As a young boy, I grew up with a a talented, but uneducated father.  My dad opted out of school in the eighth grade, and made his way in life as a mechanic and then later as an electrician.

Dee Collicott

After buying a two room house when I was five, my parents moved three children into the tiny bedroom with them, and we lived in the rest of the house.  It was years later that my mom and dad added two more bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen to our house.  I don’t know what training my father had for building homes, but I do know that my mom is convinced that few houses contained more nails than ours.

What I gained from my early days with dad was a love for tools.  It seemed that my dad could fix anything, and build whatever he wanted.  He loved mechanics and welding.  He constructed a number of projects from scratch over the years, including a horse buggy, a go cart, a scooter and other things.  When I turned sixteen, he completely rebuilt the motor on a car thirteen years older than me.  It ran perfectly and ‘like a sewing machine’ as one friend described it.

But, I preferred wood.  My first shop class in the seventh grade had me hooked.  I liked metal shop, welding and leather working, but working wood was wonderful.  I recall that my first tool purchase was a coping saw.  I rode home eagerly from the hardware store on my bicycle and ran across the street to my grandmother’s garage where I had cleared out a little space in front of an old workbench.  I took out a piece of wood that I had found in the garage and placed it on a jig made in shop class to support it.

Within seconds I had cut a nice rough cut across the end of my thumb.  A quick trip back across the street and a band-aid fixed me up so that I was ready to go again.  Holding the wood now at a different angle due to the sore thumb, I quickly made another rough cut across my thumb, forming a bloody T shape.  But, I was undeterred, and another band-aid change fixed me up.

Over the years, I found that a lot of tools for working with wood are sharp.  And, you need to exercise some caution as you work with them.  But, none of those many, many cuts and bruises kept me from coming back to the pleasure of working with wood.

I took more than 20 years off from working with wood when I stepped away from construction and eventually entered the software development world.  A few years ago, I was looking for another outlet, and talked with my wife about building a shop again.  Her father was a life long carpenter, and she gave her blessing to invest in tools and products to build a shop. Oddly enough, today I have the money to buy some of the better tools that I could not afford when I was in the industry.

So, as I step back into the shop, I bring with me a different perspective on life and skills than I formerly had when working wood for a career.  Frankly, I found that I was much more rusty than I could have expected.  But, I am having fun.

I have family and friends that are interested in what I am doing, so blogging about it seemed like the way to keep everyone posted and current with what I am doing.