Welcome to the Family Hearth Journal! We started a small woodworking business in 2022 (check out the main website here). We wanted to find ways to bring some productivity into our home, making something together as a family. Our dream from the beginning was to grow this into something more, to help other families build something together. This new site is our first step into that something more.

Perhaps even more importantly, we have some things to say about the scarcest treasure we have: time. Building a business while working another job and raising a family raises some peculiar problems, and until we did it ourselves we had never really given any thought to them. What is the work really all about? When is enough enough? What is the point of it all?

You can expect a variety of content here over time. To give a sample of what you can expect:

1. Tutorials – Building things out of wood is fun and rewarding, and we want to help you do it, too. We’d like to have many that that you can build with and for your kids.
2. Reviews – What tools do we like? How do things compare when they’re used day after day making real stuff? We’ll let you know.
3. Small Business Advice – How has starting up a small business worked for us? What advice do we have to offer after a few years of giving this whole thing a try? It’s hard to work a full-time job, manage a household, and work a small business, and we want to help you avoid some of the problems we have run into if you choose to do it yourself.
4. Family Stuff – Making stuff with your family is great, but it’s not the only way you should be spending time together. We want to bring you resources on growing great kids and a stronger marriage, things we are trying to do ourselves.
5. Games – We make many of our products are made with board games in mind. Locally and seasonally, we make and sell yard games, too. We want to let you know what we enjoy and give you some suggestions.
6. Product Announcements – We’re not going to stop making things, and we’ll let you know about them here. You’ll see these announcements posted on our workshop site as well. We plan to offer plans for some projects in the future, too, some free and some for a small cost.
7. Project Builds – It’s good to keep a record of how a particular project was built, what was learned, and what you would do differently next time. We’ll have articles featuring some of the things we build.
8. How to Become a Productive Household – We want you to know what we mean when we talk about being a “productive household”, why it’s important, why it’s valuable, and suggestions on how to get there yourself. This doesn’t mean you spend all of your time working, and the time you spend “working” is not always for money.
9. Making a Simpler Life – Everyone is always busy and we treat it like a trophy rather than a burden. What if we didn’t?
10. The Most Important Things – Why are we here and what’s it all about? Why does all the rest of this stuff matter at all?