As for my interests, I'm definitely interested in cabinetry and at least a little furniture making but also smaller projects like cutting boards, chess boards, etc.
As for my current skills and tools, I'm fairly adept at carpentry - having personally built (with assistance) one house and remodeled another - and have plenty of carpenter type power tools, including an el cheapo, portable table saw and benchtop drill press that have served me fairly well. I don't have a jointer or a benchtop planer, though, so I'm assuming I'll need to invest in those if and when I get more serious.
As for stuff I've done, I've really only built one piece of furniture of which I'm really proud and I had some assistance from my uncle on it - though I did the design and virtually all of the work myself, with him mainly overseeing and lending a helping hand every now and then. It's a floating, wall-mounted entertainment center with integrated air handling and a false back for cable routing. I've done a few, small, built-in and shelving type projects which were pretty good but nothing spectacular.
Right now, I'm "allowed" to expand into half of the garage for my workshop projects, so space is definitely a current concern. Eventually, I'd like to built a dedicated garage/workshop out building where space would be much less of an issue but I'd need to show SWMBO that it's worthwhile, first.
I've got two projects my wife wants me to do - a mudroom type built-in and a closet redo - that will need significant panel handling for which my little table saw is ill-equipped. So, I'm currently looking at proceeding in one of two ways...
The first option is to build a semi-mobile, 30" by 96" workbench that would hold a decent-to-good benchtop table saw, a router lift, a combination clamping/assembly/downdraft/bench-dog table, storage for sleds & jigs, and removable in-feed & out-feed tables. I would attach a good table saw fence system to the table to provide accuracy for the table saw and router lift. The fence system could, of course, be later utilized if and when I were to be able to justify investing in a high-quality cabinet table saw.
The second option is to go with a contractor or hybrid table saw with a decent fence system and, instead of the aforementioned workbench, build a smaller version of the clamping/assembly/downdraft/bench-dog table which would also serve as an out-feed table.
Since I've got a decent bit of cabinet-grade plywood and dimensional lumber on hand, the first option is actually significantly less expensive at the moment and fits better into my garage workspace.
One of the biggest things I'm unsure about is sourcing lumber. Since I don't have - as far as I know - easy access to high-quality downed trees to take to a sawmill and a year or two to wait on them to dry, what's the best way to acquire good stock for projects. I'm also a bit concerned about lumber storage. I know it's almost certainly cheaper to buy in bulk but I don't currently have much indoor storage for stocking lumber.
