Dave Osborne

An expert carpenter and builder, Dave Osborne was born in 1944 in North Vancouver, BC to first generation Canadian parents of English descent. He grew up in a family of carpenters: grandfather and uncles on his father's side. His father was a carpenter foreman for a small construction company, building commercial projects in the Vancouver area. When Dave was 15 years old, during his summer break from school, he worked with his dad on a new iron and concrete bridge over the Fraser River, West of Williams Lake, BC. He was hooked. Every summer after that, he was working with his dad, until he graduated from high school. After attending the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, for a second year, he quit to work as a carpenter's helper with a small framing crew. Friends who were attending a university in Abilene, Texas, invited Dave to join them to pursue his education. There he met his future wife, Frances. After two years of study Dave headed back to his second love: construction work. He and his first love married two years later. Dave completed his carpenter's apprenticeship and spent the next 6 years working in heavy construction with his dad, now the superintendent of a large construction company building mine concentration buildings in the Canadian North. In the meantime, Dave and Frances had three lovely daughters. A winter in the oil sands of Fort MacMurray, in northern Alberta was enough cold to last a lifetime, so Dave, Frances and their girls moved to the "banana belt" of Canada (Victoria, BC) to purchase a hardware store on the shore of Cordova Bay. After ten and a half years Dave and Frances sold their Ma and Pa store and he returned to construction work as a building contractor until he retired in 2004. About five years earlier, Dave and his brother Dan, a computer programmer, developed a website specialized in construction projects and renovations for homeowners that wanted to do things themselves, but maybe lacked the knowledge or confidence to go it alone. Dave writes the articles and Dan (who is a novice do-it-yourselfer) gets Dave to clarify the more advanced bits. They have built up their website over the years with various articles on construction projects, plans for sheds, gazebos and furniture: all written by Dave and all accessible on a subscription basis for a small fee. It was the members of the site who suggested that Dave write a book. With all the articles over the years it was a small task to organize them into books. They now have a series of 10 books in their Building Confidence series, one or two of which could very likely help you with your project.