About Me
A story about me and what I find so fascinating about working with wood and other natural materials.
What excites me about woodworking is its endless possibilities. With just my hands, a few tools, and some skills, I can make all sorts of things. I love being able to use my creativity to turn ideas into real objects.
One thing I really like is that making furniture yourself is often cheaper, and you can make it exactly how you want it. I also enjoy using old materials, like wood from pallets or things people throw away. I mix these with new techniques to create useful items, like lamps. I even upgraded my drill press, which was over 50 years old, using new technology.
I've learned a lot from watching YouTube videos. They've taught me about different tools and how to use them. Without them, I wouldn't know half as much as I do now.
How everything started:
When I was around six years old, I had this idea to play detective with my friend. Inspired by the detective stories I was reading at the time, I knew every good detective needed a hideout. So, I decided to build one on the property next to our house, which my parents owned.
I didn't have a plan, just some materials I found in the bulky waste. Slowly, with time and trial and error, I managed to put together a tiny room, if you could even call it that. It wasn't exactly a "detective shelter," but more like a dream of having my own little house. I added a canopy, and it evolved into a second room. For over two years, I tinkered away, even dabbling in electronics to get some light in there. Of course, not everything worked perfectly, and there were plenty of setbacks along the way.
After a few enjoyable years of working on my little shelter, my interest waned, and I shifted my focus to building a small workshop in our garage. That workshop grew and improved over time, becoming a place where I could explore my creativity and skills even further.
My buisness dream:
Caused by my school, everyone had to do a 2 week long iternship in a job of their choise. Naturally I choose to do mine at a local carpentry shop. After some searching I found one that seemed to fit my needs very well, as it said in the internet, they nearly only work with real wood. So after writing a letter of motivation, I got accepted and started my internship in january.
This experience was very fascinating for me. I gained a lot of insights into real everyday business life as well as new inspiration for my own future carpentry projects. The whole experience definitely supported my dream to sometimes start and open my own business. But therefore I still want to continue and finish my high school diploma and probably study something like “Business Management” or “Engineering” afterwards. In the meantime I am curious for more practical insights and open for more learning any business relevant topics.
My knowledge and interests:
I go to a local Gymnasium in my hometown Bonn, where I plan to pass the Abitur in 2027. Besides the woodworking, I also like to play tennis and ride my road bike. This is especially fun to do in the holidays, for example in italy.
Impression of my very early work (4-7 years old)
My workshop:
A workshop is constantly in change - here you can read about mine!
When I started working in our Garage, the first years I just sat on the ground and build things. At that time, I stored the very few tools I owned on a part of the shelf in the Garage and a toolbox. When I was about ten to eleven years old, I build a workbench and started working with that, which worked much better than on the floor. At twelve, I started building some shelves for sorting and even build a disk sander from an old motor and some wood, which I still use very often. As I got more tools, I also build more shelves and carts to store them which, really helped in my workflow. Two years after the disk sander I decided to build an oscillating spindle sander, which was very complicated as two motors have to work together, and I faced a lot of problems but also managed to solve them, and I learned a lot in this project. Of course, during these years of building a workshop, I also build some usable things, a main part of them being, lamps.
My workshop:
I found out that for me the best way to store hand tools is a tool wall because you see everything at once and every tool has its own place.
On the workbench in front of the tool wall is a pretty old vise from my grandpa, and it is so solid, it’s basically not possible to break it.
Over the years I collected some hand clamps, and you really can’t have enough of them when you are doing a big glue up where a lot of clamping pressure is required.