Lights. Camera. Action.

This journal will be a place for me to put my thoughts down. I love writing, and especially editing that writing, to ensure I’m as open and communicative as possible. It’s usually the best way for people to connect.


Starting this business, website, and journey, has very little to do with woodworking, to be honest.

For the past two years, I’ve been slowly wrapping my head around how I was going to continue the rest of my life. Originally, it was just supposed to be a way to bring in some extra income on top of any regular work I do. The more I looked into what it might take, the more I remembered just how much I was into design, in all its forms.

Graphic, interior, sound, environmental, furniture, theatre/film sets and props, and all kinds of workspace systems. You name it, I take an interest in it.

It’s turned into something so much more important. This idea of starting a business around my ideals of design started to form as a culmination of my life up until now, with special influence as someone who is Ottawa born and raised. Pragmatic, beautiful, and utterly practical living.

I’ve spent most of my working life learning how to be useful. That might sound like a strange way to describe a career line, but it’s probably the most accurate one I can think of. Even when I inevitably became so useful to the people and workplaces I found myself around, that I began to move beyond just learning and perfecting.

None of it was necessarily part of some grand plan.

Early on, a lot of my work was labour-intensive. Work harder, and maybe if I was lucky, a little smarter. It was about showing up, figuring out what needed to be done, and getting it done with the people around me, with the equipment we were provided, and all in a set amount of time. In my mind, it bred a self competitive nature, efficiency, and basically just a strong, literally and figuratively, work ethic.

Over time, I started to appreciate just how much can be accomplished when a group of people work well together, in the space provided. That idea has followed me through pretty much every job I’ve had. Tied to both working efficiently, and safely, with no compromise to either.

The most influential job I’ve taken, which that last sentence applies to almost the most, is working on sets as both a Locations Production Assistant and an Assistant Location Manager, where the work can change completely from one minute to the next, let alone days.

You learn to solve problems quickly (Whatever you think quick means is probably not quick enough), communicate clearly, keep track of a hundred moving pieces, and sometimes just figure out how to make something work with whatever you have in front of you.

The main theme I see throughout all this work?

People work their best when they’re prepared their best at work. No attitude, mood, or energy level can fight the sheer economics and ergonomics of a well balanced workspace.

And somewhere in all of that, I kept coming back to making things to solve for this. Creating workspace solutions for permanent and temporary use. Small hand fashioned “tools” that help speed up whatever task you could think of. Renovating or modifying the current workspace to be more productive, while reducing clutter.

Even though all of these types of solutions are available through purchasing simple items usually, or paying for a professional/adviser to come in, that option was rarely ever available. Bosses, corporations, supervisors, and the like, never wanted to expend the money for these problems. It’s the classic. Your worker tends to know where the problems are way better than a manager, and somehow cares about them way more.

Woodworking, and general creating and crafting, happens to be one of the places where a lot of those skills meet.

It’s physical, but it requires planning. It’s technical, but there’s plenty of room for creativity. It can be a solitary process, but making something for someone else means understanding what they actually need. And, perhaps most importantly to me, you can feel it form bit by bit. Screw by screw.

Now, working in manufacturing, I’ve finally learned about pipelining. It’s become of my favourite systems to observe, study, and implement into my own work.

Northern Formed isn't the result of me deciding one day that I wanted to become a woodworker. It’s the result of years of picking things up, putting things together, figuring things out, making mistakes, learning new skills, and slowly (maybe even surely) becoming more confident in what I can do.

I’m still figuring out exactly what this is going to become, but I know how it starts.

I have much more to say, and wish to continue my thoughts. I shall in a later post, on a later date. Until then, I have much more work to do. Maybe as do you.

tl;dr,

I hope this journal helps me communicate why I believe you should understand and implement my philosophies into your own life.