Is woodworking a good hobby?

A hobby is an activity or interest that is pursued for pleasure outside of one’s regular work and helps your forget about the daily grind.   Examples of hobbies include woodworking, stamp collecting, , model railroading, scrap booking, golf, reading, painting, tap dancing, gardening, arts & crafts, vehicle restoration, music, fishing, cooking, boating, furniture refinishing, and many other activities or pastimes.

However, we must be careful not to let our leisure/non-work time be completely consumed by our hobbies. Our hobbies can easily consume a significant portion of our time after work because they can be so enjoyable.   We need to prioritise and balance our time spent on hobbies with other, far more important aspects of our lives, such as family time, home maintenance, physical fitness, and pet care.   When you have too much of a good thing, it can be detrimental.

Hobbies are really good for balancing our mood, if all we ever do is go to work, come home, walk the dog, go to the gym, eat and sleep, you can get in rut and find yourself not being as friendly as you normally are.    By having an outside interest such as a hobby, we provide ourselves with a healthy release for stress and can give you something to talk about other than work.

Some hobbies can also be expensive to begin with large upfront costs, whereas other seemingly low-cost hobbies can quickly add up financially once you get into them.   It’s time to reconsider your devotion to a hobby that is draining too much of your family’s finances.   If your hobby has turned into a money pit, it’s not the end of the world, and you probably have a couple of options. You could change what you’ve been doing for the sake of your family, or you could shift your focus to a hobby that requires less time but can also earn you money. This way, you get all of the life-balancing health benefits of a hobby that is not a drain on your finances but rather a contributor to them.

Many hobbies can be turned into profitable businesses with low overhead and start-up costs, which may surprise you. People will seek out your skills and experience if you are very good at some niche hobbies, in addition to being able to sell the items you make as a hobby. You might end up selling your expertise as a service, especially if you’ve been doing your hobby on a consistent basis for a long time.   For example, if you’ve been making wooden toys as a hobby for your children and the children of your friends for years, you’re probably a pretty good woodworker that specialises in a niche market.

Without a doubt, you’d have a lot of knowledge stored away in your brain about the types of wood, tools/equipment, and consumables you’ve been using to make those particular wooden toys.   You’ve probably also collected a bunch of woodworking books and have a lot of favourite websites that you’ve been turning to for years to learn and obtain ideas from.

If you think about it, you have a lot of specialised skills, knowledge, and experience. You understand exactly what someone would need to do if they wanted to start a hobby similar to yours. You could advise people not only on the specifics of your hobby, but also on woodworking as a hobby in general.

Someone looking for a new hobby and possibly interested in learning woodworking would benefit greatly from your knowledge. You could help them figure out what they need to do based on their ideas, space and budget available to them, and so on. Your experience would be very valuable to many people in that situation, and you could save them a lot of time and money in the long run.

You might be able to use social media to promote your desire to help people learn your craft and then sell your experience as a service. If you’ve ever used an internet search engine to look for information, you know how time-consuming it is to sift through the thousands of results presented to you, after you’ve gotten past the first few pages of advertisements that often have nothing to do with your search criteria.

People are frequently found scrolling through a large amount of information that does not appear to be of high quality, and their main goal appears to be to get you to click on something they are attempting to sell. It takes time to figure out what you can and cannot use, and you may be able to save people a lot of time and frustration by assisting them from the beginning and eliminating the need for them to search for information that you already have.

There’s no telling what can happen when you combine your personal enjoyment of a hobby with the ability to sell products and offer your knowledge as a service. A woodworking hobby can be a great way for your family to get involved at various levels, and as long as you don’t spend too much time on it, it can be a great solution for you.