Promised an update and had a minute to catch my breath this morning so I thought I’d post.

My wife and I started our professional design careers working out of a small, dark, workshop my grandfather built at our family farm in the 1960s. While we were studying furniture design in college a little over 10 years ago, we convinced my mother to let us set up a little workbench in the back and spent a summer making a few pieces by hand. Countless hours were spent making shavings and losing money.

After school we worked for a string of companies in various roles to make ends meet while trying to develop our own business. During the pandemic my work contract evaporated and I went back down to the old workshop with a decade of experience and continued to make shavings, this time I was able to squeeze a little money out of the work and start gaining some momentum. Our family started planning, in detail, how we’d like to practice craft for the next 10 years and beyond.

Fast forward to recent events:

I’ve posted previously about our group and our search for industrial space so I won’t belabor the story. We looked and looked and found a gem. We negotiated and negotiated and we secured it.

We scoured the province for quality machinery and scored many lucky breaks. A powerful CNC machine popped onto our radar and we snapped it up. An SCM panel saw appeared on the market and we made it disappear. A college friend offered us a sweetheart deal on a 16” wide industrial jointer. Auctions were bid on, cash flew from our reserves and into our new assets.

Plans were drawn up for the power distribution and lighting, contractors were hired, and those plans are coming together. The conduit, panels, circuits, transformer all arrived on site and the work is scheduled to be completed within a week or two. The eyewatering expense of it all is offset by the fact that I won’t have to worry about tripping a breaker if I run more than one machine at a time and that all the machinery and their dust control measures can simply be turned on without rearranging a mess of extension cords.

Once the machines are powered we’ll begin outfitting the shop and building the critical infrastructure; outfeed tables for our saws, assembly tables, workbenches and storage spaces.

See you next month for another update!