My wife (Pat) and I are both retired from the Air Force and live in the Ozarks of north central Arkansas. Pat was an electronic communications maintenance officer/Command communications system officer. I started as an electronics technician and thanks to the Air Force’s continuing education program, ended as an electronic system engineer in the satellite tracking field. But, we both have had a life long love for woodworking.

After Pat retired we began Our Project – to build our own home with only our own labor. We sometimes refer to it as our “Taunton House” as we have been subscribers to FWW and FHB since the first issues and have drawn a lot in ideas and techniques.  We knew it would be a long project (had no real idea of how long!) so we first built our “utility house”. It consist of a 32 x60 ft concrete block building with half framed and finished as living quarters and the the other half as a shop.

Until now, the shop has been set up primarily to support construction type work (forms, framing, etc). The major construction of our Project is nearing completion (we are now doing interior plaster work) and we are beginning to shift our shop toward finish woodworking to do cabinets, build-ins, and furniture. So we are tuning the planer (Powermatic 221) with a new Byrd head (thanks to threads from here and other forums) and looking at several other items that need similar work. So we are really glad we have such a great reservoir of knowledge from where to draw.

If you would care to see a photo time line of our project, I uploaded a few photos to Kodak’s free site (our only available Internet connection is one very slow dialup ISP) to make them available.
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingReg.jsp?Uc=88zuvsar.67qjr403&Uy=-mzmo2l&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromsha re&Ux=1&UV=178106526604_428630859107

We welcome comments and questions and those can be sent to us at [email protected].

Looking forward to sharing with all of you.
Garay and Pat Holland