For over three decades, my world has been defined by pixels, logic, and glowing glass. I have built a life and a career sitting behind PCs and laptops, navigating the clean, predictable laws of the digital landscape.
But in September 2024, I decided to step away from the screen—not to abandon it, but to find a counterweight. I wanted to see what happened when my hands interacted with something that didn’t have an “Ctr-Z / undo” shortcut.
That curiosity brought me to the Woodwork – Beginners and Improvers course from Surrey Adult Learning Centre at West Molesey at the Henrietta Parker Trust Workshop.
The Evolution of My Space: Desk to Workbench
The transformation wasn’t just mental—it was physical. It started right in my own garage office space that eventually got converted to workshop and then moved to mens shed, which slowly shifted me from a quiet digital haven into a sawdust-scented, tool-filled sanctuary.
Where it began: 30+ years surrounded by monitors, code, and digital logic and air-conditioned places like these !
Counterweight : The garage workshop—noisy, messy, and filled with vintage steel and timber.
Entering the Tactile World
Walking into a purpose-built, fully equipped workshop for the first time felt like stepping onto an entirely different planet. The smell of sawdust, the heavy iron of the machinery, and the sheer physicality of the space was an immediate, profound revelation.
Between September and December 2024, my education started from absolute square one:
The Living Material: Learning to read grain, identify different wood types, and understand the fluid, living nature of timber—specifically how seasonal moisture makes it expand, contract, and breathe.
The Hand Tools: Moving past basic hardware store mentalities to develop genuine familiarity with the precision of Japanese pull saws and the unforgiving sharpness of chisels.
The Machines: Overcoming the initial intimidation and learning to safely respect the raw power of the band-saw, the planer/thicknesser, and the grinders.
Why I am Documenting This
This space isn’t a business plan—at least, not yet. For the next two years, this is simply a record of a journey. It is a dedicated archive of mistakes made, skills earned, meeting people and projects built as I transition, just a few hours a week, from the digital screen to the workbench.
I’m incredibly grateful to myself for taking that initial leap into the dust. But even more so, I am deeply grateful to my wife and daughter, who has patiently put up with the sudden transformation of my garage office space into a noisy, sawdust-filled workshop, endured my constant weekend pilgrimages to flea markets for vintage tools, and survived a never-ending stream of woodworking videos playing on YouTube.
The spark has been lit, the garage is properly messy, and the journey is officially underway.
