Timothy Harps, Makers of Handcrafted Celtic Harps HarpShop page

In 2009, my family relocated to the beautiful Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia Canada. The house we purchased had been left untenanted for five years, and needed some restoration, but we fell in love at first glance.

Well, that's all that we could really see of the property at first, but it had potential. With three acres of space, I could build just about any size of shop I fancied, which was a luxury! We picked the field to the left of the driveway to start.

However, we couldn't begin as quickly as we wished. I had booked a foundation company to pour the engineered slab for the shop's foundation, but they delayed and delayed coming to do the job, and I was getting increasingly anxious about the time passing with me unable to build harps. Luthiery is a terrible addiction...

So, in the interval I decided to make a shed to store our firewood, our outdoor gear, and eventually a cider house.

Oh, did I mention that our home had a small orchard? It was a great surprise to us when I managed to clear the fields of scrub and brush to find there were three plum trees, seven pear trees, a cherry tree and two apple trees on our property. One tree alone gave us two thousand pounds of fruit that first harvest! Homemade wine anyone?

Our foundation company never showed. After weeks of waiting, I decided I had to tackle the job myself. I'd never done a foundation anything like this large before, but given no alternatives it was time to start digging.

Well, sore, but happy. I dug for three days to make the footings for the foundation in the packed gravel we'd had compressed for the base. Digging through gravel by hand is... well, not terribly much fun. Still it was good to see the project underway.

Once the footings were dug, it was time to make and install the concrete forms, lay in the moisture barrier, rebar and wire, and wait for the concrete to be delivered

We had a floor! It was time to start framing the walls for the new shop. It measured 32 by 20, and we planned it to be 2.5 stories tall.

Here's a picture of the floor joists being installed, and the massive wooden beam we had to build to support the middle of the second floor.

Finally able to stand on the second floor! I'm standing right where my studio space will eventually be. Yes, the skies in Nova Scotia ARE always this dramatic and gorgeous.

I was really fortunate to have my dad helping me once again with the construction of the new shop. His expertise and hard work were greatly appreciated. I'm afraid, however, that we managed to infect him while he was here, with a desire to move to Nova Scotia. He's bought a place just twenty minutes away, and as I type now he and my stepmother are driving a moving truck with the last of their things from Ontario to the Annapolis Valley! My girls are so excited to have Grampa and Grandma moving closer!

The roof trusses we picked were simply enormous. They are thirteen and a half feet high, which gives my studio an interior ceiling height of nearly twelve feet. I wanted that much height for the acoustics in my recording studio, and so I could build a sleeping loft for guests at one end and sneak in an extra half floor into the building. Here the first truss is installed and frames a breathtaking view of South Mountain.

Here the final trusses are in place and we take a breather. My father and a friend, Matthew Kennedy, helped me get every truss secured into place.

Once the trusses were up, we had to strap them with 2x4s to provide a surface for the metal roof to be screwed to. The wind blew hard all through that October, and working in the sky was both exciting and occasionally daunting.

A view of a Nova Scotia sunset in October.

We had to wait for a relatively calm day to install the steel roofing. In a strong wind the steel is impossible to handle without risking losing a limb.

The windows and doors for my shop were all purchased from recycled building material lots. I have one close to the peak of the roof to illuminate the sleeping loft.

My proud father standing next to the completed garage doors.

Winter was closing in fast, and I had to hurry to get the building wrap in place to make my shop weather tight.

Well yes. A shop without power isn't terribly useful, so we had to dig a four foot deep trench from our house to the shop to install the heavy electric cables that would carry power to my tools.

I forgot to document the insulating and finishing of the interior, but then pink fibreglass isn't all that exciting to look at. Getting those first harps underway at my workbench was unbelievably gratifying. I had gone nearly five months without building a harp -- the longest harpless period ever since I first began building in 1990

It seemed fitting that just as I was getting back to work, and winter was closing in, one final rainbow stretched itself across the Annapolis Valley in a promise of blessings to come in the next year.

And so here it is, my completed shop! At 1240 square feet on two floors, the shop is 60% larger than my old workshop. I have much needed extra bench space, and room for more tools and wood.

However, my layout station is nearly identical to the one in my old shop. When you have a system that works, you don't mess with it. :)

It's great to have space for more work stations. The dedicated sanding station in my shop simplifies my work flow.

I have twenty four feet of wall space dedicated to wood storage. My shop is well insulated, vapour barriered, and climate controlled, so the wood in these storage racks remain at an ideal moisture content for harp making.

Here is a view of the whole shop floor (or all I could manage with one lens) from the stairs to the second floor.

The feature I was most eager to add to my workshop was a finishing area, where I could both apply finish to my harps, and do stringing, levering, and packing, without interrupting my workflow in the main shop area. This room is twenty feet by twelve, has a chemical resistant floor, and lots of bright lights. You can't quite make out the hooks in the ceiling for hanging harp parts to dry, but they're at regular intervals across the ceiling.

And here was the first batch of harps, being tuned up to full tension in anticipation of packing and shipping off to owners across North America and Europe.

Had to have a picture of the NewMac woodstove that keeps my shop warm and cosy throughout the bitterest of winter storms. It also facilitates my efforts at climate control in a province that tends to have a lot of rainfall in the fall and winter.

My shop finished, sided in board and batten, and blanketed in white by a Nova Scotian snowstorm.