Gerunds, before or after names?

Question

Consider the following:

The furniture makers in those early decades of the 1600’s were known as “joiners,” for the primary method of constructing furniture, at least among the English of this time, was that of mortise-and-tenon joinery.

I wonder, what is the grammatical function of "constructing" in the sentence? Is it grammatically correct? Because, I think when we use gerunds, we have to put the name before the gerund: "furniture constructing"
If it was like "furniture construction", would it change the meaning?

Answer 1

It is fully grammatically correct since gerunds can take direct objects. In your example the "furniture" is a direct object of a gerund "constructing".

Regarding using "furniture construction" instead - I think both variants would mean basically the same, but probably native speakers can find some semantic subtleties between them.