About 25 years ago, Barry Proctor had a problem.
He owned a glass dining table.
And he was tired of cleaning fingerprints off it.
Barry decided he wanted a wood table instead. He couldn't find what he wanted, so he arrived at the solution that would eventually become something of a pattern:
He decided to build it himself.
There was just one complication.
He didn't know how.
How hard could it be, right?
Learning by Building
Barry knew he liked Black Walnut, which led him to Black Forest Wood Co. in Calgary. He found the wood he wanted and started asking questions about how to turn it into a table.
One project led to another.
When Barry decided he wanted to build chairs, Black Forest pointed him toward Lee Valley. Books, better tools and a growing understanding of woodworking followed.
What started with one dining table gradually became years of learning, experimenting and building.
But for most of that time, woodworking wasn't Barry's career.
From Crushing Rock to Working Wood
Barry spent much of his working life chewing on dust alongside his father, Cliff, in the crushing and screening industry.
It's a world of rock, steel, machinery, dust and solving problems that don't always have tidy answers. That background might seem a long way from building furniture, but the two have more in common than you'd think.
Both require understanding the material in front of you. Both reward experience. And both occasionally require ignoring what something is supposed to do and figuring out what will actually work.
Woodworking remained the other side of Barry's life, until circumstances gave him the opportunity to take it more seriously.
When COVID and changes in the industry brought one chapter of his career to an end, Barry continued working and consulting for several years. Meanwhile, the garage kept calling.
Eventually, the woodworking stopped being simply something he did.
It became BP Garage & Wood.
Listen, I've known Barry for a long time. I'm surprised we could get him to hold still long enough to get this shot.
Built in the Garage
The name isn't branding theatre.
Barry really does build in the garage.
It's a working shop where slabs are laid out, cut, joined, finished and occasionally stared at for a while before the next cut is made.
Because Barry doesn't begin with a catalogue of furniture waiting to be reproduced.
He begins with the wood, the room and the reason the piece needs to exist.
Sometimes that's a dining table built around a family. Sometimes it's a conference table designed for a particular room. Sometimes it's a mantle, a coffee table, a console or something that doesn't have a convenient name yet.
The process is part woodworking and part problem solving.
Furniture Made to Be Lived With
Barry doesn't believe beautiful furniture should spend its life being protected from the people who own it.
Tables get used.
They collect dinners, coffee cups, homework, meetings, celebrations, scratches and the other evidence that life happened around them.
That's why the finish matters as much as the wood. Barry has developed his process around furniture that can be used, cared for and, when necessary, refinished rather than treated like something behind museum glass.
Because the goal isn't to keep a table looking untouched forever.
The goal is to build something worth keeping.