Working wood sucks. Or better yet I suck at working wood.

For the past 16 years since moving into the house I now live in I have not had a workspace. Before living here I was interested in but not very well satisfied by power-tool woodworking. I owned the usual assortment of hand held power tools and one stationary tool a Shopsmith Mark V system with a bandsaw, jointer and scroll saw attachments. The house has an unusable wet basement and no room in the house for a shop so I was forced to keep my tools on a back porch that only partially blocked the outside weather. Over the years the tools I still owned like the Shopsmith rusted and became unusable. Six years ago I bought a small Delta Midi-Lathe and had it set up in one corner of our kitchen. It very quickly became apparent that there was no way to keep the dust levels down to an acceptable level so I moved the lathe and it's tools out to the porch as well. The lathe was and still is usable but not in the cold weather. The Shopsmith eventually became so rusty it would not start when I turned on the switch and three years ago I posted an ad online and gave it and all of it's attachments away. I gave up any more thoughts of woodworking as the stationary power tools were out of my reach as far as cost and a place to use them. We refinanced the house last year to pay for some upgrades and had a two story 16 x 20 storage shed built in our backyard in November, 2011. Having forced myself not to pay any attention to woodworking for the last 7 years or so I decided to attend a national woodworking show at it's New England site in Springfield, MA last January to get an idea of what tools were currently available with the idea I would start searching Craigslist for power tool bargains when I got home. A month before the show I found a 1990's vintage Shopsmith with a bandsaw and other attechments on Craigslist which I bought. I also purchased a refurbished electric router and a used shop size size 2HP dust collector. When we got to the show I ran from vendor to vendor to see as much as I could in the limited time I had available. I kept pausing at one particular exhibit which was a demo of hand tool wood working techniques by Paul Sellers. What little I saw was fascinating but under pressure to see as much as I could I kept running off to other parts of the show. On the way home I could not stop thinking about the hand tool demo I had seen and when we got back to Vermont I looked up Paul Sellers and his New Legacy School of woodworking online. The videos I found and Mr. Sellers' blogs convinced me that acquiring a shop full of pwer tools was not the way forward for me. I bought copies of his Working Wood, Series 1 & 2 book and 7 companion videos. They were shocking and eye opening. I have been scouring Ebay for old user tools such as hand planes and hand saws since.