The Love of Woodworking

Hello there, I would like to welcome all of you who are thinking about getting into woodworking. I created this website in the hopes of inspiring you to create something that can be passed down through the generations. Let’s face it, none of us get out of life alive and I think that it is important for all of us to try and leave something behind whenever possible and woodworking is one excellent way of doing that plus it gives me the opportunity to tell my story about a man who meant the world to me, my dad and this is his story.

The Beginning and a Lesson

For as long as I can remember he always enjoyed working with his hands and the I think the hobby that he enjoyed the most was working with wood. The earliest project that I can remember him building was a canoe made out of wood. When it was finished it was the color of the blue sky. I remember when he first put it in Jackson lake he was paddling around just happy as a lark until he found out that it had sprung a leak.

Of course he was a little bit frustrated because he had spent a lot of time building it and he wanted it to be as perfect as he could get it. He did learn something valuable that day once he started thinking about the situation and that was patience. When we woodwork, things don’t always go as planned, sometimes we mess it up so bad that we just have to abandon the entire project and start over from scratch. In the end though when he got it back to the shop he just applied a little more sealer which fixed the problem.

An Awesome Outlook 

Several years later mom and dad decided to purchase a plot of land and have our new house built. I remember going up there with him to see how the construction workers were coming along and then he asked me a question. He said “do you know why the people that build houses are so important”? Me being the eleven year old smart alec kid that I was I replied “yea dad because if it wasn’t for them nobody would have a house to live in”.  He just shook his head and grinned a little and said that’s true but there is another even more important reason.

When houses and buildings are built it gives the people who built them to leave just a little bit of themselves behind and if taken care of they will continue to always be here. My dad built a lot of things in his lifetime, he made a gorgeous oak dresser for my mom (which was fun carrying up 2 flights of stairs). Some of the other things that he built was an entertainment center for the living room. As well as a couch, a welcome sign that he made for the family cabin out of a log that he split in half. 

All of these things that Dad made were created in his own woodshop that he made for himself. The woodshop in itself wasn’t anything fancy. The new house that we built had a two car garage and he just took one of the bays and made a work area that was able to accommodate two work benches. His shop had many of the power tools needed to make the projects that he was working on such as a table saw, router and table as well as a radial alarm saw. These are just to name a few.

He also had enough room for a mini bench top wood lathe which he put to good use when building stair railings at the old house we used to have. He even turned new spindles for old wood furniture that we didn’t want to part with and the result was making them look like new. That’s another thing that’s great about wood working, you can restore an old piece of furniture.