It started before
I knew what it was.
Growing up, woodworking wasn't a hobby — it was just part of life. My father had a way of breaking things down to their fundamentals. He didn't talk about aesthetics or artistic vision. He taught me squareness. Flatness. Alignment. He put tools in my hands and showed me what each one was for and why — not just how to use them, but when and why you'd reach for one over another. Those weren't lessons at the time. They were just how things got done.
I didn't realize until much later that what my father was giving me was a foundation. The kind you can build anything on. No shortcuts, no guessing — just an honest understanding of how wood behaves and what it takes to make something true.
Precision isn't a skill.
It's a way of thinking.
Eight years as a machinist sharpened everything my father started. Working in metal — tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch, zero room for error — pushed my understanding of squareness and alignment to a completely different level. Most woodworkers develop an eye for close enough. Machining removes that option entirely. You learn fast that the difference between a good piece and a great one is almost always invisible. It lives in the details no one will consciously notice, but everyone will feel.
That's exactly what I brought back to the wood shop. My father taught me what those words meant. Machining taught me to never compromise on them. Flat is truly flat. Square is truly square. Every joint is cut like someone is going to inspect it with a caliper — because in my mind, they are.
A chunk of wood holds
infinite possibility.
The part that gets me every single time is the beginning. A rough slab — heavy, unfinished, still carrying the character of the tree it came from. Knots, grain lines, color shifts, live edges that no two slabs share. I stand in front of it and start to see things. A table that doesn't exist yet. A shape. A finish. How the light will fall across it on a Tuesday morning ten years from now in someone's home.
That's the part I love most. Not the technique — though I take pride in every cut — but the vision. The ability to look at raw material and see not what it is, but what it wants to become. That's where machinist precision and artistic instinct meet, and where Timber & Resin Co. was born.
My girls make the shop
feel like home.
My daughters have grown up with sawdust in the air and the sound of sanding in the background. They don't help me build — not yet — but they're there. Wandering through the shop, asking questions, sitting on upturned crates watching a slab get its first pass of finish. They don't always know what they're witnessing, but I do.
They're watching their dad build something with his hands. Something real. Something that will sit in a family's home for decades. I hope one day they look back and understand that this — the craft, the care, the obsession with getting it right — was always for them too. The same way my father's time in the shop was for me.
Every table I build carries a little of that forward.
