Our Family's Faces

Left to Right: Ryles, Adam, Bethany, and Hayes

Photos courtesy of http://www.jlydesigns.com/

So much to do over the next couple of weeks before the Christmas holiday!  But before I get frantic, I had to share these fantastic photos by one of our very talented photography friends.  I love these faces that she captured for that moment in time, as we all know too well how quickly they change over time!  Thank you Jen!

Until next time,

A + B

Wood Slab Table

Our dual-wood slab, live-edge table is finally completed! Hooray!  For the longest time, this table has been in "idea-phase", but now we can say that the idea was put into production at our shop and now there is a physical result!

The slabs are white oak that we acquired as a result of needing to remove a couple of trees from our yard in order to preserve the foundation of our house.  Rather than giving the tree-removal company the go-ahead to take the down trees, we decided very early on, that we would want to re-purpose the wood for furniture items. It has been a little over two-years since these trees were removed from our yard. At that time, we also had a portable band-saw operator come out to our house to mill these large trunks into boards. Once these boards were cut, Adam and two friends helped him carry and stack the boards with block spacers to allow the boards to dry.

As you can see from the photo above, the slab shown at the bottom right is one of the boards that we pulled for the table.  Essentially, we cut this guy in half to create both halves of the table.

We were really excited at how beautiful and near-perfect the boards turned out to be!  After the bark was removed, the two halves were sanded until they were both touchably-smooth. I will not elude to you guys that the sanding was a piece-of-cake. In fact, that part of the project took Adam the longest in man-hours, no doubt about it!

Once all of that tedious sanding was finished, we could select a color.  

Before making any selections, Adam created test samples for us to choose from. We decided between stains and oils.  Ultimately, we selected the fruit wood stain that gave the wood an-all over, even and continuous tone; since these are two slabs that are positioned next to each other. The Danish and Teak oils appeared to pronounce the differences in both slabs.  The sliced boards do vary in tones along with having pits, knots, and character markings.  The thought behind the stain was that it would marry the two slices, so that they would match and not appear too different from one another.

This photo gives the best representation of how the fruit wood stain turned out on the two slabs!  After the table got its stain, Adam proceeded to drill out holes for metal-rod dowel connections for the slabs. We opted to leave a space down the center of the table as a connection reveal or design detail.

After the rod connections were in place, Adam welded a special hair-pin leg, that we like to call a "tri-pin" leg.  These were coated with a high-quality, auto-body paint before they were attached to the table. And Voi-la, here you have it, our newest IDM creation!!

Before we try and sell this guy, we plan to make coordinating benches and pair them with a couple of Mid-Century style arm chairs for the ends.  After all is done, I honestly may want to keep it all for myself!  :)

Until next time!!

-B

  

Slow MoJo over ThanksGiving

Well, it's Cyber-Monday and we're starting to make the push of getting back into our usual routines.  Ugh!  Over the four-day holiday, Adam and I had hoped to utilize our home shop time to the max; cranking out as much new product as possible.  All that seemed to be accomplished was a desk re-finishing project, which we were able to bring to the store on Saturday.  Other than that, Adam admitted last night (as we were returning from another Thanksgiving function) that he felt so let down because nothing really had been completed for the store.

Apparently, Adam had been wanting to finish the dual-slab, live-edge dining table that we had designed, also wrap up another live-edge piece being a coffee table along with custom cutting boards, dining chair re-do's, an MCM desk paint-out, and bending multiple metal legs for different future projects.  Not to mention, there's mowing the yard and leaf-blowing all those millions ga-zillions of leaves out there in our yard!  Honestly, I know there are holes to fill at the shop, but when you have to run it for two out of the four-day weekend and still attend holiday functions, while always taking care of two crazy toddlers-------you kind of have to lower the expectations of yourselves!

Actually, as I snapped a few photos this morning of these various projects in our shop, I could see that a large percentage of work had been done already.  Maybe, nothing is finished yet, but they all will be soon.  With the many demands for products by others (and mostly from ourselves), we have to come to grips with the notion that IDM is NOT a huge-scaled factory---having tons of worker bees.  Essentially, we ARE in a good place. Progress is being made and boxes are getting ticked (at a realistic pace, of course)!

Until next time ya'll,

B