My journey into furniture making…
I wasn’t always a furniture maker, before I re trained in furniture making, I was working in the charity sector as a fundraiser, organising events, working on sponsorship deals & managing volunteers to name a few of my duties. Sadly for me it wasn’t the rose tinted work I believed and it became unfulfilling and didn’t make me happy…….time for a change, but WHAT! We’re going back about 14 years, but I must have realised I wasn’t happy and had taken up a couple of evening classes, whilst I was still working. I’d never thought about working with wood, in fact I hadn’t done anything since my GCSE design tech class, many years earlier, which I scraped a pass of some sorts with a D grade!! I was always fairly practical, learning skills though my time in the scouting movement and some in my genetics, passed to be my dad, who made me an amazing action man tower when I was a child. I took up one woodcarving evening class and one generic woodworking evening class. I loved these classes working with my hands and being creative, it opened up a new side of me.
Where next then?
To be honest, I wasn’t sure, I did loads of research into different wood industries, which at the time didn’t include furniture making! I found out about an event at Yandles in Somerset, so I went and stumbled across a stall offering a furniture making class at a nearby college, Bridgewater college. So that’s where it began, I was offered a place, started when the college opened up for a new year, undertook the year long course and i’ve never looked back.
It hasn’t been an easy journey though…… College as a mature student was, lets say interesting, but I was so dedicated it just didn’t matter. After college, I knew I couldn’t work for anybody else, too long in the tooth for that! So working for myself was the only option. Only one slight problem, no where to work, only a few basic hand tools to my name and no way of financing the operation!! I couldn’t let any of that stop me, this was my only future. I started making a few bits in my kitchen (it was a very small kitchen), then I moved to another rented property with a shed!! I thought all my Christmases had come at once, somewhere to work in a fairly isolated spot on the edge of a Devon village. The shed was only a 10ft x 6ft, but hey it was bigger than my previous kitchen! I met my now partner whilst living there, we moved in together with 2 of her daughters into a different house (new start for us a family) and this time it came with a stone built shed in the garden, about 10ft x 8ft, great the workshops’ getting bigger! I invested where I could into some small machinery but the majority of my work was done the old fashioned way, by hand. My best investment was a small planer thicknesser, hand planing all my timber was far too time consuming and I just couldn’t make a living out of it, but I never gave up. A butter knife would cut a straighter line than my table saw, so eveything was shot off a shooting board to get those square ends.
Next chapter coming soon, i’ve been working on the website all day and my eyes have had more than enough!!! Catch you next time.
Olly