need a complete gut. I just hope it keeps getting better and better."

All of Toland's seat-of-his pants success and level-headed perspective begs a very obvious question: Why would a relatively stable individual run off to Los Angeles to seek fame on reality television?

"I'm pretty adventurous," he says with a wide grin. "I knew if I didn't try, I'd be kicking myself in a year for missing out."

Viewers of the show, which airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on Bravo, know that much of the drama is built around the formidable personalities of the interior designers and burdensome deadlines they face. Toland is like a tall slice of serenity in the middle of these meltdowns. Something that helped him keep his cool was the realization that the carpentry on the show was strictly used as props. In the beginning, he says carpenters carefully glued, nailed, and created very solid furniture. Those pieces, however, were scrapped as soon as the room was complete. Soon, he and his fellow carpenters were ditching the glue and the careful building techniques and instead constructing tables, desks, and chairs that looked pretty, but would probably crumble with use.

Toland was so pleased with his "Top Design" experience that he recently auditioned for a new HGTV make-over show. Although looking back, he realizes that he missed out on his chance to join the ranks of reality TV's beefcake carpenter brigade. In one "Top Design" episode set at the beach, several of Toland's carpentry colleagues shed their shirts, setting blogs a-flutter. "I'm definitely not as toned as those guys," says Toland. "They're LA guys. They model in their spare time. I'm from the East Coast and I'm a little paler. I stuck to my white T-shirt, and I was fine. Most of my weight-lifting involves tool boxes and sheets of plywood, so I was happy to let them do the showing off."