It started with “I can build that.”

The first time I remember using woodworking tools properly, I was a kid in Scouts and my dad was leaning over the project with me. He wasn’t a woodworker. He was the kind of person who fixed the car himself rather than paying somebody to do it, and I picked that up without noticing.

The tools came slowly after college, one at a time. What got them used was my wife. She would find something online she liked, a shelf, a bit of decor, something on Etsy, and I’d look at it and say I could build that. Then I had to.

Corner shelves first. Then barnwood pieces for the house, then Christmas decorations, then gifts for family that got more ambitious every year until I was making trees and snowmen and skis in a garage in November.

My grandfather started our family’s Christmas tree farm about forty years ago, and it’s still going. I’ve been there since I was five, when the job was dragging trees out of the field and the fun was climbing the pile of fresh-baled ones.

Years later that lot became the first place strangers bought something I’d made. I brought up a batch of tabletop trees, standing snowmen, skis, a few decorations with no real idea whether anyone would want them. I live a couple of hours away, so I dropped them off and my grandfather did most of the selling.

They sold. That was the first sign this could be more than a hobby, and it’s why Daddy Build It doesn’t feel to me like a business that started in 2026. It started on that lot.

I’d thought about turning woodworking into a business before I was a father. Daddy Build It didn’t exist until the girls did.

My wife and I came to our daughters through surrogacy, and it was a long road. The first trip in 2023, the match at the end of 2024, two embryos transferred and both of them taking. Our twin girls were born in 2025, in Ukraine.

Once they were here, the idea changed shape. I stopped thinking about a woodworking company and started thinking about something they could grow up around. Something where the question is let’s see what Dad builds today.

We spent about three weeks in Ukraine with our daughters before we could bring them home. It was not the trip anyone pictures when they imagine meeting their children.

There were sirens, and shelters, and trains. We washed bottles wherever we could find a sink, including on board. One night I was up at two in the morning feeding one of the girls when I saw something hit in the distance, and I woke my wife and we went down. After that I kept a bag packed by the door so that when the warnings came we could strap both babies to us and be moving in minutes.

There were stretches where I was awake more than a day straight, working out train times and translations and feeds. And somewhere in the middle of it, on one of those trains, a man sitting near us realised only after a long while that there were two newborns travelling beside him. They had been that quiet the whole way.

We landed at Newark. There was a United States seal on the wall of the airport, and we stopped and took a photo of the four of us next to it. We were home. We still think about the people who helped us get there, and we still talk to our coordinator in Ukraine.

Everything is made in a shop at home, about forty by sixty feet, concrete floor, more tools than I could honestly argue were all strictly necessary. Some days it’s organised. Most days there are three projects going and the router is out because the router is always out.

I work in cherry, red oak, spalted maple, pine, reclaimed lumber, barnwood, and boards cut by family and left to dry for later. Knots, grain, spalting and colour changes aren’t flaws to me, they’re the reason to use real wood. Offcuts get kept, because a piece that’s useless for one project is usually perfect for a smaller one.

I’m still learning. Brad nails come through the wrong side, cuts go wrong, things get set aside until the fix becomes obvious. I’d rather show that than pretend I’ve been doing this flawlessly for thirty years.

Right now that means handmade pieces and custom work. Over time it means build plans you can follow, videos of the builds including the parts that go wrong, and eventually somewhere people can come and learn to use the tools themselves.

The point isn’t look what I can make that you can’t. It’s closer to look what I worked out how to make, and you could learn this too.

And the long version, the one I actually think about: family land, a house I build on it, a bigger shop beside it, and two girls who grow up knowing they can make the thing instead of buying it. If they want to run this one day, it’ll be here.