Small hands, real tools, proper wood.
A home-from-home childminding setting in Maplefield where children aged 1–8 spend their days building real things out of real timber — patiently, safely, and with plenty of sawdust.
The workshop is the living room.
There is no separate craft hour at Timber Tigers. The bench is in the back room, the timber rack is by the door, and the tools are the same ones I learned on — just sized for smaller hands.
Children arrive, hang their coats on a peg they made themselves, and get on with whatever is on the bench that week. A bug hotel. A bird box. A stool that has to hold their own weight before it counts as finished. They measure it, mark it, cut it, and sand it until it feels right under their thumb.
We work in threes. Three children, one bench, one adult who is never further than an arm's length away. That is the whole model, and it is why nobody is ever waiting for a turn with the hammer.
Three generations of sawdust
Timber Tigers didn't start as a business. It started as a shed, a jam jar of bent nails, and a grandfather who never once said "careful, let me do it".
Grandad Bill's back garden
A twelve-foot shed in Somerset, a vice bolted to a plank, and a rule that nobody left until the floor was swept. Sarah's grandfather taught half the street's children to cut a straight line.
Dad's workbench, Saturdays only
Sarah spent every Saturday of her childhood sanding other people's furniture for fifty pence. She learned the difference between pine and oak long before she learned long division.
Timber Tigers opens its door
Registered as a childminder with two children on the books and one very small workbench. The name came from the first child through the door, who insisted tigers were the best at building things.
Real tools, properly sized
We swapped plastic play-tools for the real thing: a 6oz hammer, a junior hacksaw, a block plane. Injuries went down. Children treat a real tool with real respect.
Everything moved outside
Lockdown pushed the bench into the garden and it never really came back in. Rain covers went up, a fire pit went in, and the setting has been outdoors-first ever since.
Two hundred families later
Children who started here at two are coming back at fourteen to help on the bench. Some of the bird boxes from 2013 are still up in the trees down the lane.
Everything here was made by someone under eight
We hang the finished pieces on the wall with the maker's name and age burnt into the tag. Tap any plaque to look closer.
Pinned to the board by the door
Notes left by the families who trust us with their mornings.
Come and see the bench
Visits are welcome any weekday afternoon. Bring your child — they'll be handed a piece of sandpaper within about a minute.
Thanks — that's landed.
Sarah will come back to you today with a couple of visit times.
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14 Oakwood Lane, Maplefield MF3 2TGFive minutes from Maplefield Primary, parking on the lane