There are few things more empowering than building your own beautiful, ecological home or adding personal touches to the one you already have. With carpentry know-how, you can feel satisfied living each day surrounded by reflections of your own creativity and resourcefulness. What’s more, tiny houses are efficient, flexible and offer the security of home ownership to folks who may have thought it was out of reach. In our building classes you can learn these skills and create the handmade home you’ve always imagined.
Home building workshops that give you the skills to build your dreams into reality
In-person Classes
Women's Basic Carpentry
This class is intended to get ladies up-to-speed on basic building skills, working with wood, and using hand tools as well as power tools. Focus is placed on ... creating a safe, comfortable, relaxed and fun learning environment in which students with beginning to intermediate skill levels can thrive. Trans welcome.
Choose a 2025 session:
- Apr 3-6,
- Apr 24-27,
- May 15-18,
- Jun 2-5 or
- Jul 24-27
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Tiny House Building Workshop
Gain the skills you need to build your own tiny house from local, natural, or conventional materials. Tour beautifully crafted tiny houses and natural buildings, ... learn about each stage of building from expert lectures, experience hands-on learning as we build a tiny house from scratch, plus get lifetime access to extensive online video library
Choose a 2025 session:
- Apr 28 to May 7,
- May 22-31 or
- Jun 19-28
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Foraging and Medicinal Herbs Course
Identify and wild forage medicinal plants in the Appalachian mountains. Learn to make medicine and cultivate herbs in your garden. Make ... and take home herbal salves, tinctures, flower essences, decoctions, cough syrups, herbal liqueurs, oxymels and vinegars.
- May 8-11
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Timber Framing Class
Learn how to lay out, measure, cut, fit, assemble, and raise a 16' by 20' timber-framed building through demos and hands-on practice. This class is appropriate ... whether you are an experienced carpenter, backyard deck builder, or excited beginner who just has a knack for craft.
- Jun 14-21
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Women’s Rewilding Retreat
Gather with other women for a long weekend of connection, learning, and rewilding. Basketry, medicine making, cheese and soap ... making, wild foods cookery, friction fire, and more In the mountains near Asheville, NC.
- May 28 to Jun 1
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4-Month Carpentry Program
Get confident building for yourself and others. Our hands-on carpentry program is non-residential and takes place at Wild Abundance, located near Asheville, NC. It’s ... appropriate for beginning to intermediate level builders; no experience is necessary, just enthusiasm and a willingness to learn by doing. If you do have experience, there will be plenty of depth and advanced skills to dive into.
Choose a 2025 session:
- Mar 11 to Jul 2 or
- Jul 22 to Nov 20
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Adult Beginner Woodworking Class
Get deep satisfaction from learning carpentry In a culture that’s zooming toward virtual reality and digitizing the day-to-day, not everyone grows up learning ... how to use tools and work with their hands. Our woodworking class for beginners and folks who have used tools, but don’t feel totally comfortable with them is here to change that. No matter your lifestyle, you surely interact with physical objects like shelves, chairs, tables. Learning carpentry can be rewarding and satisfying whether you want to build for yourself, feel confident fixing things around the house, or interacting with folks you hire in a confident way
- Sep 26-29, 2024
- Monthly or one time payment options available
- Secure checkout
- Flexible refund policy
- Sliding scale pricing based on income
Gardening and Permaculture Apprenticeship
Learn to grow vegetables and tend food forests in this one-day-per-week program that spans an entire growing ... season. Non-residential permaculture apprenticeship.
- Mar 19 to Nov 19
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Permaculture Design Certificate Course
This permaculture class empowers students to become effective ecological designers and planners. You will ... come out of this class with deep knowledge about creating forest gardens, ecology, permaculture principles, plant species and variety choices, holistic forestry, and more.
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Online Classes
Everyone can learn how to build
Our carpentry and building classes bring together natural and sustainable materials, smart designs, and practical skills. Not everyone grows up learning construction, but everyone can do it. We bring years of experience to the table, offering clear, accessible guidance that leaves you feeling confident. At the end of our home building workshops, you’ll be ready to tackle a project that you didn’t know how to when you began.
Our comprehensive tiny house course has a natural twist
Every fall, we offer a tiny house workshop that goes way beyond the basics. Woven throughout the 8 full days of hands-on and theoretical instruction are the natural building modalities that we love and value. In this home building workshop, we explore a bunch of different tiny houses. There’s a lot of time to talk about design, because we know everyone’s needs and visions for their homes are different. Together, we put the ideas into action and build an actual tiny house as we’re learning. If you want to own your own handmade home, this course will get you well on your way.
Carpentry and building are integral to sustainable systems and permaculture design
Our interest in building came out of a broader interest in the balance, harmony and beauty of sustainability. We’re excited about the intersections between carpentry and permaculture. In fact, we can’t help but bring permaculture principles into our home building workshops, and building skills into our Permaculture Design Certificate Immersion Course.
Human beings (the vast majority of us anyway) live in structures, and those structures play a major role in our day-to-day lives. How our buildings fit into the ecosystems of our homes, homesteads, farms and communities impacts how those bigger systems work. When we have the skills to design and build structures that fit in smoothly, efficiently and beautifully, the whole system benefits. When we build and repair our structures with our own hands using local materials, we disentangle ourselves from the extractive global economy and increase resiliency.
If you want to become a Permaculture Apprentice here at Wild Abundance, you can learn all about building and sustainable systems first hand. Every apprentice lives in a handmade structure and has access to all of our beautiful, custom-made facilities. They also get to participate in our home building workshops, including the tiny house course.
Women’s empowerment through home building workshops
Let’s be real: Female-bodied people typically don’t grow up learning building skills. And it’s not always easy for women to jump into male-dominated projects to learn as adults. That’s why we offer two special home building workshops just for women.
For those who feel nervous wielding a hammer or drill, our introductory women’s carpentry course meets you where you’re at. We teach basic tool use and safety, give lots of practice time, and every student gets to create their own small project. For those with some familiarity with tools and carpentry but who don’t feel confident constructing buildings, our advanced women’s carpentry class goes a step further. From foundations up, we cover everything that goes into designing and building strong, stable structures.
The spaces that we occupy and the objects that we’re surrounded by are important for so many reasons. Houses are the containers for our lives; their design and feel dictate the ease (or lack thereof) of our daily activities.
A home building workshop puts the power in your hands to create the spaces you want to inhabit
Want a sunny kitchen? Need a bookshelf to fit just right into that tight corner? Want to get your garden tools organized without hiring someone to build your shed? All these things, and more, are possible. We are here to help you make them a reality.