Matt Seiler

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've been working with urban sourced wood.  Specifically: wood that's come from individual lots and properties, and the owners want the wood turned back as useful finished goods.

Now that's an interesting proposition.   The reason is because (by its very definition...) the wood is not graded.   What is there is what is there.    There is no going back for another board, there is no selection process to pick out the best, straightest and clearest boards.   This is the client's own tree and what's there is there.

My current project is to transform a combination of silver maple and cherry into a clock.  Per the client's spec's, I'm actually following a set of plans from Klockit.  

Here is what the wood generally looked like:

Lots of bark, isn't there!    

The sort of tall/square piece that you see standing upright on the left side of the bench was taken from the far left end of the barkey/waney board that's laying down at the front.      I still have yet to clean up one face of that chunk prior to planing it to final thickness.

The boards are about... 5/4 in thickness.  I only need to yield 3/4" finished thickness.   I think what I'm going to do is to resaw most of the waste away in order to preserve it.   No sense in making all the wood go up the DC hose from the thickness planer, now is there?     I really like to conserve as much wood as possible, and it often becomes useful for something either in the same project or for future projects later.

This wood has checks, knots, it dried with curves and waves in it... in short, it can be pretty gnarly.

But this is the thing about urban wood.   It's honest.   It's not fancy.    And it's kind of like Gump's box of chocolates:  you really don't ever know what you're going to get.

Case in point, the two slabs that were flitch matches to this board that's standing up here to the right.

I selected three consecutive slices from the tree and then navigated around the checks, knots and bark in order to yield something useful.   This third board has yet to be cut into.

I rough cut the pieces to a little under six inches wide and twenty eight inches long.   Then I jointed one face.    Lo and behold, there's some amazing figure down in there!

What I'm doing now is simply harvesting rough and oversized boards for all the component parts for the clock.    I had to go through the bill of materials on the Klockit plans and then work out what the unit count and descriptions were so that I could harvest the right sizes, shapes and grain directions for all of the pieces.

This is very different work than standing in the lumber aisle and selecting either S2S or S4S wood.   Here I am in complete control of how I take the boards from the flitches.   I can make the call of how to follow the grain to yield harmonious patterns in the wood.   

But the downside is that it's a precious resource.   I can't just go back to the store to buy more wood.   I have to preserve and conserve the wood the best I can. 

In all I've got a solid day's worth of work left to harvest the appropriate pieces from this lumber and to get a flat face on the boards.   There will be a few glueups, as the molding details on this particular clock will need to be quite thick.   And the cherry will be milled, jointed and then face glued in order to yield turning blanks for decorative elements on the face of the clock.

It's challenging work.  But it's just too cool to work with lumber like this, which has a story because it came from the client's own property.   He grew up with these trees.   He saw them every day of his young life.  And now that they've come down they'll be transformed into items for his interior spaces.

A significant part of my business this year has come from one very unique source.  And the story behind that source is really quite interesting.

Bruce and Erika Horigan run Horigan Urban Forest Products.    They are sawyers and operate a series of dehumidification kilns.  And there are generally seems to be two segments to their business.

One segment is cool all by itself.  Bruce and his son, Justin, take trees from tree services and from municipal parks departments and slab them up, put them through their dehumidification kilns and then offer the wood back to the general public for retail sale.   And that's a pretty good story right there.   How many of us can say that they know where the wood actually came from?   When I buy my roughsawn and ungraded lumber from the Horigans I get that insight.  And there's a very unique local Chicagoland story that emerges from that.

But it's the other half of the HUFP story that's more special.   Often folks will find that they have trees on their property that had to come down for one reason or another.  Or maybe Mother Nature has made that decision for them, and the felled tree needs to be disposed of.

The Horigans can take these trees and mill/dry them and then the homeowner can have anything that they want made from this valuable resource.   And this is where some of my coolest, most special projects have come from.

Earlier this year readers of my blog may recall my having made three copies of a rocking chair.  The original was used to rock three boys as infants, and now that those boys are men Mom wanted to give each of them a copy of that chair so that they could do some of their own rocking.    And that's really amazing.

And then, just today, I took delivery of some silver maple and some cherry boards, harvested from a family's property in the far southwestern suburbs of Chicagoland.   The task is to make three clocks for this family, made according to three different kits from Klockit .     The first will be a Christmas present for my client's parents.  Then each of the next two calendar quarters will reportedly see an order for the other two clocks, which will be for my client's, as well as his parents' log cabins up somewhere in Wisconsin.

The trees, themselves, had been on their family property for quite a long time.  My client grew up on that land, and reportedly was able to point to the five or six homes in the immediate area and tick off which relatives lived there over the years.   So these trees were a big part of the family's landscape.    Now they'll be turned back to the interior spaces.  

I think that this newfound aspect to my business is really special.  Not only do I get to make beautiful things for my customers, I'm providing them a very real, tangible touchstone to their unique family histories.   The trees that were played under, which provided shade in the summer and that sported things like tire swings or tree houses are now transformed into functional items to enrich their living spaces.   And it's an honor to be asked to help with this transition and transformation.  

Move over Porsche - I think that we have a whole 'nother thing for which there is no substitute.

It's time.    I've got to get the heck out of here.     Too much time spent at home and in the shop, and I'm crispy around the edges.

At 0:dark-thirty tomorrow I'll be loading up the car and LOML and I will be heading to the general Boston/Cape Cod area.   Lots of little white stripes to pass on the highway, lots of history to take in once we get there, lots of fresh seafood to get acquainted with while at the coast.

Have fun, see you guys in a week and a half.

-Matt-

How does that song from the musical 'Pajama Game" go?    Oh yeah:

Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up
Can't waste time, can't waste time, can't waste time, can't waste time
When you're racing with the clock
When you're racing with the clock
And the second hand doesn't understand
That your back may break and your fingers ache
And your constitution isn't made of rock

It's a losing race when you're racing with the
Racing racing racing with the clock"

Ok - so the song was a lot better with music, and when I was acting in this play (*ulp*)... twenty six years ago, opposite recent Oscar nominee John C. Reilly.

But the point is that tempis fugit.   Time waits for no man. 

You see, I've got two projects on my bench going in parallel right now.    I've got a table that I'm building for a designer, and it's spec'd to be made from urban-sourced ash.      The second project is a collection of plaque backers for a trophy shop that I'm now working for.     As a nice bit of coincidence both were to be put into a jet black dye.      But the table is specifically spec'd to be in a solvent-based satin varnish, and the plaques are to be in a waterborne gloss.

And both are happening on my bench in parallel with each other.  

It's not the normal way that I do business, but I'm heading out of town for a week, starting this coming Friday.   So I've got to get both of these projects done and outta here by mid-day on Thursday.

Temperatures are in the mid-50's.   Clearcoats are drying  S-L-O-W-L-Y.         And the last clearcoat layers have to be done by the end of the day on Tuesday/VERY beginning of the day on Wednesday so that they'll dry hard enough to reliably transport by Thursday.

Cutting it close.   Hours on the clock ticking by.  I'm wandering out to the shop in about an hour (putting it well past midnight!) to flip some of the pieces and lay down another coat of finish so that everything comes out according to the clock.

tic... tic... tic... tic... tic... tic....

No pressure.   Nope.  No pressure at all.   Not here...  Nope, not at all.  *ignore tha bead of sweat slowly forming at my temple*   I'm just fine.   I'm calm, cool and collected *well, except for that little telltale tic starting at the corner of my left eye*.     I'm the very picture of composure.   *yeah, RIGHT!*

Actually, I do jest a bit.   I've backtimed the delivery calendar and I think that I should be just fine.   I'll get both projects delivered on Thursday and will be able to have time to get the car packed up and be on the road first thing on Friday.

And then....  vacation. 

Wish me luck!  There's a good bit of work to do before I can vacate.

As some here are aware, I haven't had a traditional day job since October of 2001.   Since that time I've been making sawdust all day every day.     And business has gradually picked up year after year to the point where this year (the year of the recession!) has been my best yet.   In fact, I've had back-to-back jobs since the beginning of January.   And many of those jobs were for returning clients.

One thing that I can say contributed to my success is a very strange realization:    I'm not in the business of providing a PRODUCT.   Rather, I'm in the job of providing a SERVICE.

Odd, no?    Don't we make things?  Aren't they products?   Hmmmm....    I'm sure that at this point there are some who are scratching their heads and wondering just what in the heck Seiler is getting at.  

To explain this let me get into a little back story.  First up, let me tell you who my typical customer is.   This comes from looking at who I've traditionally been working for this past eight or nine years.

My usual client is a pair of empty nesters who's last child left home/got out of college 3-5 years ago.  They recently moved into a smaller house (sometimes a townhouse or condo) and they have parted with an awful lot of the furniture that they had when the kids were around.   This is matched with wanting to have 'nice' things for the first time in their marriage, and they've got these new rooms to fill.

They know that they want to change some of their design aesthetic, but only dimly know what that entails.   Much of the furniture in the rooms is department store bought, with a very plain vanilla sensability.     They're beginning to realize that they don't want to continue to live this way and are beginning to poke along the edges.

These empty nesters are learning about a new way to live.  They're reinventing themselves because they're in a new phase in life.   These folks who come to me actually understand that they're reinventing themselves.   But they need help doing it.

So the 'service' part of what I do is to not only come in and say 'Yup... I can make something for you...", but I go a few steps farther.  I ask them questions about what it is that the piece needs to do for them past the strict jobs it's to perform.    Furniture provides a statement.   It can provide a motif in the room.   It can be a design leader, or it can be a design follower.   It can set the tone for a corner, for a room or (in some instances) the whole rest of the house.

So the 'Service' that we're performing has to do with the DECOR of the room, not simply a thing that provides horizontal surfaces or doors for things to hide behind.

And this is a very real opportunity for customer service - in its best sense.    You're helping the client come to terms with their new surroundings and you can bring distinctiveness to their surroundings.   Your work can go far past just the job of cobbling together a chair, desk or table.    If you ask the right questions, and if you let your creativity run its course, you can provide a much-needed sense of homeyness to your client's surroundings.

And I think that that's the best part of what I do for a living.  I bring distinctiveness to their home.  

The Austrians have this wonderful word - 'gemutlicht'.   It means 'agreeable cozyness'.    I think it neatly sums up the goal for what they want, and what we can bring to their homes through the things that we build.

When you bring gemutlicht to your clients homes and you'll have clients for life, returning to you again and again.

So I maintain that it's about the service.   The product follows.