In the above video James "Jim" Huggett shares a recent tour of his Furniture Making workshop in Earlysville, Virginia, just a few miles from the Wood And Shop Traditional Woodworking School. Jim reached out to me over a year ago, after he learned that my shop & school were just down the road from him. I dropped by his workshop (J.F. Huggett Custom Furniture), and was amazed that such an accomplished and skilled furniture maker
Although refrigerators long ago rendered them obsolete, antique oak ice boxes remain popular with collectors, even though they’re expensive and hard to find. This do-it-yourself version is neither: it’s both inexpensive and easy to build. An authentic reproduction of an original, the project is especially popular when used as a bar, but it has many

I recently taught a three day "Introduction to Hand Tool Woodworking" class here at my traditional woodworking school in Virginia, and want to share the experience to give you an idea of what the class is like. The first thing students do in this class is learn about & try out workbenches and all the different hand tools in the shop. Then they jump in and use a folding rule to measure out a length
As the comic George Carlin might say, a shop is mostly just “a place to put your stuff.” The physical aspect of a shop is indeed simply a space of some kind — a garage, a barn, a teepee — that keeps the rain, rust, and robbers away and houses a collection of implements needed to saw, plane, slice, sand, and pound raw wood into useful objects. But just like the difference between a house and a home, what transforms a building full of tools into a comfortable workshop goes beyond the mere physical aspect.
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