The Daily Prattle

Still another venue for Doug's ramblings and ruminations. He'll be posting general thoughts on life to his new The Daily Prattle blog.

It will have little, if anything to do with woodworking and is rin in-house from his new web site design site: Allan Douglas Designs.

The Fat Lady Sings

There is a saying: “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” Apparently coined by sports information director Ralph Carpenter during a 72-72 tied game between the Raiders and the Aggies in 1976 and reiterated any time someone is in a close contest.

For most of us recently life has been a close contest. Economic disaster has pushed many to the brink of ruin. And some have gone over the brink.

I’ve been building furniture for over 30 years. It started as a hobby, making things for my own home, then friends and relatives. Eventually word got around and my friends’ friends began calling on me to build things for them too, and furniture making moved from hobby status to side-line business. This side-line grew until I cut my full-time employment to part time to test the waters as a full time woodworker, then quit my job altogether. That was about 12 years ago and I’ve been working full time as a self employed custom furniture maker ever since.

There have been a few lean spots where things got particularly tight, and there have been times when demand for my work has been so great that I had a 12 month long waiting list in spite of the fact that I was working 12-14 hours a day 6 days a week for weeks on end.

Yet, somehow we never seemed to reap the benefits of all this work. Even when our busiest year came to a close and we tallied up all the numbers in our annual report to Uncle Sam, profitability was disappointingly low. How could that be?

Then I found a series of articles in Custom Woodworking Business magazine written by consultant Anthony Noel in which he addressed this very issue, pointed out many expenses that often slip through the cracks to feed upon your profit margin and taught us to build a spreadsheet for tracking those costs and calculating them back into our hourly shop rate. I awaited each installation of that series with much anticipation and when it was complete I had my spreadsheet and began tracking down all those misplaced profits.

We recalculated our shop rate based on the results of that study and were confident that we would now be able to start tucking away a little for retirement.

Then the economy tanked.

For a while people who still had money to spend on quality furniture were finding us and we were getting along, but last July either those people started feeling the need to hang onto their money or we were no longer able to get our name in front of them and things began to get really tight. But, the fat lady hadn’t sung yet.

Almost another year has passed and nothing is getting better. I believe I hear that buxom soprano starting her aria. It’s decision time.

Having furniture custom designed and built for you is expensive. It’s much like the difference between selecting a suit off the rack at your local department store or going to a tailor and having a suit specially fitted to your physique. A tailor made suit will be many times the cost of an off the rack suit. More so if you choose a particularly spiffy fabric. But there are men who feel that $500 to $1000 (sometimes more) for one suit is money well spent. Marie spent many years as a seamstress in a popular dress shop in St. Louis and she knows first hand the extraordinary amount of money women will put into custom made gowns. And we hope to meet some of those people again soon as they will be the ones who are willing to spend money on high quality furnishings that are designed to their specific needs and tastes and built to last for generations.

But those are not the people who have been contacting us lately. As an example, there was the fellow who wanted a table and benches designed for his children’s use. After discussing his needs with him I estimated the job at around $1,000. His budget for the project was $350, and that had to include delivery to the east coast! This was just one example, it is typical of most of the dealings we’ve had lately. We’re just going to have to move in a new direction if we are to survive.

Over the years there have been certain items that have been very popular and have sold consistently. The higher pricing dictated by the need to actually show a profit as cooled the enthusiasm for even these items. But if I can get pricing back down to the previous levels, we may be able to revive interest in those pieces. How do we do that? Volume production.

I have always considered myself as something of an artist and as such have always considered production work to be distasteful. But then, so is starving to death.

If I can produce our most popular items in batches of 10 to 12 pieces I can economize by making the parts of these pieces in runs, and saving labor overall. How does that work? Well, it takes time to set up a tool to make a particular cut. Depending on the tool and the cut being made, it can take 20 minutes to fit the jigs and make test cuts to home in on perfection. If making parts for a single piece of furniture, all that work will go into making one or two finished cuts on parts (which may take all of 30 seconds to make the actual cut) and all that time gets billed to the one piece of furniture. If making 12 of those pieces of furniture, once the set-up is done it can be used to make parts for all of them and the 20 minute set-up time gets split between the 12 pieces. Instead of adding 20 minutes of shop time to each, less than 2 minutes is billed to each.

This is not to say that we will be able to slash our pricing to ½ of the current rate, for assembly and finishing of each piece of furniture will still consume most of the construction time and that must be done one piece at a time, with careful attention to detail or the quality of our work will suffer greatly. And it does not take 20 minutes to set up for every cut made. But if economizing in the parts making stage will help us reduce costs, maybe we’ll get some of that business back.

This will mean that what we build will not be customizable. Asking us to make a set of tray tables 2” wider than the ones we normally make seems a simple enough request, but it would in fact require re-designing and re-making all the jugs and templates for most of the parts used to make those tables. So, full custom work is being sent to the bench until the game turns around for us. The fat lady has sung.

Hitting The Wall

When I was in Junior High and High School one of the sports I excelled in was long distance running: both cross country and the longer track & field events. One of the things I learned while training to run is that all distance runners reach a point where every fiber of their bodies is screaming at them to stop, to quit running, to rest. This message is delivered via considerable amounts of pain, noodle-like legs and feet of lead. We called this “hitting the wall”.

By ignoring my body’s command to cease punishing it and pressing onward, time seemed to slow down; I felt as though I was just plodding along in slow motion, running through Jell-O. But the pain would ease up (because I’d go numb), I could no longer feel my feet only hear them thumping into the dirt). In reality I was still sprinting along, but I was totally unaware of that. And I found that not only could I continue to run after 'hitting the wall', but I actually had untapped reserves to call upon if needed.

I’ll spare you the “Glory Days” tale of my exploits and the state records I set. I dredge up this dusty old memory only to use it as an illustration; for I have Hit The Wall.

For the past three weeks I’ve been working overtime to get a trio of our English Garden Benches completed and shipped to Vermont in time for a wedding. How I got myself into this pickle isn’t important, but here I am. I’ve been coming into the workshop as early as 3:30 AM and working as late as 10:30 PM 6 days a week. Sundays I do no woodworking, but I do use time after church to do yard work, and catch up on chores around the house as well as the things I’ve volunteered to do for our church like maintain the web site (http://www.newportpresbyterianchurch.org/) and burn the Sunday Sermons to CDs that can be shared with our shut-ins or used as a resource in the community.

By last Friday night I was all tuckered out, and was reminded of my early days as a runner. This work is not normally as strenuous as a cross country run, but when you do it 6 days a week for 17 hours or more a day, for three straight weeks… then add to the long hours the fact that this is not your normal piece of furniture, the parts for this bench are made from massive chunks of timber and are much heavier than comparable parts for a regular chair or bench so juggling these pieces all day long takes a toll on the neck, shoulders and back. Then add to that the fact that for the past two weeks we have been experiencing unusually high temperatures for June. Actually these temperatures are unusually high for any time of the year for this region. Just a few years ago if it ever got over 85° even in August it was considered to be extremely hot. But here we are with day time temperatures running 93° to 97° every day for two weeks. We’re setting new records! Add to all of this the fact that I passed the half-century mark a few years ago and I’m not exactly as fit as I ought to be -- too much time spent making sawdust and not enough time spent hiking in the woods. Roll all that up into one big ball of wax and mash it into the mold of my life and you have a casting of why I am about spent.

Friday night I “hit the wall” so to speak. When I got home I showered, fell into bed and went comatose for the entire night. Didn’t wake up once, which is odd for me. I also missed my morning wake-up call. Normally I wake up at 4:30 all by myself, Saturday I didn’t flutter an eyelid until 6:00!

I spent Saturday in the shop, but Tim and Marie came to help so we got a lot done and it wasn’t as hard on me as it could have been. Another deep sleep Saturday night. Sunday morning I almost played hooky from Church, but decided that I really didn’t want to do that, I get a lot of benefit from attending, and I’m an Elder and should be leading by example.

Sunday afternoon I needed to get the lawn mowed. We have company coming to stay at Mom’s house and it’s expected to rain all week long, so this is my last chance to get the place looking less like a hay field. Yeah, I know, mowing a lawn is not a big deal to most. You haven’t seen my “lawn”. The photo is just a piece of it. We live on the side of a mountain and there is about a acre of cleared land that serves as a lawn, the rest is forest. There are three flat spots, carved into the slopes around the edges for our house, Mom’s house and our workshop, everything else is a slope, some are steep slopes. I’ve rolled our lawn tractor twice trying to mow some of those slopes… I use a weed whacker for those now. And… the tractor died on me a couple of weeks back, so I’ve been using a push mower that we normally reserve for trim work. UGH! But, I figured that this would help correct that ‘not quite as fit as I ought to be’ problem. Most of the time it’s just a good (3 hour long) work out. But this week I’m exhausted before getting started. This is where that ‘reaching down inside and finding the reserve’ bit comes into play. I reached, I found, I mowed. Then I collapsed on the sofa and took a nap.

But, I am SO close to the finish line. Just a couple more days and the benches will be on their way to Vermont. I just need to dig down for that last little bit of strength, take another dose of Ibuprophen, grab another bottle of cold water and continue to throw those leaden feet out in front of me... for just a few more steps.

Once the benches are enroute, I have promised to give myself an entire day off. I have it all planned out. I’ll sleep in late then get up and fix a hearty breakfast of eggs, (low fat) sausage and toast, then I’m going to stretch out on the sofa and re-watch the entire series of "Firefly". Maybe take a nap in the afternoon. Then when Marie gets home from doing her stuff in Newport we’ll go out to Elkmont and watch the synchronized fire flies. It’s a fascinating thing to see and no one knows just how they accomplish it. Or why. And this just happens to be the one week a year that they do it. It’ll be a micro vacation – just one night.

I’ll be back in the shop on Friday to prepare for the next order on the production schedule, but from that day on it’s back to my usual 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM days, 5 days a week. Making a long, hard run like this occasionally is interesting in that it proves that I can still do it, but it’s definitely not something I want to do again any time soon.

Why The Change?

We have for the past three years or so been posting daily updates of the projects that we are building to a special blog called Daily Shop Notes . Before we started blogging we posted web pages on our site that chronicled our adventures in woodworking, but they didn’t get much traffic. Mostly just the person for whom we were building the piece. We wanted to increase the exposure these efforts got.

The blog is syndicated through a number of RSS feed sources, so people who are looking for woodworking articles – or just blog browsing – come across this far more often. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, CLICK HERE to go to our explanation of this new way to stay informed on a variety of topics.

The blog gets lots of traffic, but very little of that traffic is stopping in to shop with us, they’re just peeking in the window as they walk by. I know this because our web site generates traffic reports that tells me how people are finding our web site, where they are coming from and what they look at when they get here. It does not break it down by individual visitor, so there are no privacy violation issues here, but the How and Where and What are important to a webmaster in determining what’s working and what’s not. The current blog is not. Why is this important?

The whole thing got started as a way to allow our customers to watch as we work. Like a race shop with big plate glass windows that allow fans to see into the shop and watch as the race cars are prepared. But there’s a practical side too. For one thing if the piece we’re working on does not look the way the customer envisioned it, they can bring that to our attention and we can discuss it and make changes during the construction, not after it’s completed. Also, the most common comment we receive from our customers is how much they enjoyed watching their new piece of furniture take shape. Some have said it gave them a much greater sense of appreciation of how fine furniture is built and how much skill and dedication goes into it. That’s a good thing. Too many people think that furniture is made by pressing a button that fires up a machine, feed wood in one end and furniture comes out the other. Maybe it works that way in Taiwan, but not here on Piney Mountain.

While a blog format does a good job of keeping people who are following along on a daily basis informed, those who come by in the middle of a project – or well after its completion – have a terrible time with it because they have to read the thing backwards. By going back to posting construction articles on our own web site, we can offer a home page for each project and separate pages for each day or step of the project. By linking the pages together with PREV and NEXT tabs a viewer can move through a project like flipping the pages of a book. By using the project Home page like the index of a book, a visitor can start his reading at any point. Making access easier will encourage people to view our work, and perhaps convince them that we know what we’re doing and should be entrusted with building *their* special piece of furniture.

So, that’s what we are hoping to accomplish with the changes to our blog. We hope you enjoy it.

Doug & Marie

The buzzard, the bat, and the bumblebee

I received the following in an e-mail today and liked it so much I thought I'd share it here.

THE BUZZARD: If you put a buzzard in a pen that is 6 feet by 8 feet and is entirely open at the top, the bird, in spite of its ability to fly, will be an absolute prisoner. The reason is that a buzzard always begins aflight from the ground with a run of 10 to 12 feet. Without space to run, as is its habit, it will not even attempt to fly, but will remain a prisoner for life in a small jail with no top.

THE BAT: The ordinary bat that flies around at night, a remarkable nimble creature in the air, cannot take off from a level place. If it is placed on the floor or flat ground, all it can do is shuffle about helplessly and, no doubt, painfully, until it reaches some slight elevation from which it can throw itself into the air. Then, at once, it takes off like a flash

THE BUMBLEBEE: A bumblebee, if dropped into an open tumbler, will be there until it dies, unless it is taken out. It never sees the means of escape at the top, but persists in trying to find some way out through the sides near the bottom. It will seek a way where none exists, until it completely destroys itself.

PEOPLE: In many ways, we are like the buzzard, the bat, and the bumblebee. We struggle about with all our problems and frustrations, never realizing that all we have to do is look up!

Sorrow looks back,
Worry looks around,
But faith looks up!
Live simply,
Love generously,
Care deeply,
Speak kindly
And trust in our Creator Who loves us.

And the winner is....

The above is a scan of the newspaper article that appeared in several local newspapers. Click on it to read full size. We get the Newport Plain Talk, so I have that article, but am told that it also appeared in the Greenville Sun, the Morristown Citizens Tribune and the Knoxville News Sentinel. Just a few of the others who have covered the contest include Microsoft, MSNBC (I've received e-mails from MSN users who said they read about us on their home page news), Yahoo, WebWire, MoneyCentral, MSN Money, PRNewswire and of course StartupNation.

We were notified on November 5th that we had placed 6th in StartupNation's Home Based Top 100 contest, under the "Boomers Back in Business" category. While there are no cash or goods prizes, the advertising alone is worth the effort of entry.

Normally, when I check in on our web site during the day we show 10 to 20 guests on line. Yesterday we were showing 120 to 140 guests (and ocasionally a member) online at any given time, all day long! This morning we're back to normal, showing 19 as I write this... oop, it just went up to 22.

They say it pays to advertise, especially when it's free!

You may click the winner emblem above to go to our winner blurb on the StartupNation web site. From there you can read about other winners as well as details of how the winners were selected. One of the determining factors in this contest was public voting, and so we must thank those of you, our friends and readers, who took the trouble to vote for us.

Thank You!

The Leaves of Fall

Fall is once again upon us here in the Smoky Mountains. October is historically one of our busier months in terms of tourism as the “leaf peepers” arrive to take in the breath-taking vistas of color that bless us each fall. Well, most of the time anyway.

We have had a few Autumns that were disappointing in terms of the vibrancy and longevity of the foliage colors. This year appears to be destined to be one of those years.

Have you ever wondered (or had your kids ask you) why do leaves change colors anyway? Here’s why:

The leaves of trees and other plants contain three main pigments: carotene, anthocyanin, and chlorophyll the photosynthetic pigment which captures the sun’s energy to make food for plants. As the most abundant pigment, chlorophyll is what gives leaves their green hue in spring and summer.

Another chemical in leaves, auxin, controls a special band of cells at the base of each leaf stem, called the abscission layer. During the growing season, auxin prevents this layer from fully developing and blocking the tiny, internal tubes that connect each leaf to the rest of the tree’s circulatory system.

In the fall cooler and shorter days trigger an end to auxin production, allowing the abscission layer to grow and cut off the circulation of water, nutrients and sugar to the leaves. When this happens, chlorophyll breaks down rapidly. When the chlorophyll is out of view carotene creates the yellow in maple, aspen and birch leaves and anthocyanin provides the oranges and reds of maples, sumacs and oaks. When there’s less sun, anthocyanin isn’t as chemically active and leaves are more orange or yellow than red.

Other factors such as the amount of rain and temperature variation can also affect the intensity of color in fall leaves. This year we endured a near record breaking drought and unusually high temperatures. The leaves are therefore not turning the bright colors we look forward to, but are just withering up and falling off the trees. Mostly. There are exceptions.

We have one young maple tree in our yard that must have some extra deep roots, for it is blazing a bright red while the others maples around it are barely orange and their leaves are littering the ground already.

But, even without the usual vibrance of color, fall is still a beautiful time of year and we enjoy sitting on our porch in the evenings and enjoying the views. We also enjoy the crisp evenings in front of a craclking fire in our fireplace. Let winter come; we're ready!

Doug-Bob.

Note: Material for this article was provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Da Big Sign Caper

In August of 2003 Smoky Mountain Woodworks and Landrum Machine & Cutlery (i.e.: Marie and I and our friends Len & Varena) started Treasures of Appalachia, Inc.. The purpose of this was to help local artists find buyers for their work. Naturally “local artists” included us. The problem is that most of the many, many artists who live and work in this county live and work in places that are tucked away up in the mountains, far from the major thoroughfares; difficult to get to even if you know where you are going. And if you are a visitor to our county, pretty near impossible to find.

So we wanted to open a gallery where locals couple display their work and travelers could find it easily. This effort has had a varied amount of success. Overall, we think we’ve been blessed considering the extremely limited amount of resources we have to work with.

In August of this year (2007) we moved the gallery in which over 50 local artists were displaying their work to a larger and in many ways superior location. One of the tasks that needed accomplishing was to move the big road-side sign and put it up at the new location. We had to leave the framework because it was cemented into the ground, but we took the sign boards to be re-erected at the new gallery. We did that last Tuesday.

To build this sign, Len and I cut all the parts and assembled them on the ground to make sure everything will fit, then disassembled it, carted the pieces up a pair of extension ladders and reassembled them aloft.

Don’t let that fool you though, the components were plenty heavy and it was enough of a strain doing it this way. There was no possible way we could have gotten it up there fully assembled without a crane. Most of the frame is made from pressure treated 2x12s with a 2x6 for the top rail. If you’ve never worked with pressure treated lumber fresh from the lumber yard, let me tell you; it’s quite wet and much heavier than dry lumber the same size. The side pieces are actually 8 feet long, but extend down between the sign boards of the lower sign 4’ to help stabilize the sign so the wind won’t topple it over. Lag bolts will hold only so much, you know. The lower sign is 8’ x16’, our sign is 4’ x 12’ and the point where the two join is 13’ up in the air.

During this reassembly I was using a drill as a power screwdriver. Once, while holding the driver with my left hand and hanging on with my right hand because the direction of the screw and position of the ladder demanded that I work left handed, I was having to apply considerable pressure to keep the driver bit seated in the head of the 3” long screw. The driver bit slipped off the screw and augured into my right hand. The result was a rather deep puncture wound in the fleshy muscle bit between the index finger and thumb of my right hand. It bled like a stuck pig and looked awful as blood ran down my arm. Stung a bit too. Luckily it started to rain and that washed some of the blood away.

The wound is healing nicely now, no signs of infection or permanent disability. It’s tender though.

Last night I was sitting at the computer, engrossed in editing an instructions file for Treasures shopkeepers, when the puncture gave me a sharp, stinging pain. Surprised by the sudden pain I glanced over at the hand. The wound is scabbed over, with a dark spot in the middle and little “puckers” running out from the middle. Well, to my distracted mind it looked for all the world like a spider.

My distracted Brain said, “Ahhh, there is a spider on Right Hand and it’s biting us!” So the parts of my body sprang immediately into action and Left Hand reached over and smacked Right Hand to kill the “spider” and thus rescue his counterpart from further injury.

This was followed by an instant of mental chaos followed by several nano-seconds of creeping clarity as nerve impulses arrived from Right Hand to Brain: GASP --- “AHHHHHHHHHHHH… that HURT!” Left Hand immediately apologized to Right Hand and Brain crawled off to his corner and hid.

I don’t think We’ll be making THAT mistake again for a while!

If you ever find yourself near Cosby TN (which is quite close to Gatlinburg TN, a very popular vacation destination) stop in and say "hey". Maybe even take home some authentic, locally made, hand crafted artwork for your home.

News Bees, Fog Dogs & Insect Serenades

Last night the girls got on one of their barking binges. Several times they’d spring up and run around the house barking out the windows. I’d get up and stare them down until they, with heads hanging and tails tucked would return to their beds. After the second round, I flipped on the outside flood lights -- um… like I’d have flood lights inside – to see if I could see what was riling them and was surprised to have the light swallowed up by a dense blanket of grey fog.

Going back to the bedroom, I mentioned the fog to Marie and she was surprised because just a few minutes before all this began she had noted how bright and clear the moon was as she looked out the bedroom window.

After 3 or 4 rounds in twenty minutes or so, the fog went away as suddenly as it had come (must have been a Mountain Wraith) and the girls settled in to sleep the rest of the night. Lucky them.

By now I was fully awake and am NOT blessed with the ability to just lay down and go instantly to sleep at any time any time I choose like everyone else in my household. By the time I got to sleep, it was nearly time to get up. And I’ve been foggy-headed all day. Curse those mountain wraiths!

For the past two days I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my finishing room as I’m working on staining the big curio cabinet I’ve been working on. Each time I go in there, a few minutes after I get started, I hear a familiar droning buzz…the drone of a News Bee. Now, in case they call these critters by some other name where you are, these are insects that look like small hornets; yellow and black stripes, but the size of a wasp and his abdomen is kind of squared off and gnarly instead of being a stinger tipped cone like a wasp or hornet. They have the peculiar habit of just hanging motionless in the air watching people as they do things.

This one would come and hang about a half inch outside of my finishing room window screen each time I went in and would stay there for the longest time. Normally a couple of minutes of watching is enough then they are off to report to their Editor in Chief. But this guy would stay for a good 10 minutes, barely moving, just watching. I could swear he had a note pad! It got to where I would talk to him and explain what I was doing. I named him Ray, after a local reporter I know.

We have some other strange bugs. Actually, living in the woods as we do, we have a lot of strange and wonderful bugs. Some I’ve never seen before, like the News Bee. Others are more common but they do strange things.

At night we are serenaded by an insect; locusts (grasshoppers) I think, that make a three part thrumming buzz; chic-ka-chaw. But what is unusual is that they do it in unison. It’s hard to say how many of them there are in the trees around us, but it sounds like millions and they’ll get into a rhythm and perfect unison with their song for 10 to 15 seconds. Then a few loose the beat and anarchy spreads for a second, then they rally and get back into rhythm. And they do it over and over and over, all night long. It’s really quite entertaining to listen to while I’m laying in bed not sleeping. I don’t have to strain to hear them, they are quite loud.

Perhaps locusts (or whatever) do this everywhere, I’m not sure about that all I know is that I’ve never noticed it before. But another local resident has been commemorated as being very unusual and bug fans from all around the nation come to see it.

There is one place near Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where for a few weeks each year tens of thousands of fireflies gather and flash complex patterns in perfect unison. It’s really quite intriguing and no one knows how or why they do it. And apparently this particular phenomenon occurs no where else in our country.

Just one more perk from living here in The Great Smoky Mountains.

That’s about it this time.

A Right Fine Settn' Porch

There are few things I find more enjoyable than sitting on a proper porch with my beloved and a glass of cold lemonade on a warm summer evening.

This evening is one such. Temperatures during the day had gotten up into the mid 80s, but as the sun slides down behind English Mountain across the valley from us the temperature eases. The sky splashed with pink, rose, mauve and vermillion slowly deepens into amethyst, violet and plum. A few bright stars burn through the gauzy haze of high, thin clouds which provide a canvass for the setting sun to paint upon. To the south the multiple ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains slowly disappear into the dusk.

A Chuck Wills Widow sits in the top of a tree across the hard-road from us and serenades us with his gentle melody. Crickets chip, cicadas thrum, tree frogs trill. A flying beetle thumps determinedly against the glass of the porch light. It looks like a June bug, but it’s too early for June bugs, unless he’s an eager beaver June bug. I switch the light off to save him from endangering his well being (and annoying us) and so we can get a clearer view now that the sky is dark.

It occurs to me that too many people have lost the art of porch settin’. Many newer homes have no porch to set on – just a sort of stoop. I suppose one could sit on the step of the stoop, but that’s not the same. No, a proper porch is a comfortable refuge even in a light rain. Though we have no rain tonight. No, tonight is a perfect porch settn’ night. Warm enough that an icy glass of lemonade is refreshing, cool enough to be comfortable, a light breeze to keep the gnats and skeeters away, and a utopian peacefulness to the sounds of the evening.

When the wind blows the right direction, the singing tires of 18-wheelers on Interstate 40 will traverse the 4 miles separating them from us and invade the natural sounds we enjoy so much more. But not tonight; tonight we could be a thousand miles away from anyone.

We sit in our new sling chairs – some call them umbrella chairs because the fold up like an umbrella. We bought them to keep behind the seats of our truck so we would always have chairs handy for outdoor events. They’ve come in handy even for a few indoor events. These we bought new this spring; we wore out the old ones. This time we sprung for the extra couple of bucks to get chairs with arms on them – one arm even has a mesh pocket for holding a glass of refreshment. Originally we planned to put a pair of rocking chairs here, but I haven’t had time to build them yet and these sling chairs are very convenient. When we need them they are comfortable, when we need the space for something else, they fold up and stow away easily. We may just keep these as our porch chairs.

Drowsiness eventually overtakes us and we go inside to get ready for bed. It’s been a long hard day and this respite was the perfect prelude to a restful night of sleep. Just one of the many reasons we enjoy living here in the mountains. It’s a great place for porch settn’.

A Day With A Dingo

Yesterday Marie and I spent, once again, in the company of a Dingo. In case you don’t remember our last encounter, this Dingo is a walk-behind front loader – well, OK, it can be fitted with other attachments to do other things too, but we were using it as an earth mover. And that’s how we spent the day; moving piles of earth from one place to another.

We chose to go with the Dingo rather than the Bobcat this time because the Dingo does less damage to the ground you’re working than the Bobcat. It also costs less, but it carries 1/6 as much as a Bobcat – so that’s a wash. It was the “tearing things up as fast as I smooth them out” thing that was the determining factor.

The first pile didn’t have to move far, just from where it was, next to our septic tank, to the hole above the septic tank – and the ditches running from the new house to the tank, and the ditch from the mobile home/shop to the tank. (The only way I could think of to find the tank was to dig up the existing septic line) And that pile was actually several piles or ridges scattered about the site. Quite a mess really, but it looks better now. It’s still just dirt but now it’s mostly level dirt that can be traversed, not piles and ridges that form barriers to travel. And, before I started digging it all out, I laid down a thick layer of dead leaved over the grass under the big pile to make it easier to know when to stop digging while putting it back and to protect the grass a bit. I had not counted on it sitting there for so many months, but there are still some shoots of grass harboring in a layer of decomposed leaves. They ought to come back fairly well now that sunshine can get to them again.

The second pile, or again: piles, were above and behind the house where the Bobcat and I carried the “fall-out” from our cave-in while building the Great Wall of Edwina. This needed to go back into the caverns behind the wall. That area looks much better now and will look even nicer once we get some flowers (or at least weeds) growing again. This area is the view out our kitchen window, so that’s a priority. I’d bore you with pictures, but our brand new camera quit on us and had to be mailed to Connecticut for repair. Hopefully we’ll get it back soon. The picture above? Oh, that’s a shot from our files of the last time the Dingo entertained us.

The third project was to flatten out the driveway and parking area. The parking area is bare clay and has been pretty badly rutted up by heavy trucks, and equipment used in installing our home. It is now, as Marie put it, “like the infield at Wrigley Field.”

On Friday we decided we could afford some gravel to put on the parking area, but at that late date we were unable to get anyone to deliver it on Saturday. So…

I tried to level out the humps-n-bumps in the driveway, but that was mostly beyond the Dingo’s capability. Here the gravel we spread the last time the dingo visited got churned into the clay below it by the bulldozer and Jadde (as well as by trucks full of cement blocks, a small track hoe, and the truck & trailer of our trim-out guy) forming a very hard, stable base for our driveway. It’s pretty ugly now, but once we get another layer of crusher run on it, it will be a good driveway, even for as steep as it is. Even now, it does not get mucky in the rain like the parking area. I succeeded in scraping off some of the bigger humps and moving that material into the deeper depressions, so it is better, but it is far from smooth.

And finally we moved most of a large pile of black dirt, which I bought from a road crew who were cleaning out the ditches along the Edwina-Bridgeport road last year, from behind the workshop around to the flower beds in front of the new house. There is a high amount of small gravel in this dirt, but it is also very rich, black dirt, not the red or yellow clay you see most everywhere. Around here, even if you buy “top soil” from a garden center, what you will get is red clay that has been screened for rocks and large clumps. This black dirt should be a good start for Marie’s flowers (better than we could buy) and we can cover the stones with mulch once the plants get started. I’ve got a compost pile started using wood chips from the shop. That’s been steeping since last fall so it ought to be ready this summer.

We accomplished in a day what we had hoped to accomplish in… well; in a day, but were afraid we’d need two. A Dingo, in the hands of an experienced operator, is supposed to be able to do some very nice finish work. I am far from ‘experienced’, so it proved very useful for moving around large quantities of earth and some of the spreading but all smoothing and making “pretty” was done with a garden rake and muscle. And those muscles were very sore on both of us last night. Hot showers and liniment all around – make mine a double!

Telephone Tribulations

In our modern society it seems that 90% of the population has a cell phone strapped to their hip or tucked in a purse so they can maintain constant and continuous contact with every other human being they know. When they come across someone who fails (or in my case make that 'refuses') to get on board with this ideology, they become irritable. We encounter these irritable people occasionally and are berated for not being more "accessible". There are several reasons why I will not join in with this 'Borg-like' lifestyle, and I'd like to explain them as this month's article.

Foremost is that woodworking is seriously dangerous business. Any tool that will cut cleanly through a 2" thick slab of white oak lumber will cut through flesh and bone like it's not even there. A blade or bit whirling at thousands of RPM can throw a piece of wood with tremendous force if it binds. Anyone in the path of this missile will get hurt. Therefore a moment of inattentiveness can result in the loss of one or more fingers, or a limb, or an eye, or even your life. When a phone rings, it is human nature to want to hustle to answer it, especially in this age where people expect to get an answer in 3 rings or less. Always. Rushing a cut or abandoning a tool while it's running to answer the telephone is a sure-fire recipe for an accident. So we have, so far, avoided having a telephone in the shop simply for safety reasons.

But, another reason is that so many of the calls we do receive are trash calls. Or, to borrow a term from the Internet; Spam. Telemarketers, wanting to sell us everything from carpet cleaning services to a postal meter, and 'directories' wanting to 'verify' their information (and at the end offer to sell us a subscription to some service they provide) and lately we've been getting several calls a day that are recorded messages bashing some political candidate or other. These calls will end when the elections are over, but the telemarketers are still a serious annoyance.

Yet another is the fact that most of the calls we get that actually pertain to our products are people asking what our pricing is, what our delivery time is, what woods are available, etc. The answers to all of these questions are readily available on our web site; the same web site they got our phone number from. Now, to be fair, I do know that some people are simply much more comfortable with their telephone than they are the internet; they're new at this but have had a phone forever. Some who call don't even have internet access; a friend or relative printed off a page from our web site and wrote our phone number on it.

But at the same time these people must realize that time spent dealing with all these phone calls is time not spent building furniture. Smoky Mountain Woodworks is a small shop, with one or two people in the shop most times. If there are two of us it is usually because we are doing something that takes two people to accomplish. Taking one of them away to answer the telephone effectively shuts down the progress of our work for both people. If the call is from someone who is seriously interested in our work and needs answers not available on the web site, then this is time well spent. But if it is someone wanting advice on how to stain the porch swing he just built or someone gathering pricing from as many furniture makers as possible on 'a dining room table that is so-wide by so-long' (with no details whatsoever), then this is wasted time.

If *you* were paying us an hourly rate to build a piece of furniture, would you want us spending a couple of hours per day answering the telephone on your time card?

We are not to the point where hiring an office manager to do bookkeeping, handle e-mail and answer the telephone would make any sense. That would mean paying them a wage good enough to insure that they will actually show up for work every day and paying workman's compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, FICA taxes and benefits. These costs would have to be factored back into the prices you pay for our furniture -- a piece of furniture that takes two weeks to build would cost an additional $360.00 on average. Would *you* be willing to pay it?

However, there are enough telephone addicts calling us that we need to work out some sort of compromise.

We are currently planning to enlarge our work space. In the new workshop (assuming everything works out) will be a dedicated space for a small office. In that office will be a telephone. However, we will NOT be allowing that telephone to take over our workshop. Instead, the answering machine will go in the trash and we will simply refuse to answer the phone until it has rung at least five or six times. That ought to weed out the telemarketers and casual inquiries leaving only those who are serious about talking to us. We will not jeopardize our physical well-being in order to grab the phone, so it may ring a dozen times before getting answered if we happen to be in the middle of something that shouldn't be interrupted. But if you can be a little patient we will be happy to talk to you, once it's safe to do so.

We hope to have the new work space completed in January of 2007, but we will begin testing this telephone theory starting now by taking a cordless phone to the workshop each day and practicing NOT answering it until it has rung at least 5 times.

How's that for a compromise?

It – Is – Alive!

Well, OK, it’s not really "alive" – it’s more like really interactive. ‘It’ being our new web site.

I’ve been working on this project for about three years now. My initial attempt came crashing down like an imploding building when the programmer I hired turned out to be… let’s say; not as reputable as I’d been led to believe. We’re still licking our wounds over that fiasco so I was not real eager to dive right back in again.

Back in the dark ages; in the days of DOS and dinosaurs, I used to be a pretty fair computer programmer. I took some college courses and learned to use half a dozen different languages. This was to help me get ahead in the job I was working in at the time. But this was before Windows™ so none of what I learned there is really of any use today. But it did give me a familiarity with how things work inside a program. Since then I have taught myself to hand code HTML for building web sites, and have picked up a passing familiarity with PHP, a scripting language used in building databased and interactive web pages. So I thought I might have what it takes to set something up myself by modifying a stock script.

I examined many shopping cart programs and scripts, but I’ll spare you the details of that journey and tell you instead that I settled on one called Zen-Cart. It is an Open Source project, making it both affordable and easily modified.

I installed the script first on our Treasures Of Appalachia web site because the traffic there was nowhere near the level of our woodworking site and would not inconvenience so many people if I blew something up. Since PHP does not run in a Windows™ environment I could not build and test a site on my local machine like I can for HTML sites, it had to be done on-line from my leased web server space.

That went well and I learned quite a bit. One of the most important things I learned was that I was NOT up to programming this thing to run the woodworking site the way I hoped it would. So I found Chris Eden of Absolute Solutions. He lives in Bristol England and is one of the Zen-Cart project programmers. He knows this thing inside and out and has been very helpful in getting the new web site up and running. We have a long way to go before it is fully functional, but what we have up works well. We’ll add new functions as we can that will make life even easier for Smoky Mountain Woodworks and our customers.

What we have accomplished to date is to replicate the look and feel of the old web site – because customer feedback indicated that our customers really liked the ‘homey’ feel of it – while adding many new functions. To list them all would probably bore you to death so I’ll just point out the most major improvements.

We can now “build” a product within the system by listing all the materials and hardware used in that product in a hidden section of that product’s listing and the web page will update the price of that product as prices for our materials change. By doing so, the product listing pages will actually provide cost estimates to our customers based on your preferences. The price listed on the page is a ‘starting at’ price, make your option selections from the drop down lists to customize the piece, then add it to your shopping cart to see the new estimated price. You can then delete that version and continue shopping or leave it there and continue to set up a different version. Add multiple versions to your cart to compare their pricing.

We are able to offer a richer variety of options to our customers and (hopefully) not make it so confusing.

Our new payment processor, tied to your customer account, allows us to simplify the periodic payments that are required. Once you enter your credit card information to pay the deposit, we will not have to ask you for it again for the remaining payments. We will e-mail you for approval, but you will not have to go through the whole rigmarole of logging in and entering your card number and address each time. Just say, “Yes, go ahead.”

And you have access to your customer account to review your order’s status and communications to date and to review or update your name and address information. This area is securely password protected, and all credit card information is encrypted and stored in a separate database on a completely different server from the web site.

Navigation has been simplified because important information is now displayed in small boxes along the left hand side of most every page. Information such as definitions or detailed discussions of a topic or word are still linked to the text of each page and those words change color when you place your cursor over them, but otherwise blend in so they are not distracting while you read.

As it always has, our web site offers a tremendous amount of information to those who wish to seek it. Much of this is supportive in nature, but some is critical and we’ve tried to insure that each buyer will see the critical information needed to make informed decisions.

As I said, this is a work in progress, so look for more improvements in the near future. We hope that you will enjoy our new web site. Your comments are welcome.

Till next time,

Doug-Bob

An Auspitious Start

This month is off to a rather bad start.

The power went out about 2:00 this morning. Not a big deal since we can sleep in the dark just fine, and I don't need an alarm clock to get up on time. But since it's still dark when I get up to start my day, it was a problem then. The power came back at 6:00 and I was able to get my monthly invoices out and get started in the workshop before the electricity flashed several times and went out again.

It was light now -- about 8:30 -- but I have become rather dependent on the power tools to get my work done. There was a time when I didn't need electricity at all for woodworking, but that was long ago.

So I went out to the barn and got the weed whacker (gas powered) and did some trimming around the yard. Still no power when I was done, so I fired up the tractor and began mowing. But the tractor wasn't running right and it kept getting worse until it finally died and wouldn't start again at all. So I left it where it died and walked back up to the workshop. The lights were on again, so I went back to work.

About a half hour later, Tim came in. Tim lives nearby. He said, "I heard you trying to mow, and heard that your tractor was giving you trouble. Don't know what it would be just from listening to it, but I know you want to finish your mowing before it gets hot, so I brought mine over. You're welcome to use it if you want." That's Tim for you; the man has a heart of gold, there isn't anything he wouldn't do for or loan to a friend.

So I used Tim's tractor to finish up. It was a nice one too, he'd just gotten it. Tim buys, repairs and sells lawn equipment. This one looked to be practically new and it had an automatic transmission, something new to me on a tractor.

As I was coming down a slope toward the barn, I mowed over the top of a new nest of yellow jackets, which swarmed out and nailed me good. I was wearing my straw hat, so that protected most of my head, and my pants were thick enough that the bees couldn't get through them, but the tee shirts I wear for working in the shop are thin, they went right through that and stung me all up my right side from my waist to my shoulder, my neck, the back of my head, and my left hand, because I was reaching over my shoulder with that hand trying to shoo them away. So they nailed that several times.

In an attempt to get away from the bees I jumped off the tractor and put some distance between me and they. It is fortunate I was driving Tim’s tractor, not mine, for his automatic requires that the operator keep a pedal mashed down to control direction and speed. Let up on it and it stops. And it has a dead-man switch under the seat, leave the seat and it kills the engine. My tractor has neither, so it would have become a run-away if I’d bailed off of it like that.

Mom's house is right near the barn, so I stopped in there and asked if she had any Benadryl; an OTC antihistamine that is good for combating the effects of bee stings. She did not. So I went home and called Marie, who got what I needed and brought it to me.

Now; I've been stung by most every insect there is – except maybe a scorpion. Some are worse than others, but these danged yellow jackets are by far the most venomous lil buggers I've encountered. While Marie was on her way here, I jumped in the shower and ran straight cold water on the stings to knock down the swelling as much as I could -- and our well water from 400 feet down inside the mountain is ICE cold right out of the tap. I stayed there as long as I could stand it; which wasn't real long I'll have to admit. It got to where I was shivering so hard I couldn't stand up, and I was going numb from the cold! But it helped.

When I got in, my left thumb and the two fingers next to it were so swollen I couldn't bend them. The icy water got two of the fingers back. My thumb took two hits from the bees, so it is still swollen up like a sausage and my hand looks like it's been snake bit; very swollen, red, and hot to the touch. The stings along my back and neck hurt, but won't interfere much with my ability to function. The hand is going to be a problem.

I took some Maximum Strength Benadryl and laid down for a bit to let it do its thing. I went back to the workshop later, but the Benadryl made me so groggy it would have been unsafe to operate power tools. One moment of inattention and I’d have a much worse problem that a few bee stings to contend with. So I took the day off, took my Benadryl every 4 hours and puttered around in the house.

By the next morning I was doing much better. So much better I decided to forego the Benadryl and it’s accompanying grogginess. A little hydrocortisone cream for the itching and I headed out to the shop.

This was SO much better than the last time I got stung. Then I suffered fewer hits, but I allowed nature to take it’s course and it took 4 or 5 days to get to this point. I’m definitely going to keep some Benadryl in our medicine box from now on. I’m sure this won’t be the last time, and next time it may be worse.

That’s all for this time. We hope you are healthy and happy, for those are the true riches in life.

Doug
Smoky Mountain Woodworks
Custom designed, solid hardwood furniture.
http://www.smokymountainwoodworks.com/

Springing into the new year

It has been a wet spring here in the Great Smoky Mountains with unusually high temperatures for so early in the year. This combination has yielded some pretty sultry days during May. Early June has been considerably cooler. In fact, as I write this I’m wearing a robe to keep warm enough this morning. This brings hope that perhaps we will not poach like eggs as summer descends upon us.

Our work has been fairly routine over the past few months; little has happened that I felt would be of any interest to you, my readers. So it has been a while since I’ve posted anything here.

I would like to thank those of you who have taken the trouble to contact me about your feelings toward this blog. All but one such conversation have been very gratifying.

Last year we launched into a major re-work of our current web site. Because we get many favorable comments about the look and arrangement of our current site, we want to retain as much of this as possible. But we need to add some new functionality that will help our visitors with pricing on a piece of furniture they are considering.

Most of the furniture pieces we offer can be ordered in a wide variety of woods, finishes and hardware choices. The choices you make will affect the final price of the piece you're ordering. The price displayed with each item is the price for that item with the pre-selected options. Naturally, changing those options will change the final price. This means many, many price bid requests from people who just want to know what a certain piece will cost in a different wood, or with a different finish.

Of course we could just figure what each piece costs if the most expensive of each option were selected and use that as the cost, regardless of your choices. But this seems dishonest to us. After all, this could mean a difference of several hundred dollars in the final price of a large piece of furniture. Why should you pay for expensive options if you’re not choosing them?

Why would the price change so much?

The price of some lumber species fluctuate considerably depending on availability. Because we buy most of our lumber directly from a local sawyer/broker we get the best price possible and can pass that savings along to you. Species like cherry and walnut are always in high demand and in short supply and will be more expensive than more plentiful woods like red oak. The cost difference can be considerable.

As a side note here, I have considered buying a small log mill to produce my own lumber directly from logs. But to do this most efficiently would mean that I’d have to be out buying those logs as standing timber, harvest the trees and mill the lumber, then move the lumber back to our workshop to be stacked and dried. I simply don’t have the time (or knowledge) to do this. The broker we deal with; Tommy, does. And he treats us fairly. It costs us less to have Tommy and his sawyers supply us with lumber than it would to produce it ourselves.

Some finishes are more difficult or time consuming to apply than others, and will therefore add a higher price to a piece of furniture if selected. We have posted a new discussion topic in the Library section of our web site that explains the differences between the various finishes we offer.

Knobs & pulls for furniture are available in a vast number of finishes and metals. Some are quite inexpensive and add little to the over-all cost of a piece of furniture. Others, particularly those made of solid brass, silver or pewter, are so expensive that they can add hundreds of dollars to the construction cost. Our 'Standard' selections are pieces we've found that offer a good value, that is: a good piece of hardware for a reasonable price, not necessarily the cheapest available.

Those who are on a tight budget and need to cut costs where possible and those who want and can afford to have the best available will be free to choose the 'Custom' option in the hardware selector and stipulate knobs and pulls they've found that suit their needs. The 'Custom option removes the cost of pulls and knobs completely from the on-line estimate. We will bill you what it costs us to acquire the pulls you select. However, if you are comparing prices among furniture makers, please bear in mind that our price in this instance will NOT include the cost of your custom selected pulls or knobs.

Our bookkeeping software keeps track of what we pay for materials and uses a weighted average cost to calculate the invoice for each piece we build. Our new web site will use these figures to adjust the price displayed on the item page as you make your selections. This will allow you to see in real time how your choices will affect the price of a piece you're interested in. At least within the scope of the options we offer. Making a piece larger or smaller or using some non-standard wood will still require asking for a bid. But, this should reduce the amount of time we are currently spending filling bid requests by quite a bit.

Our initial version of the new site will be on-line soon. For a preview, Click Here, but remember that not everything is working just yet.

Thanks for dropping in!

The Milestone

Today I turn 50 years old – a half century of life and vitality on this Earth. If I were a car I would qualify for Antique Status. Luckily, I’m not a car.

This morning I have been reflecting on my life. Having a naturally depressive personality, the things that spring into my mind first are things like the fact that I can not say, “I have 30 years of seniority with the company I work for.” Or “I’ve lived in this community all my life.” But then I realize that neither of these are common situations these days.

The only people I know who can actually say they had even 20 years in with the same company are 80 years old. The social situation was very different when they were part of the work force. Longevity and loyalty meant something then. Today workers hop from position to position almost as often as they change their clothing as they search for bigger, better, more. But then, employers have no more of a commitment to their employees than their employees have to them, so it’s perfectly just.

Marie was born and raised in St. Louis and lived there for 45 years before I dragged her off to the mountains of Tennessee. She thought it would be a difficult adjustment for her. It wasn’t. In fact, after a year here, she said she’d never go back to living in a city again.

I’ve been a vagabond since birth. My family never lived anywhere for more than 2 or 3 years maximum, and generally for only one year before we were moved again. It’s in my blood. Not being a long-standing member of a community has never been a concern to me before. But since we’ve gotten here to the mountains I’ve started regretting the fact that I can’t make this statement. Although, most of the people I know who can claim to have been born and raised here left for 20 to 30 years to seek gainful employment and came back when they retired. The young people today still seem to be in a big hurry to grow up and go somewhere else.

They will learn – and they’ll be back one day.

I have worked for more employers than I can count, doing every thing from mopping floors to managing a multi-billion dollar per year business. Well, managing a piece of it anyway! I can say that, for the most part whatever, I chose to do for employment I excelled at it and it was generally outside forces that separated me from that employer.

A good example was my stint with Professional Maintenance in Peoria Illinois. I took a job with them as a night janitor while I was in High School. It wasn’t glamorous work, but I applied myself and did the best job I was capable of regardless of the task I was assigned. As a result I received better and better assignments, I was promoted to Lead of a work crew, then a bigger crew, then I was made the Lead of the crew that did promo jobs where the company was wooing a new client by showing them how much better our work was than their in-house staff or current contractor. Eventually I was promoted to District Manager, in charge of all accounts in the Peoria district. This included some prestigious accounts like the Bell Telephone Towers building. All before I had reached the age of 21. I was the youngest DM the company had ever had.

I do realize that a booming economy and the company’s need for effective leaders had a large part in my rapid advance. In slower times this would not have happened. In fact I was laid off from this job because slower times came. Clients began trying to cut their expenses and contract cleaning services were often one of the first cuts made. As clientele dwindled, districts were combined. I lost mine to a man with much more seniority than I.

There were other such jobs: the newspaper where I started as Supervisor to a section of the city’s newspaper delivery boys and girls. I worked my up through the paper, and into the corporate office ultimately becoming Production Manager over the corporations three newspapers and it’s book division. There was the riverboat casino where I started out as a lowly token seller and ended up as Deck Supervisor and the top runner for the next Assistant Shift Supervisor opening before the whole thing toppled like a house of cards.

But most of my occupations were more mundane. Usually managerial in nature, but not always such sky rocket performances. On no occasion, however, have I been fired for being a failure. That in itself could be counted as a success – perhaps even a mark of distinction.

There are no bronze plaques or statues attesting to my having made a difference. In fact if I were to return to any former employer now, I doubt anyone would even know me. Mostly because the staff I worked with will have all gone elsewhere as well. But I know.

Regardless of where I worked to earn a living, I was also involved in woodworking. It was a hobby at first, then became a passion. It allowed me to own furniture I couldn’t possibly afford to buy. It provided me with quality gifts to give friends and relatives, and it challenged me to grow and learn and become more than I was.

No, my name is not as well known as Sam Maloof, Auther Formsby, or Norm Abram, and it’s a very good possibility that it will never be. But that’s fine with me; I don’t do this to become famous. I have a file box crammed full of the many hundreds of orders and letters from the customers we’ve served. Many of whom told their friends about us and they ordered something as well. Their glowing comments are all the fame I require. I am gratified just knowing that my furniture graces the homes of hundreds and hundreds of families. Perhaps it will be handed down to the next generation as a cherished family heirloom.

That is a legacy of a sort – even if they forget my name, my furniture will stand as a mute testimony to my having been here. A few clients have actually asked me to sign their piece of furniture – somewhere inconspicuous – because they felt it was a work of art and deserved to be treated as such. I blush at these requests, but am gratified that they feel this way. It gives me courage enough to look forward to my next half-century. Perhaps, like a fine wine or a pot of home-made soup, I’ll just get better and better with age.

Heating up the Holiday

Sometimes the simplest gestures can make all the difference.

Some friends gave us a wood stove (more like a wood burning furnace) that they no longer needed and we installed it in the workshop. I planned to run the pipe straight up and through the roof. That seemed the simplest plan. The lumberyard had an installation kit that had "everything you need to seal up around the stovepipe" for about $50. When I asked about insulation so I don't burn the shop down, the guy said, "Oh, yeah, you'll also need a high-temp adaptor for that."

"And how much is that?"

"About $200.00"

AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

My neighbor suggested just busting a hole in the block wall, mortering an 8" drain tile into the hole and running the stove pipe out through the tile. I envisioned myself, a sledge hammer and a block wall... Images of Berlin a few years ago came to mind. Hmm... no, there must be a better way.

We have three windows in our workshop. Sort of. One is a good window in the end wall above our stationary workbench, and is irrelevant to this discussion. Another good window is near where I wanted to install the stove. It lets in light, but offers no view other than the dirt and grass sloping sharply up beside the shop. That's part of living on the side of a mountain. Opposite that window is a window-hole that I boarded up with a removable shutter so we could open it in the summer for extra light and ventilation, but remains closed in the winter because the window was broken out, frame smashed and I can't find replacement windows the same size.

I thought about moving the stove over to the opposite wall and running the stove pipe out through the boarded up window opening. But because of the tool arrangement, that would be very awkward. What to do, what to do?

So Marie says, "Why don't you leave the stove where it is and move the window. That way you have the heater where you want it, we get more light and our view out over the valley."

Duh! No wonder she's the boss.

It wasn't quite that simple -- nothing ever is -- but it did work out. I used a panel of cement board (Durock - fire proof) to fill in where I took the good window out of the back wall, cut a nice neat round hole for the stove pipe through that and we now have wood heat in the shop. We also have a lovely view down our front "yard" and across the valley to English Mountain, as well as a good view of the sunsets in the evening.

Before the wood stove, we used a small propane furnace as our primary heat source. I turned it down at night to keep the shop at 35° to 40° -- just enough to keep supplies from freezing, and around 60° during the day. Warm, sunny days helped considerably to stretch the fuel supply, but on average we were filling our 40 pound propane cylinder once per week, at $18 per pop. But the cost of propane is up from last year almost 50%. Now we use the propane just at night, and the same cylinder has lasted us 3 weeks -- including the recent cold snap where it was getting down into the teens at night. In normal temperatures, it will last even longer. That helps a lot.

Of course the trade-off is that we have to go wandering through the woods gathering up firewood once a week. And a lot of what we bring back is in the form of large branches and small logs that have to be cut up, but Mom gave us an electric chainsaw she brought with her when she moved from Nebraska. I have no idea what they were going to do with it. It had been used once by my half-brother; Brian. He neglected to set the tension on the chain before using starting it up, so it jumped it's track right way. Disgusted, he stuck it back in the box and never touched it again. It works fine if you do it right.

So our mornings are scented with the fragrance of wood smoke, the shop is warm and our forst gets cleaned up of deadwood. It's all good, and we're grateful for it all.

Merry Christmas!

The Old Homestead

Living in a semi-remote mountain area is a mixed blessing.

I call it a ‘blessing’ because it is primarily a good thing. It is for us at least. The beauty and grandeur of The Great Smoky Mountains region is breath taking. Especially at this time of year with the changing leaves. The peaceful serenity here is blissful. And the people in these parts are truly the salt of the earth. Mostly descendant from Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled here during pre-civil war times, they have their quirks and peculiarities – like any one. They’re ‘Mountain Folk’ from way back. They have their own way of doing things and thinking about things. But if you take a little time to get to know them and don’t come in determined to “reform” them over night, they’ll welcome you into the fold and be some of the best friends you could possibly want.

Being raised as an Air Force brat, I’ve lived in 20 some-odd places all around this country, and others. And of all the places I’ve been and seen this place is the one I love best. Everywhere else I’ve lived we always enjoyed getting away on vacation – going and seeing someplace different. But since being here, I don’t long for different sights. When I must go away, I enjoy getting back home. This is the first place I’ve lived that I actually called “home” for my other residences always seemed as temporary as they were. Even after being grown and out of my parents house, I knew that where I was would be temporary so I didn’t make much effort to put down roots. And when it was time to move on, it was no hardship. But since settling here I can’t imagine going elsewhere.

Of course this is not the life for everyone, so those who prefer the seashore, or mid-western farmlands, or the deserts of the southwest are welcome to pursue their desires.

In St Louis Marie and I owned a house and workshop in a 1/8 acre lot. From either our front or back porch we could see 6 to 12 other homes. And they could see us. Here we have 4½ acres of wooded land. To us it seems a palatial estate, though by local standards it’s a pittance. Around here you’re not a real “land owner’ unless you have at least 25 acres. It’s a mountain folk thing. Many of these people are descendants of families who owned entire mountains each. As the young’uns grew up and married, parcels were given to the newlywed couples. There are still a few large tracts of land owned by single family lines, although many were forced to sell family land to outsiders when hard times came and they needed money.

The remoteness that I enjoy so much would drive some people bonkers. Not to over state the case, we are NOT up on some craggy bluff 20 miles removed from the nearest living soul. We have neighbors. We just can’t see them, or hear them – most of the time. The only house I can see from our place is the one we had built for my mom and step-dad when they moved out here a few years ago; its on our property around 100 feet down hill from our place. Close enough I can get there quickly and easily when needed, but far enough away that I don’t wake them if I go out early in the morning to work in my shop– which is another 50 feet or so away from them. The other neighbors are not visible because of trees and rises, but are within walking distance. Tim & Katherine are across the drive from Mom, their daughter and son-in-law live in a small home on the back side of their property. Earl & Wilma are across the hard road. Judge John Bell just built a new home across the road as well, but it’s at the end of a half-mile long driveway that snakes through the trees and over the ridge a bit. If you didn’t know he was there, you’d never know he was there. The Balls, Iveys and Crumms live along the road in one direction, the Watts, and the Munns in the other. Some of these names are families that have been here for almost 200 years. A dozen or so families live within a mile in each direction of our home – easy walking distance should we feel like going visiting.

We all live on Little Piney Mountain, along a single two lane paved road. A very good road, comparatively. I’ve been on many in the area that are barely a single lane, twisty, gravel paths scraped into the side of a near vertical mountain face with a sheer drop-off that plummets hundreds of feet. No guard rails. No place to pass on on-coming vehicle. Piney Mountain Road is an expressway compared to those. Still, the truck line we use for furniture delivery refuses to come up here with their semi’s to pick up our shipments. The big chickens!

Big Piney is just behind and a north of Little Piney, then a couple more whose names escape me just now, and we come to Rocky Top. Yes THE Rocky Top immortalized in song. It’s surprising how many songs were written about this part of Tennessee. The other direction is Halls Top, then Stone Mountain. Across the valley, west of us, dominating our view is a long massive ridge called English Mountain. There is a notch on the southern end of English Mountain called Sunset Gap which is reputed to have the most spectacular sunsets on the planet. The reputation is well deserved. To the south are The Great Smoky Mountains. Through the floor of the valley runs the Pigeon River, carrying cold run-off from the creeks and streams that originate in the Smokies to the French Broad River, which eventually connects to the Tennessee River.

These geographic features shield the residents of this valley from storms. Working like a bug deflector on your hood, bad weather is forced up and over. We rarely suffer the ravages of storm winds like Knoxville and Morristown; the nearest cities outside of our valley. Although residents of the bottom lands get mighty wet when heavy rains fall and “The Pigeon” can’t carry it away fast enough. Being about half-way up our mountain slope, gentle convection currents work to keep my neighbors and I warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We’re almost always 10° more temperate here than the town of Newport which occupies most of the floor of the valley.

Newport begins about 5 miles from where I sit and is a town large enough to serve our most immediate needs, yet small enough to be friendly. Here we attend church, buy our groceries, household supplies and gasoline, do our banking, and are involved in a variety of community organizations. It offers a variety of restaurants if we want to eat out. It has a movie theatre if that’s what we crave, and a Theatre Guild that puts on theatrical productions several times a year should we desire ‘culture’. And it offers a variety of shops and stores to serve us when we feel the need to browse for something new – or new to us.

The only real deficiency comes in the department of our business needs. Not office supplies; that’s covered, but the hardwood lumber, specialty hardware and tools that I use to build our furniture are not available here. For those we had to look outside our valley. And that forced upon us some new ways of doing business.

When we lived in St Louis, I had three woodworking specialty stores within a 15 minute drive of my home and shop. Each carried a wide variety of dressed hardwood lumber, furniture hardware, woodworking tools and finishing supplies. When I needed some lumber, or a set of drawer pulls, or a replacement part for a tool, I went and bought what I needed. No problem. But when we got settled in here, the biggest ‘culture shock’ I encountered was getting used to not having these supplies ‘at arms reach’, so to speak. The biggest adjustment was in finding lumber.

Oh, sure, there are three lumber yards in the area. But they carry construction lumber: 2x4s, rafters, pressure treated deck boards. Some have a limited supply of oak, but its pre shaped for use in stair treads and quite expensive. Ask for cherry or walnut lumber and they give you a blank stare. Why would they want to carry that?

Think you can buy a replacement mortising chisel or brad point drill bit at the local hardware store? Not on your life. They have no demand for such things, why carry them?

So I set about locating sources for the things I would need to keep the business going. What I can buy locally – common screws and finishes mostly - I do. Most of the small stuff: hardware and fixtures, specialty screws, specialized hand tools and such I mail-order. The Internet makes that easy. I just had to learn to keep ahead of my needs – which was difficult when you’re used to being able to just pop over to Woodcraft and pick things up when you needed them.

I found a couple of suppliers of good, dry furniture grade lumber in Knoxville. But Knoxville is an hour away from here by Interstate (which I strongly dislike) or an hour and a half by back roads. Making a lumber run now took a half day at least. So to make it worth the trip, I had to start buying a truck-load at a time. Paying retail -- or near retail – prices for this amount of quality lumber requires a goodly bag of coin and tended to put a serious crimp in our budget.

So I started working with local sawyers to buy fresh-sawn lumber which I stacked and air dried myself. We now have a fairly good sized private lumber yard from which to draw supplies as I need. We carry 8 different species, around 7,000 board feet total. As I use what I have, I buy new to replace it so it will be dry when I need to use it.

So we are again able to avoid going to The City except for a few times a year, which is almost like an adventure. “Put on some clean duds an hitch up the wagon Paw, we’ns is a goin to th’city!”

But when the adventure is over; after we’ve wound our way through Chestnut Hill and the back side of English Mountain looms, I sure am glad to be coming ‘home’.

Mainstream Melodrama

I awoke early this morning about, 4:30. My internal alarm didn't care that today is a holiday.

I got up and wandered into the living room to do my stretching exercises and have a bit of prayer time, then on into the office to boot up the computers and see what awaited me this day.

As usual, I wiled away the early morning doing web site stuff and bookkeeping. About 8:00 I went into the kitchen and fixed breakfast: scrambled eggs, turkey-sausage, muffins, banana, hot tea and cranberry juice, placed it on our Bed Trays and took it into the bedroom to serve my beloved.

Our breakfast tray tables are one of the very first sets we produced, many years ago and they’ve seen a lot of use. They are just as lovely and sturdy as the day I built them. I used to cook and serve breakfast in bed once a week, every week, but lately we’ve had precious few days, even on weekends, where we could afford the time for this. Today is different. It’s Labor Day and we specifically planned to take some time for ourselves. We've earned it.

As we ate, the sun was just coming up over the mountain crest behind us, spilling its golden rays across the valley. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves. Through the bedroom windw we could see a squadron of Gold Finches flitting amongst the trees, their bright yellow bodies bursting with color when the sun’s ray found them. Other birds chirped and twittered melodiously.

It was a beautiful, peaceful mountain morning.

But not far from the forefront of my mind was the knowledge that just a few hundred miles from here, cities lie devastated, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and – at least temporarily – homeless. Perhaps thousands have died. You’ve seen the reports, I don’t need to tell you about that. But it was a sobering thought, and I recounted my blessings.

After breakfast I went to work, as I do most every day. Yes, it’s a holiday; but I am not quite caught up, so I must get some things done. But it will be a short work day. I have to lacquer 6 TV tray tables. Once that’s done, I’ll go inside, stretch out on the couch and listen to an audio book. Who knows, I might even take a nap. Such hedonism!

As for new stuff this month: we have made a few changes to our policies. These come as a result of a problem we’ve been having recently.

First, I must admit that we’ve become spoiled. In the past, our customers tended to all be intelligent, thoughtful people who were capable of looking at the facts presented and making informed choices that met their needs and desires. We rarely had to take them by the hand and lead them through the process of ordering a piece of custom furniture.

But, since our web site has attained very favorable placement in Google, we’ve been getting more and more people who don’t seem to bother reading any of the information presented to them. And we’ve had an increasing number of people getting huffy with us because they misunderstood some aspect or another of the process.

Therefore from here on out all LTL truck deliveries will be considered residential, and a lift gate equipped truck will be ordered on all orders weighing over 100 pounds.

We are also ‘prequalifying’ those requesting a bid on a piece of furniture. Once they tell us in writing that they have been to our web site, have looked at pictures, pricing and estimated delivery time on anything similar to what they want built, and have looked at our policies, we will spend the time – sometimes as much as 5 hours – producing a design sketch, taking off a materials list, searching out unusual hardware needed and producing a cost estimate. We’ve wasted too much time doing these things for people who “had no idea…”

We’re still trying to figure out how to prevent people who wander into Smoky Mountain Woodworks from mistaking us for Amazon.com and expecting to receive the item they ordered in a week or so. There have been three such people in as many weeks. One of these ordered a pair of Pin Rail Shelves. We processed her deposit, e-mailed her invoice and placed her on the production schedule for around next March. Two weeks later she wrote the cursory note of “WHEN IS MY ORDER GOING TO SHIP?!”

In discussing the matter with her we found that she did not see any production time indicators on our web page, she did not see that her order in the shopping cart was a deposit on custom built shelves and she did not see the delivery date on the Invoice. She saw a picture, clicked a button and entered her credit card number.

This, of course is entirely our fault for being so unclear. So we produced her shelves by working them in around other orders. When it was time to pay her balance, she argued that she had seen a payment to us on her credit card bill, she was sure she’d paid us. I explained that this was her deposit payment, the balance and shipping was now due. Then she claimed she could not find her listing in the production schedule. I instructed her to look way down there near the bottom, not at the top. She had no right to be at the top. It took another week for her to figure out how to make her final payment.

If this is what it means to become ‘mainstream’ I think I preferred being an obscure web site.


Moving on…
We’ve added a new product. A customer had us design a heavy duty version of our TV Tray Tables. It’s designed along the same lines of our classic tray tables, but more robust.

Another new product that is under development is a variation of our CD End Table that will accommodate the book shaped DVD cases that most movies come in these days. Be watching for this…

So much for this edition. Hope you enjoyed your Labor Day!

It’s not what you know, but who.

That’s what they always say anyway. I’m not sure it’s entirely true. After all, if you know nothing at all of interest, knowing a lot of influential people who knew that you knew nothing wouldn’t benefit you much. Would it?

Either way, I may not be the best example of this saying as I spend the vast majority of my time squirreled away in our workshop making sawdust. Because of our workload, my presence is required here. But I do get out and involved in outside projects as I can and people know where I am and call upon me regularly.

Marie is our “people person”. She handles most of the face-to-face stuff and she’s good at it. Some things we attend together, but most of the local meetings are handled by her alone.

But, between us, we have come to know a considerable circle of people. Some of them quite influential. This is a situation new to us. In our previous lives, we did our jobs then went home and kept to ourselves. Being public figures never appealed to us at all.

When we came here, we knew very few people. But those few introduced us to others, and those opened doors to still others. A few of these people have been key in getting our business up and running after the move. I’ve talked about them before, so I shan’t rehash it again here.

But lots more were simply open and helpful to us in a way we had not experienced in The City. Wilma Webb is an example.

When we met her, Wilma was running a candy store. Scrumptious hand made chocolates. I *love* good chocolates. We had made up some wooden gift boxes sized to precisely fit around a 1 pound box of chocolates. They were nicely finished and had a picture of chocolates on the top. Quite unique, and we hoped Wilma would be interested in buying some to sell in her store.

In talking to her about it, we found that the art & craft items she had for sale in her store were on consignment from local artists. But she didn’t charge them any consignment fee. Whatever she made on them went to the artist. In St Louis, consignment fees typically ran 50% to 70%. This amazed us. But she said, “If the crafts draw some folks in that wouldn’t have stopped otherwise, I get an opportunity to sell them some candy that I wouldn’t have had. These artists and I scratch each others backs.”

We ended up putting some things in her store, but the biggest help to us was the way she started rattling off other places we should go and people we should talk to. She had lived here all her life, had owned and sold off a flower shop and two restaurants – all still bearing the name of “Wilma’s” as well as the candy store. She knew her stuff. And she freely shared her expertise with us.

She was the first of many such people we’ve met. And we are grateful to them all.
As a result, I run a small side business using my skills as a web site designer to help local businesses who want to get onto the Internet, but can’t afford – or trust – the ‘professional’ design firms. I don’t advertise this service, but word of mouth keeps me busy. I’ve done work for several businesses and have at least a couple of sites under development most of the time.

Marie was elected to serve on the county’s Tourism Council, I serve as it’s web master, and we keep busy helping the county market it’s many tourist opportunities. As a result, we hob-nob with local and state level officials quite often.

We are active members of the Chamber of Commerce which is now part of the newly formed County Partnership. So we have contact with and access to many of the most successful business persons of the community.

And we assisted in getting Treasures of Appalachia opened up and serving the many talented people we’ve run across here who have no viable outlet to sell their work in this county other than public craft shows. We serve as officers on the board of this non-profit corporation. I serve as a volunteer shopkeeper one or more days per week in the gallery, and take care of the bookkeeping. Marie alternates weekends with Varena and serves as Visual Marketing Director. Treasures has grown over the three years it’s been open and is serving a vital need in the community. We are proud to be a part of it, and happy to have befriended so many talented and creative people.

Many other opportunities to serve the community come along regularly and we always do what we can to help out. We feel it is important to be active in our community, a community that welcomed us so warmly. As a result we are rarely bored. But we lead happy, fulfilled lives. And that is a good thing!

Making More Changes.

If you arrived here because you had bookmarked this blog as the source of the daily In The Shop progress notes you are, no doubt, confused.

Where are the shop notes? I moved them over yonder.

Why? Because I like to keep as many people confused for as long as I can as often as possible. Nah, not really.

Several months ago I tried spiffing up the In The Shop section of the web site. My goal was to make it an information central for anyone with an order placed, a place they could go any time to see not only their order status, but – if it’s under construction – how far along it is, how far it has to go, a progress picture, and even the ability to review their invoice and account status. Once it ships, they have the ability to track the package and know exactly where it is and when it’s expected to arrive.

Because the new detail pages present personal information, I had to come up with a password protect function to offer some resistance to folks who would exploit that information.

I hoped that providing all this information would be one of those value-added features and that our customers would enjoy the “warm & fuzzy” experience that it offers. It would therefore be worth the amount of additional time required to maintain all this.

It was also my expectation that by this time I’d be back to working on one or two projects at a time. I am not. We’re still working on 4 to 6 at a time.

As it turns out, most customers don’t even look at their detail page except for when it’s time to make the final payment. Those who do look tend to complain about the password utility.

The time spent photographing the items being built, producing and updating a production steps list and posting invoices to be viewed would appear to be wasted time. Time better spent on other tasks.

Therefore, I skinnied it down some.

• Our bookkeeping software has the ability to e-mail you your invoice as it is generated. It will be your responsibility to file that away for future reference as it will no longer be available on line.


• Photos and general notes will be available from the In The Shop listing page -- click the Construction link
  
• The ability to make on-line payments will be available when it's time, click the Awaiting Payment link.
  
• Our UPS account allows for the tracking number to be e-mailed to you as we process the shipment. Old Dominion shipping can be tracked by clicking the In Transit link in your order.
• The production steps and progress notes took a considerable investment of time to keep up with. Two weeks ago I tried converting from individual discussions to a general Shop Notes sort of thing and moving it here. But I don't really want to congest this rants & ruminations blog with all those daily summaries, so I set up another blog to handle those and deleted them from here.

If you do not see the links described above in your order's listing, then that function is not currently available.

This will make maintaining the In The Shop section much easier.



We will also be raising our labor rate in early August. If you’re “on the fence” about ordering a piece, you may want to consider getting it in before then.

Why the increase? Every How To Run A Business book I’ve ever read (and I read quite a few) offers an axiom on pricing your work. Each words it differently but all say the same thing. My favorite version is: “When the demand for your product exceeds your ability to produce it – raise your prices!”

Our production wait time is still running around a year. This is too long. It’s exasperating to our customers, and stressful for me. I tend to work myself to death trying to get caught up. Three to four months would be acceptable. Six months the maximum. So we will continue to try and find an equilibrium point. Once we find it, everyone will be happier. Well, most everyone. ...You can't please all the people all the time...

That’s what’s new. Thanks for dropping by to see what’s going on.

Doug-Bob