About Me

Welcome to my ramblings. I have been actively engaged in woodworking since January 2010 now but I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I was a young-un, I used to watch my dad. A lot. He was your Jack-of-all-Trades, master of some. The key being that he loved to work with his hands. Fixing the car, building a house, making a table, converting the garage into storage and sauna. He was good at it all. Well, except for fixing cars. He could perform basic tasks on those, but mainly because he lacked the proper tools.

Every home that we lived in was touched in some way by him and made better for it. He built our cottage that ended up being our home for 4 years up in Parry Sound ON. I think the only contractors he called in were to dig the hole and drop in the septic tank and the Ontario Hydro folks to connect the power.

Like I said, I watched him through most of it and learned a lot. After leaving home for the wide open world, I forgot about it and went through the usual period of discovering myself and career hopping. I forgot about the joy of creation (cue the sad, tragic music).

Three and a half years ago, I got married to an amazing woman and we moved into a house 2 years ago (cue sappy love music). It's a modest semi-detached dwelling that was built in the 70's. I'm happy hear, but there have been some things that needed to be done (unbeknowest to me before purchase). The deck needed replacing, and the basement leaked last spring. I wasn't going to hire a contractor to do it as I knew I could do fine without one.

Finishing those projects, I realized how much joy I experienced in making these changes to our home (cue happy music - okay, I know enough already!).

Then my wife bought me a table saw for Christmas this past year (How awesome is that?). I'm not a Normite, nor am I a hand tool junkie. My skills are developing slowly and I don't want to limit myself to one particular discipline. I simply allow my tools on hand to dictate the method of how I tackle a task. I may even try multiple methods to see which one achieves the best result.

I'll post some additional entries about my projects completed thus far and put up a tour of my shop in my future posts.