My daughter, who is five now, has been interested lately in helping me in the workshop. This is good because it means I can spend time woodworking without abandoning her all Sunday afternoon, but it also limits the complexity of my work, because a woodworking shop is, obviously, no place for an unattended child. I’ve been trying to find projects we can work on together; we made a few squirrel feeders back in the fall, with simple nails for holding cobs of dry corn, and now we’re building a winter warming shelter for chickadees (since a bird house would go unused for a few months).

For Christmas I bought her a few tools of her own — hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, try square, and carpenter’s pencils — never underestimate the value of rectangular pencils in making a child feel like a real carpenter! More important, I built her a workbench of her own.

It’s a scaled down version of my own workbench, which is not a proper joiner’s bench but a fairly simple table-like structure designed to go against a wall. I built it in graduate school, and combined with a Stanley WorkMate it’s a good solution for a small space. Some of the attraction of the mini-bench is that it’s just like dad’s, but it’s a solid, functional table for a child.

The bench is 33 inches wide, 21 inches deep, and 25 inches high. The width is somewhat arbitrary — big enough to be useful but small enough to fit in the available space. The height and depth are tailored to the worker: The benchtop should be at a comfortable working height, and it is as deep as her arm is long, so that she can comfortably reach the tools on the peg board without their being in the way while she works. Since everything is put together with bolts and screws, I can replace the legs with longer ones when she outgrows the bench.

The body is made of two-by-fours, joined with half-lap joints with either carriage bolts or screws: four legs, a rectangle at top, and two stretchers on the sides and one at the back (but none at front, where it would get in the way). The top is plywood, with two-by-four stops along the back and left side to hold work in place and keep little items like screws from rolling off the back. The peg board is framed with one-by-two-inch pine, rabbeted to hold the peg board and joined at the corners with butt joints and screws. The whole project would be less than a day’s work for someone who could actually spend a solid day in the shop.

I chose the pegboard rather than a toolbox because, first, it’s what I use — again, I was trying to make it “just like dad’s” to maintain the feeling of doing real work. It also lets her see all of her tools at once — which is a nice feeling for a woodworker of any age — while providing a proper place for everything, to reinforce the lesson that a good craftsgirl keeps her workshop neat and her tools safe. And, finally, it adds to the feeling that this is her space in the workshop.

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