Jen Woodhouse: A Powerful Influence in the Woodworking Blogosphere

By Stacy Moser | Photography by Justin Borja

The garage in Jen Woodhouse’s Harker Heights home isn’t just your average car park. This is her workplace, a carpenter’s wonderland. As she swings open the door, an impressive workshop is revealed—every wall is covered with neatly arranged rows of power tools, each hung within easy reach of her workbenches and tidy stacks of lumber.

As she talks, she scoots aside a half-finished bookcase and wheels out a miter saw on a portable stand, deftly adjusting the blade and wood guides on its table.

This is clearly someone who knows her way around a DIY project.

Her interest in woodworking began almost by accident. “I was pregnant with my first child and I just got that nesting instinct—you know?” she says as she slides on a pair of safety glasses. “That instinct kicked into overdrive and I started wanting to learn how to build things. My husband and I had a long hallway in our apartment and shoes were everywhere, which drove me nuts. I decided to build a shoe caddy. It was kind of a crazy idea because I had no tools, so I took a trip to The Home Depot. There I was, six months pregnant, waddling up and down the aisles, dragging a lumber cart behind me. People gave me strange looks, but I didn’t care.” She says she purchased some basic tools and lumber, then went home to put it all together—proving to herself that she could do it.

“My first Mother’s Day present was a compound miter saw,” she says, laughing. “And I’ve been building things ever since. It’s fun and it’s easier than you think.”

Jen began to photograph her DIY projects, everything from cutting boards to entertainment centers, and posted them online, writing, “Look what I made! It was easy and you can do it too.” As readers responded to her posts, asking for details, she decided to write up the plans. “I write my plans like a recipe,” she says. “If you can follow a recipe, you can build a table. You don’t need fancy wood-working tools and you can use off-the-shelf lumber.”

The reaction to her “recipes” was overwhelming. “Readers wrote to me, sending me pictures of their projects, saying things like, ‘I used your plan to build this. It was my very first time building anything and it was fun!’ I want to make woodworking a lot more accessible, especially for women—that’s my goal.”

She says that tool companies and businesses like The Home Depot and Lincoln Electric began to pay attention as her audience grew. “I grew my audience online by building an authentic and organic relationship with them—my readers trust me. They say, ‘Hey, if she can do it, I can do it.’ When I make a recommendation about how to do a project and where to get the tools and materials they need, it can be a lot more effective because of that relationship. I’m not a TV commercial selling them something they may or may not need. I’m a real person who’s figuring things out, sharing my experiences, and taking them along on the journey.”

Jen explains how her collaborative process works with corporate sponsors of her woodworking blog, The House of Wood: The DIY Life of a Military Wife. “A company will say, ‘Hey, we have this flooring product and we want to get some eyeballs on it. What can we do?’ I really love that all the brands I partner with allow me creative freedom to tell their story in my own voice. So I’ll make over my laundry room floor with the product and take pictures of my process, film a video and write a blog post about it. My sponsors pay for that online content that showcases their products in a real-life scenario for an engaged audience. It’s not lost on me that this is the weirdest job ever!”

Before Jen learned to wield a power tool or brandish a blowtorch, she made a living as a singer and songwriter. “I earned a degree in musical theater from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. After that, I lived in Nashville and was writing songs and performing, touring all over the United States,” she says. She met her husband, Adam, now a major in the Army, when he came to one of her concerts in 2007. The two hit it off immediately and were engaged two weeks after their first date. They married after he came back from a deployment in Iraq, then moved around the country as required for Adam’s work, most recently relocating to Fort Hood.

When asked to describe her musical style, Jen pauses, staring at the ceiling for a second. “If Nora Jones and Amy Winehouse had a baby—that’s my sound,” she smiles. “Kind of jazzy, but in a pop-rock kind of way.”

She gave up her musical touring life when she and Adam had children—Evie, who is eight, and Liam, who is six. “I didn’t want to be away from home all the time, so I started to license my music for films and TV series. I had an agent who would call and say, ‘We’ve got this film and this is its premise—we need a song about it.’ It was like a creative-writing assignment.” Her songs graced such TV series as E! Network’s “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and MTV’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” among others.

Now that Jen is raising children and working from home, she can easily relate to the readers of her blog, many of whom are moms. “Like me, they want to be resourceful, save money and make furniture customized for their own space.”

She admits that her biggest challenge is finding a balance between the demands of her business and the needs of her family. “My husband is a huge part of how I manage all this on a daily basis,” she explains. “We home-school our kids and Adam and I trade off responsibilities around the house. It can be stressful to fit everything in, but it’s been good for the kids to watch us build a business. Whenever they see furniture they like in a magazine or a TV commercial, they don’t say, ‘Hey, Mom, can you buy that for me?”

She pauses for dramatic effect. “They say, ‘Hey, Mom, can you build that for me?’”

Building Blocks

Jen’s Tips for Introducing Kids to Woodworking

• Find tools that will fit smaller hands. For instance, Makita and Ryobi offer smaller tools at lower price points.
• Start out simple. Show your kids how to make a table that is scaled to their height. It’s got four legs and a top—pretty basic—and it’s something they can use in their own room.
• Choose softer woods, like pine, for projects. It’s very forgiving and easy to hammer nails into or saw into pieces. It’s cheaper, too, so if you mess up, you won’t break the bank to replace a piece.

— JenWoodhouse.com