I’ve started my journey towards woodworking after buying a house and finding out it’s really useful to get at least the basic skills to fix stuff around house. Besides, being educated as a software engineer, it’s really awesome to create something you can actually touch and be present in the physical world.

Not sure where exactly, but most likely by some YouTube recommendation mystery, I ended up seeing some videos from Samurai Carpenter. It was a long time ago, maybe around 2017 – before he burned out from all the content creation and online schools, before he went crazy and moved out to the woods with his family. Before he burned out again and eventually realized it’s not the paradise he imagined, but a tough life out there in the wild :-)

I haven’t seen most of his videos, definitely not the middle part of the latest ones. The old ones focusing on basic building techniques and tools are the best and most valuable IMHO. I bought few japanese saws because of him, they are nice and crazy sharp (my left hand could tell stories :-) but you can do without them. The main message I took from him was “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, leans to do manual things, build beautiful stuff that will last years to come and maybe even outlive you”.

So I built a playhouse for kids, playground in the garden with swings and slide, wood shed, house for cats, sturdy workbench from spruce beams, a loft in our garage to store our seasonal stuff, several bouldering walls and more. It was not always an efficient way time- and money-wise (in the beginning, when you don’t know the darn stuff), but a ton of fun anyway.

Plumbing

Learning some basic plumbing stuff was also good experience which paid for itself already. How to join copper fittings with threading, how to weld PPR together, how to format and use bellows (“vlnovec” in Czech), that was all very useful. The first several seals we made with my dad the old-fashioned way (using hemp & paste), when installing a central water-softener for the house, were all leaking first, a lot. It was a stressful afternoon with when your wife is asking when the water will be running again in the house :-) But I watched some videos overnight, learned about Tangit sealing cord and teflon tapes and voilà, the next day we fixed everything and worked without a single drop from the joins.