Sitting in a lawn chair inside his cool garage Aug. 11, Tom Brown of Wiscasset was hard-pressed to name his favorite among the hundreds of wooden crafts he’s made.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around at the toy boats, trailer and dump trucks, carriages, wheelbarrows with tricycle wheels, and dollhouses, one inspired by the one-room Parker Head Schoolhouse he attended as a child in Phippsburg.

“I like them all,” the Bath Iron Works retiree, 81, said about his creations.

With wife of 60 years Jo Anne at his side and a toy pink park bench nearby on the floor, Brown said he enjoys making them. He sometimes works hours a day in the garage of the Gardiner Road home the couple built in 1971. Before that, they lived on Bradford Road 13 years in a home they also built.

He makes most of the crafts for family, at one point for the grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren.

“It’s like they’re going to a toy shop when they come here,” he said, smiling. The crafts, from a covered wagon to a covered bridge, are something that can continue on in the family, he said. “It’s something to remember me by.”

Brenda Potts, one of the Browns’ four children, has something of her father’s handiwork in every room of her Guntersville, Alabama home. In one bedroom is the cradle he made Potts’ daughter. Potts keeps a dolly blanket in it now. In the kitchen is a Noah’s Ark.

“We can look at it and say, ‘My daddy made that,’” Potts said in a phone interview Aug. 11. She feels very sentimental about the gifts, she said.

Her parents weren’t always able to buy her and her siblings the latest and greatest, but the homemade things showed they wanted them to have everything, Potts said.

Jo Anne Brown, 78, is impressed at her husband’s ability to picture something and make it. The first week of August, he watched a “Little House on the Prairie” episode and decided to make the house. He waited until he saw another episode before finishing it, so he would get the entryway right. He noticed a window box, so he added that, too.

“If I can see it, I can do it,” he said about his work. Minutes later, he got up and brought back containers of stemmed wooden flowers, including tulips.

“I’ve got flowers you don’t have to water.” He makes them from scrap pieces when he’s between his larger projects.

He’s sold a few items over the years locally and in Florida where they winter, and the couple said they wouldn’t mind selling more, maybe on consignment.

The wood is all spare pieces people have either dropped off or let him pick up from construction projects or elsewhere, including a wood product business where he worked during a BIW strike. The business was getting rid of a lot of window boxes and let him take them. He broke the boxes down and used the pine, his wife recalled.

Most of his work is painted, but not the last several items including a small chair. He’s run out of paint. The Browns weren’t sure where or when they would get some more.

Asked which items are the hardest to make, he cited the boats, which range from a rowboat to a dragger, complete with fish in the net. “’Cause (the boats) have to be shaped pretty good, to look decent.

“And I’m a long while sanding them.”

 He pointed up to another of his works, hanging from the ceiling: a double-winged plane. “Brenda wants that one.”