Hi! I’m Ryan Stauffer, owner of Grape Country Woodcraft. Thanks for stopping by to visit my website. I’ll try to polish and flesh out this site more later, but at the moment I have projects in the shop calling my name. Below is a brief overview of my history with woodworking in case you’re interested.
Where it all began
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.
