How not to move into a new workshop

In short: Corbett Made now resides just outside of Spokane, WA.

It’s been an interesting time, lately. First off, an apology for the website being broken for a bit. While my day job remained the same, everything around it changed. My family and I moved a little over a thousand miles and two states, I’ve shifted my goals a bit more towards a hybrid woodworking approach (mixing powertool and handtool elements), and my new location has a lot more… wood.

The new home comes with daily deer crossings

Corbett Made was founded in Los Angeles in 2018. I had found myself in California chasing a career, one I still maintain. My father was a carpenter by trade, and wood working had always been a part of my life in one way or another. I grew up with power tools and hand tools alike being around, and was given my first hammer at four or five years old. But it was never something I pursued until that time in 2018 when my daughter was born. I found myself suddenly with a lot of time late at night, awake and idle waiting for her first overnight bottle feed. I filled that time by learning about hand tools, buying tools and acquiring wood scraps – making shavings in the kitchen. If you’ve had kids, you know they are basically deaf while asleep in those early months – so the sound of my shakily sharpened off brand No5 hand plane didn’t even phase her.

The new shop on move-in day


I didn’t have many goals as a business at the time, it was just something to pursue to fill otherwise empty and anxious time. I wanted to take a swing at the old family trade, going back generations.

After about a year I was even able to sharpen a chisel to be, well, sharp. My shop and tools improved, eventually being moved to the garage. After dabbling in various things and tinkering and building my own workbench from scratch – I managed to make some things worth selling. And most astounding, to me, is that people wanted to buy them.

Even now, I don’t have aspirations of a giant business – I’d always want to remain a size where I could maintain my core business ethics and honesty. But I have been taking steps to allow myself to take the business more seriously. I do want to make more things, and I want people to want them as they did the first things I made. This is how I grow my shop, by reinvesting the money I make selling things I made – it goes right back into making the shop better. It was the goal I had before, and it is the goal I maintain now.

The state of the workshop as of this writing

And so now, post move, I look upon all of my boxed tools and hastily arranged new workshop and feel… great. It’s a new beginning, a place to grow and explore what I want to do – how I want to bring value to people. It isn’t my final shop, it is still a temporary place to set up – but it is the first time I’m taking serious consideration on layout, space, organization, cleanliness (notice there is a new dust collector), and goals.
Goals are an interesting thing – in some contexts they are simply aspirations, in others they are business priorities. In this case they are both, I aspire to have a business doing this – something that can make the workshop self sustaining and in fact grow. It helps me grow as a person, and check off my own aspirations.
The place is honestly a mess right now, and plenty of storage utilities were left behind in the move. And so most of it remains boxed until it has a rightful place to go. The shop is in stand-still until that is resolved, but I earnestly want to return to my inlay work and other crafts.

There are some grand changes planned: from adding a thickness planer & spindle sander to the power tools, to a new workbench build in the planning phase.

All things towards my ultimate goal: Make things of quality, of value, that will bring people joy in their ownership.

To make things Corbett Made.

My son exploring his new non-city surroundings