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!