Donovan Woodworking & Sawmill

Donovan Woodworking creates handcrafted live edge epoxy river tables and custom hardwood furniture designed to showcase the natural beauty of every wood slab. Proudly serving Pittsburgh, PA. We build one of a kind pieces that combine expert craftsmanship, premium materials, and timeless design.

The shop at 425 Highland Avenue in East Pittsburgh is run by a man who spent 43 years as a registered nurse, much of it in hospice care, before retiring in 2025 to make furniture full time. He had been doing it part time for years already. He learned the work from his father and grandfather rather than in a classroom.

What separates the operation from a furniture maker is the sawmill in the same yard. Most woodworkers buy slabs. This one cuts them. A customer can bring a tree, one taken down in a storm, removed for construction, or dying and due to come out, and have it milled into slabs or dimensional lumber and then built into something. The tree and the table come out of the same shop.

For anyone who has lost a mature tree on their property, that is the whole proposition. A walnut or cherry that took eighty years to grow usually ends up as firewood or chips because nobody nearby can mill it.

The catalogue beyond the live edge epoxy river tables the shop is known for runs to custom cabinets, live edge benches, floating shelves, fireplace mantels, and traditional and slab tables. Sawmill services are sold separately as well, for customers who only want lumber cut.

Nothing is built twice. Each piece is designed around the customer’s space and around the particular character of the slab it comes from, the grain, the voids and the shape of the edge, which is why there is no showroom stock to choose from.

Even the waste goes somewhere. The shop donates its sawdust and shavings to local horse rescue caretakers for animal bedding.