Matt Seiler

Today I was part of what will hopefully become the birth of a new category of certified, sustainable lumber in America.

All sorts of interesting people from five states were gathered at this brainstoriming symposium, held in a sustainably built public library in Ann Arbor, MI.   Representatives from federal, state and municipal forestry departments, regional arboretums, folks from state departments of natural resources, as well as independent forestry auditors/accreditors and private and commercial wood products makers (like me!) gathered together. 

Chief among other topcs was the idea of carving out a new certification system, designation and protocol for lumber recliamed from America's Urban Forests.  The aim is to create inroads to bring this lumber to the consumer market in commercial-like quantities.

Let me set the stage for a moment.   We're not talking about a guy with a chain saw who's wanting to cut down the occasional tree.  We're referring to a regimented system of taking millions of trees in the urban forest - which are coming down ANYWAY for a whole raft of reasons - and then turning those saw logs into useful pieces.   The components that aren't saw logs would serve the firewood, mulch, landscape and other such industries.   And this is something that is NOT happening today at this level and in this quantity.

The scale?   Very literally millions of trees annually from state, local and municipal sources.  

These aren't people going out into a stand of managed forest land and selecting which ones are to be cut for commerce.   The trees in question are ones that were designated for culling out of URBAN settings.   And that's something we see daily.  The local arborists and foresters who were at the symposium reported on their cutting volumes and the numbers are really staggering.    Factors like invasive insects, fungal disease, etc. are mostly to blame right now.  

What happens with the wood now?  Well, much of it is either mulched or landfilled.   And a significant percentage are 'lost', with no reporting on what happened with them at all. 

To lay down some back story, right now the US has as one of its chief accreditation bodies the FSC, or Forestry Stewardship Council.   FSC cerfification applies to commercially harvested timber taken from mostly managed forest lands.   "Managed' means that replantings replace harvested timber, yielding a sustainable supply, and it relates to the chain of custody of the resources and the state of the management of the land, itself.  

Yet there is no designation for timber harvested from our urban forests.    That's street parkways, parks and backyards.  And it's every bit as valid to call it a 'forest' as the stand of trees you'd drive out to visit in the country.

Certification for this is one of many steps that are being explored in the pursuit of creating a unique and marketable brand for this urban timber.   Once certified and branded with a formalized, universal name, the goal is to get this wood into the lumber supply chain in the US.

I am definitely condensing what was a ten hour long conference, and there is a tremendous amount that I'm simply skipping to keep this narrative short and easy to read.

Ultimately the point is this.   When parks departments, utility companies and anybody else has to remove a tree from an urban setting due to age, damage, disease or other causes this wood is not necessarily lost.  It may look like it's been whisked away, tucked back behing the Great Oz's black curtain, never to be seen or heard from again.  In urban and fringe suburban areas this view is pretty prevelant.   Interestingly, it's not necessarily the case.  

There are many exceptionally influential and plugged-in people who are working to creating a widespread return of this wood to the consumer industry.  That could be as boards for sale at woodworking outlets, it could be as lumber for any range of commercial users (think: the lumber inside vinyl windows or lumbercore doors, etc, etc, etc.) or any other thing where timber would be required.   Or flooring, trim and other construction needs.

As it sits right now this lumber is sort of in a gray zone, unclassified and unclassifiable within the current FSC guidelines.  If this were to change it would be a vehicle (not the method itself, but a vehicle) with which more barriers would come down.   And the goal is to then let this HUUUUGE, UNTAPPED local resource find its way into the wood supply chain.

And much of it could be returned to us, the woodworker.   And in species that may not be on the menu already at your local wood-o-rama.   (But that's a topic for another show.....)

When taken to its conclusion, it's an environmentally green story, taking local resources and turning them back to local demand.  One of the very much intended benefits to this is to generate JOBS, as this is a workforce industry that really doesn't exist today. 

It's also a very significant savings on the volume of decomposing biomass heading to landfills.   Some areas are concerned about the longevity of their dump sites.   In SE Michigan alone this reportedly would eliminate an estimated 8.8 million cubic yards of material from heading to landfills each year.   And the lumber would have a second life as a useful component in any manner of applications.

Urban timber is a topic of conversation that you may hear more of in the coming months and years.    And for me, it was very interesting to be part of the breakout groups all day and to participate in the brainstorming sessions about the logistics, steps and overall ingredients required to take a new wood product to market.

Really, very cool stuff.

As I sit here in my hotel room in Ann Arbor, Michicagn, I'm preparing for two days to be spent with urban timber specialists, municipal arborists, representatives from the Morton Arboretum (Lisle, IL) and other such folks.

The topic of conversation will be taking urban sourced lumber and designating a higher use beyond just mulching them up.  Trees that have to come down from disease, lightening strikes and insect invasions can, depending on the nature of the issue, be slabbed and kilned and turned back to the general public.   

I already work with one urban sawyer, Bruce Horigan of Horigan Urban Forest Products, located in Skokie, IL, and he is the TIP of the wedge in this arena.   His lumber business involves urban sourced trees that he slabs up, dries in one of his three dehumidification kilns and which he sells back to the general public.   I've talked a bit about this in the past, and am pretty entrenched in the whole idea of reusing urban trees.

Urban lumber comes from from parks, street parkways and your back yards.   The urban forest's cuttings could infill as much as 40% of our commercial hardwoods requirements in the US by some accounts (OK - I suspect it's more like 15-25%, but that's just my off-the-top-of-my-head guesstimate).   

It also places some new species on the menu.   When was the last time you worked with honey locust?  Or catalpa?   Or Kentuckey coffee tree?   Urban culing and milling places these types of species front and center in the list of available woods.   And that's a really neat thing.  I don't know about you guys, but oak, maple, walnut, ash, birch, mahogany and poplar are nice, but it's great to stretch out a bit with even more domestic choices.

This symposium will cover things like the EPA requirements for Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) containment, eradication and infected lumber reuse, as well as other related items.   The group will be made up of the preeminent movers and shakers in the urban wood movement in the upper Midwest. 

I'll be one of the few 'end users' at the symposium, representing the Chicago Furniture Designers Association, as well as all of you guys, the humble and dedicated woodworkers of America.     

I'm apparently the first one checked into the hotel right now.   Once the rest arrive we'll have a dinner in one of the banquet rooms this evening for the meet and greet, with inevitable sidebars, and then tomorrow we dig into the meat of the thing.

It should be an interesting event.    If there's any good stuff to share I'll report back when I return home on Tuesday.

Best,

-Matt-

Anybody still with me?    Bueller....      Bueller...        

Last time around we talked about a mockup to 'see' the space and to see the design.  And the legs just weren't working at all.  

I lived with that mockup in the corner for a week.  And what I realized is that I hadn't truly COMMITTED to a curve in the leg.  It was small and subtle.  And as a result it sort of insinuated itself in there in a sort of an apologetic way.

OK.   So if we're going to have curves, what about having BIG curves?    Here's the new and original, klunky design:

No issues with a failure to commit on the curve now, is there?   And by removing TWO shelves this now has a bit of a life and an energy to it.     It would need radius treatments on the edges of the legs, and I'm not sure if that's a router profile or if it'd be something different.

That sort of apologetic rear leg may be done away with entirely, substituted with a Z-clip to keep the thing attached to the wall.    And if that happens, then it'd just be the two semicircular legs and that's all.

OK - let's stop here and see if there are any comments.    What's the consensus now?

-Matt-

Modeling in SketchUp, as well as other computer programs, is an absolute winner in some applications.   It can be a real problem solver.

But it's not a silver bullet.    Sometimes you just simply need to see an object mocked up and in the intended space to get a sense of whether your design considerations are working.    You just can't do that with a computer program.

To that end, I decided to mock up my table with some 1/4" ply and some hardboard, just to get a sense of things.

I created a compound curve for the legs, where it's a gentle inward sweep and then an outward kick towards the floor.   And I placed the bottom shelf just about even with the top of the upholstered bench that'll be three feet to the right (er... when I get the ladder and extra drywall out of there - - I've still got to paint the wall that I just skinned with drywall, as discussed on the Home Improvements forum these last few days).

No, it's not pretty.  All that this mockup is doing is to check if the height works, and if the aesthetic is generally OK.

Obviously I ditched the idea of having three shelves.  That just didn't look right at all.

For the mockup I actually did a compound radius curve on the legs.  They bow in a little between the top and intermediate shelves, then kick out towards the bottom.   Interestingly, I don't think it reads right, especially being right next to the door trim.   The upper portion of the radius is so gentle that it looks like I mis-installed the leg and didn't place it truly vertically.

Interesting.

This is something that would never reveal itself if I'd truly stuck with designing inside a computer program.   It's something that has to be perceived in full scale to really get a read on it.    I happen to think that it's too easy to dismiss the issue when viewing it on a computer terminal.

I like the dimensions of the top and bottom shelf.   I like the height, and I like that it's somewhat even with the door handle.

I'm also detecting that I might need a bent laminated skirt board under the shelf.   The thing would possibly be too spindley with these little orphaned horizontal planes.   I need to buttress the shelves with a thicker line value, represented by the skirt.   But how thick?    TOO thick and it becomes clunky.  Too thin and it's a miss.   So there's a case where I'll likely make it about two and a half inches thick, each, and then trim them to the height that looks right.    (Of course, there's TWO radiuses, as the pie shaped shelves are two different sizes... WHEEEeeee.)

Now... about those legs.    I'm intending to make them as a face glueup of two 3/4" poplar boards (remember: this'll be black, so poplar's just fine for this application).   I know that they'll have some sort of a radius on one plane, and I'm thinking that I'm going to need to do some sort of a radius on the other plane.  Basically, to make them do an hourglass taper all on their own.   

...Or not.   Again, this is a process.   

I've got to sit with this mockup for a day or two and see if anything else jumps out at me.   The landing area by the door is really tiny, and there's no abilty to change the pie shape.  The space defines that I stay within this footprint in order to actually navigate the space.   We're up and down these stairs all day long, as they lead to the lower finished level of the house. 

Any thoughts and opinions out there of the process so far?    The jury is still out whether I want to exaggerate the top portion of the arc of the legs or if I actually do want to make them be straight between the two shelves.

What do you think of the design process I'm describing, and the fact that I ajourned when I did from computer design to physical space mockups?

This is an update from my last blog entry, where I talked about the aesthetics of a small corner table.

As originally plotted, here's the table in question:

The next iterations will have the legs be curved, giving the table a slightly hourglass shape.

And I'm ditching the center shelf and making the bottom shelf be at an elevation of roughly a third of the height from the bottom.

Any thoughts on what this will do for the overall look and feel?

-Matt-

Here is the small table that I alluded to in my last blog post.  What we're going to cover in a series of blogs is 'design', as it relates to this table.    We'll cover what it is, why it's to be built, what the design considerations are, and a bit later we'll talk about things like aesthetic goals as well as bringing 'life' to an inanimate object.

There are two reasons to build this table.    First up, there's a tray that'll sit on the top shelf and is where we put keys, etc., as soon as we get home.  This table will reside immediately inside our front door.

And on the other side of the door is a small bench where we do the whole shoe thing when entering/leaving.   In the morning LOML needs a place to put her coffee cup, so the middle shelf is 'it'.        And as long as we're making shelves, we might as well make a third one.

The second reason to build it is to visually balance that stool that's on the opposite side of the door.   The stool is store bought, is upholstered and is black.   The entry hall is SMALL, and visual balance is key in this kind of area.

All that having been covered, here's the first iteration of the design.    This version simply handles the physical issues with little thought to overall coherency and 'design'.    It's simply called out to the maximum boundary sizes and shaped to roughly what we had in mind.

It's about twelve and a half inches on each straight side, making the table cover about nineteen inches across the radiused front.

Fairly simple so far.   It's pie shaped (in this space it kind of has to be...), it has three shelves and it has just enough legs to make it not fall over.

For purposes of the initial presentation the radiused skirt was repeated for each shelf.  And I drew it in SketchUp so that the shelves had 1/8" radius roundover on the top and to cove cut the bottom edge of the shelves to lighten them up just a tad.

Again, it's just a starting point.

Consider this stage about like modeling in clay.  I'm free to add and subtract in order to get JUST ENOUGH coherency that I can begin to make good decisions.

Sure, this design is functional.  And it sort of serves the design requirements to a general degree.

But it's just so..... flat.   When I look at a design like this I feel that it's been done to death for a few hundred years' worth of American furniture styles.

It frankly lacks any real panache.    It's bland and characterless.

Hmmmm.... pause for a moment.  This is evoking an emotional response.   This means we're onto something.

But it IS a good start.   And I mean that from two main perspectives.   

It's a start inasmuch as the overall form and function dialog is concerned.   It begins the visual exploration of how to handle the jobs that the table is to perform against the final form that gets selected.

But it also is a start from another perspective.  It's a place to begin editing the aesthetic details.  Here I know what's NOT working.   And knowing what you don't like, and what not to do, is every bit as valuable as knowing what you like and what is working.

I'll go out on a limb here and guess that there's a few out there who'd like to stop me and tell me that I'm over-thinking this.  After all, it's not a horrible design as it sits now.

But there's no spark.  It doesn't pop.   There's no life to the thing.  It's actually quite dismal.   And those are a blend of intellectualizations as well as emotional responses.      Hmmmm... We're back to emotional response again.

I think that part of the problem is that relentless vertical march, with the same shelf shape and size repeated verbatim three times.  And the legs, while functional, are frankly boring.  They're drawn as three straight stick-like legs.   *yawn......*

All there IS is legs and shelves. So the problem lies within! 

Thoughts and opinions so far?     This is a starting point.   It's the jumping off point (for me, anyway) that transitions from a boring, same 'ol -kind of a desing to something that I'm proud of.

What would YOU do to liven things up?   I've got some ideas, but would like to hear from you guys.  Then we'll compare notes for next time.

-Matt-

One of the topics that comes up every now and again is the concept of 'design'.     We've occasionally touched on some of the considerations and some of the solutions when we need to create a new piece from scratch.  And, of course, there are always some historical references and touchstones that we bring up from the past.

I am in process right now with designing a new piece of furniture for my home.  It'll be a front hall entry table.   It has some boundary sizes and it has two specific jobs that it needs to perform.  And the finish needs to match an existing piece that's four feet away.   So I already have many of the parameters for my design.

But... what is design, anyway?   Maybe we need to get a definition of the thing before we go exploring much farther.

Merriam-Webster online defines it like this:

 ¹de·sign

• Pronunciation: \di-ˈzīn\
• Function: verb
• Etymology: Middle English, to outline, indicate, mean, from Anglo-French & Medieval Latin; Anglo-French designer to designate, from Medieval Latin designare, from Latin, to mark out, from de- + signare to mark — more at sign
• Date: 14th century
• transitive verb 1 : to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan : devise, contrive
  2 a : to conceive and plan out in the mind <he designed the perfect crime> b : to have as a purpose : intend <she designed to excel in her studies> c : to devise for a specific function or end <a book designed primarily as a college textbook>
  3 archaic : to indicate with a distinctive mark, sign, or name
  4 a : to make a drawing, pattern, or sketch of b : to draw the plans for <design a building>intransitive verb 1 : to conceive or execute a plan
  2 : to draw, lay out, or prepare a design

So 'design' is a process.  It's a method.  It's a series of thought experiments that lead us from needing a problem solved on through seeing the problem managed.   Those thought experiments take us from a position of realizing that something needs to be done to a position of standing back and admiring our work.

But 'a' design is also a thing, besides being an idea.    Architects create designs for buildings.  Engineers create designs for electrical systems, HVAC networks or automobiles.  And then there are 'interior designers' (which is an interesting extrapolation on the words, actually....) who assemble visual and aesthetic collections of objects, shapes, sizes, colors, lighting and textures that appeal to the sensibilities of the cleint.

Therefore we keep our eye on three balls.  Design is....

• Creative. 
• Deliberate. 
• A means to the end of achieving a specific goal or effect, and/or of solving an aesthetic challenge.

Fair 'nuff.   So how do we apply it?

Next up:  designing my little table.

-Matt-

I've got a good friend (my Senior Patrol Leader in Boy Scouts 30+ years ago, we were eachother's best men at our respective weddings, his dad was my Scoutmaster to the day he died...) who has more heart than skills at this stage of the game where it comes to working with wood. In short: a great guy who hasn't quite got it together yet in the woodshop.  But I've got to admire his tenacity.

He's an OTR driver and doesn't have many days home per month.  But when he is at home he likes to putter in his garage.  And it's full of all kinds of half-finished projects, half-fixed things and is generally in a state of 'halfway' all around.   It's not exactly his fault.  There's not much you can do when you're home for 72 hrs every three to five weeks, on average.    Between his wife and daughter, other family, general life obligations, etc., he's short on hours he can devote to any given thing.

And so a couple of years ago I thought I'd help solve this problem for him.  I gave him a Jet pen lathe.  DANG, that thing is small and cute.  And inexpensive (!).  The intent was to give him a woodworking hobby where he can go from start to finish in a relatively short amount of time.   Let's get off the halfway horse, shall we?

Quite mysteriously he's just now starting to ask about the accessories, turning tools, sharpening strategies and all that good stuff that would be required to turn pens.    Hmmmm...  I wondered to myself.   What's started the bug all of a sudden?

It turns out that in one of the trucker magazines this last couple of months somebody reportedly spotlighted ancient kauri wood.  For those who are not aware, it's the 10,000+ year old wood that they're bulldozing out of peat bogs in New Zealand.    And it seems that in there somewhere it gave the name of a supplier (don't ask me... I don't know...) for pen turning blanks.   And so he's got an end product that he can wrap his mind around, with the ability to get there from here.

OK.  Insert the rev'ing sound of the Tasmanian Devil here.    He's a man with a mission.

In the last two days or so I've sent a few emails to him on the road, with links to suppliers, with photos of the sorts of things he'll need, and with some ideas for how much a 'get-you-going' set of things will cost him.

This is pretty cool.   I hope he follows through with this.  I'm encouraged by the fact that the day after Christmas he wants to head over to our local fine woodworking establishment to peruse their kits, tools, etc., have me introduce him to the manager and generally talk shop.

For me this is going to be a bit like living in the woodworking equivelant of Brigadoon.   One day every 4-5 weeks.   The first day/month it'll be wrangling pieces and parts.  Wait a month.  Then it'll be sharpening and teaching him how to navigate the equipment.  Wait a month.  Hopefully he'll have watched a few recommended instructional DVD's on the road in the meantime.  Then it'll be time to get into it.

Optimistically I think we'll have him up and running by.... spring.   And then he's off to the races.

I can just imagine how many pens and pen/pencil sets he's goign to sell to the other OTR drivers he meets.   Fingers crossed that he can become a cottage industry.

I love spreading the hobby around.

-Matt-

Yeah, I'm about like Gump - where this wood is concerned I really never knew what I was going to get.

A client came to me courtesy of my urban sawyer friend a few months back.   The client had several different trees taken down on his property and they were milled and kiln dried.   Now that the wood is ready to be used I was tapped to begin making some of the client's requested items.

The first project on the docket was a clock, to be made from a set of KlockIt plans.   Hmmmm... I've never built from KlockIt's plans before, so for me this was a new experience.

And, of course, there were the inevitable discrepancies and judgement calls.  But that's where the project got fun, as I was able to inject some of my own sensibilities into the project.

I started out with rough sawn lumber, bark on.  Gnarly stuff.  These are much smaller sections of the large boards that I began with. 

It's silver maple, which is a soft maple.     It'd been milled with a WoodMizer bandsaw mill and still bore the bandsaw blade marks.

But if you look verrry closely at the area just inside the bark you'll begin to see some patterns emerging.

Inside that bark was some absolutely amazing tiger figure.   Here's a snapshot of a small offcut and you'll see what I mean.   

WOW.   I didn't expect to see this much very pronounced figure in urban trees.

This figure was living in the outer edges of the boards.   And this meant that if I was to harvest the boards in an intelligent way I'd need to be mindful of not only the grain orientation, but also of the direction of, and density of the figure in the wood.

Really pretty, no?

So what I had to do was to harvest oversize blanks from the boards and skip plane one side.   I didn't worry about making them flat yet.   I'd do that later.   What I needed to do was to get the proper read on the boards before I yielded usable blanks.

And when that was done I had a collection of

somewhat oversized blanks that looked like this.

In each case the rough sawn side is facing up.  The pretty sides were left down for this shot, just to get a sense of what I had before me.

Over the course of the next six or seven days I harvested the right shapes and sizes out of each of these boards, as per the plans.  And the plans are drawn on, notes made in the margins and all that good stuff.   If I ever am asked to make a clock from these plans again I figured that there was no sense in reinventing the wheel.   And in one case I scrapped their instruction set for one component (er... the crown molding at the top, no less!) to revise it so that I'd actually yield a usable piece when done.  Their order for when to bevel cut and when to profile cut the pieces guaranteed that you'd positively slaughter the profile at the miter.   

And overall, things are really looking good, I think.    The columns were made from some cherry that he'd had milled.  I thought that the color contrast would really pop.  And I think that it does.

But DANG!  Just look at the figure in this wood.

Did I mention how badly soft maple burns under router bits?    There was a lot of scraping and sanding to clean up the wood this nicely.

And, being higly figured, it meant that the wood wanted to chip out when planed or routed.  So my Performax drum sander got a good work out, and I ended up taking very small bites with the router bits, leaving exceptionally light cleanup passes to yield surfaces that didn't require tremendous amounts of sanding and scraping.

The crown profile took me three hours to mill, scrape and sand to look.... pretty good.    A further hour and I got it to the point where I thought it looked presentable.

This profile represents four different milling operations.  Two of the profiles required using bits with their bearings removed, letting the bit follow the profile next to it with JUST the nubby at the top of the bit to ride on the wood.   More burning anyone?     Not friendly.  But not unrecoverable, either.    So that's what lead to the hours of work to clean things up.

Never let anybody fool you:  figured wood is fun, but it's time consuming to make it look good!!

The client saw the carcass before the door was done.   I've got a month before he will be by to pick it up.

The hardest part is going to be letting this one go.   It's been a lot of exceptionally fussy work, but with lumber that's this gorgeous I dont' think that there's any alternative.  I've got to serve the wood.

So who'd have thought that this would have come from urban trees?

I sure didn't.     It really IS like Gump's box of chocolates.   And this time I got the one with the creamy center.

YUmmmmmmmm!

Best,

-Matt-

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.