About us

I started Grape Country Woodcraft to fulfill my love of making beautiful things out of wood and as a means of supporting my family. I've worked with wood for many years now and it just feels like home to me to be surrounded by sawdust and the smell of freshly cut wood. And having grown up helping Dad in a small, family-owned woodshop, I want to create a similar experience for my children.

Create beautiful, durable kitchens

With careful planning, hard work, and attention to details, I ensure every kitchen is beautiful, premium, and durable. 

Build relationships

I enjoy interacting with people and building meaningful relationships. I take an interest in the lives of my clients and am happy to spend time just visiting.

Advance Christ's kingdom

I am a Christian and consider everything that I have to be a blessing from God. As an ambassador of Christ, my goal is that everything that I do and say would bring glory to Him. I may take the liberty to decline jobs if the requested work is primarily in support of activities that Christ would disapprove of.

Provide for my family

I am blessed with a family and work hard to provide for them. In addition to financial matters, this also includes being available and involved as a husband and dad. I make a conscious effort to not make myself so busy with shop work that I neglect their needs.

My earliest recollections of woodworking are of going along with my Dad to the shop before I started school. He worked alongside several of his brothers and my grandfather in a family business that made custom kitchens. It was a child-friendly environment, and I have many fond memories of tinkering with wood scraps in the shop and helping sweep floors and push sawdust into the floor sweep.

When I was a young teenager, Dad bought me plans for a detailed high-track dozer from Toys and Joys, and I spent months working at it on and off. Dad helped me with making the tracks (which actually move), but other than that, I built it myself.

Around that time, I also started actually helping after school with shop projects. We lived close to the shop, so I was able to bike over and help for a few hours before the end of the workday. I started learning how to assemble doors, finish sand doors and drawers, and route mortis and tenon face frames with a multi-router.

I went to school through 10th grade (which was the highest grade that the private school I went to taught) and then started working full-time in the shop immediately after. By the time I was 18, I could do any job in the shop and specialized in making face frames, routing cabinet parts on the panel router, and spraying finish. I enjoyed the face frames and panel router jobs because of the mental math and precision required, and the finish spraying for the art that it is.

I spent nearly 7 years in woodworking between the end of school and getting married. One of those years was spent doing voluntary service in a woodshop at a mission in the Bahamas, where I made many Bahamian and Haitian friends. My time spent in the shop there involved a much wider variety of projects than just kitchens.

My wife was from the Erie, PA area, and when we got married, I moved to her area. For a few years, I worked as in sales/design at Haines Printing, and at first, I had no definite plans of doing woodworking again. I had an empty shop at the place we purchased, and it didn’t take long for the nostalgia of sawdust to prompt me to start buying a few machines. It also didn’t take long for local friends to find out, and cabinetry projects started trickling in. I’d spend my evenings and Saturdays in the shop and gradually purchased more machinery from auctions until I had a fully functional kitchen shop.