How to do a custom piece

[drcollie]

Picking up the big custom wall piece this Sunday, I'm driving to John B's to go get it. We will deliver this coming Monday afternoon, stay tuned for photos of the finished piece.

[drcollie]

Here's the piece. This was quite an adventure and why I was slow on replying to forum posts and emails the past few days.

John Buchanan told me that he would not be ready on Sunday, but absolutely would be Monday morning by 10 a.m.. So I left my house early Monday at 5:15 a.m for the four hour drive to his place to pick it up. It was the 19th day in a row here in Virginia that temps were at 100 degrees and 90 % humidity, and the A/C is broken on my commercial diesel truck, so I was rightfully dreading the trip (also why I left so early, to beat the heat). I had my delivery guys set to meet me at the store at 2 p.m and we planned to deliver to the customer at 3 p.m. Ahhhhh...."the best laid plans" as they say. I pulled up at 9:20 a.m. to his place to confront a cabinetmaker with a VERY long face - he didn't have the piece done.

I've been doing this long enough to know what I see when I see it, and this piece needed about ten more man hours to complete (see third photo). My customer was leaving for Africa bright and early Wednesday morning and would not be back for a month. Normally I would have turned around and gone home, but not under these circumstances - so I said "Let's get this done, John - show me how I can help"..... For the next six hours he and I worked on the piece in the un-air-conditioned shop and completed it, and loaded it at 3:30 p.m. Monday afternoon. Here's the photos of the shop, some the piece as I came into the workshop, as it progressed through the day, and finally when loaded in the truck. I canceled my delivery guys for the day, and with the customer. It was 8:30 p.m.when I got home that night and I was fried from the day. Delivery was re-scheduled for 7:30 a.m. the next (tuesday) morning.

[drcollie]

More shop photos

[drcollie]

The next morning we rolled up to the customer's home at 7:35 a.m. I have two excellent delivery guys, Kyle and Brian. They're hard-working young men that take great pride in doing a good job and their eyes were big as silver dollars when I opened the back of the truck to show them what we were delivering. It took us three hours to install the piece, working slow and deliberate. It was very heavy, and required a delicate touch to bolt together to keep it all tight and without damaging anything. I had to wire the lights in after it was assembled and leveled (there are down lights in the glass end units and also soffett lighting to go upwards hidden in the crown mold on a separate circuit). We had to polish the whole piece and clean the glass as well, and install all the shelving. 93" tall, and one impressive looking piece. Room for a 60" or larger flat TV in the middle section, and the customer was very pleased at the outcome. I took a photo of Brian standing next to it so you can see how big the piece really is.

Go back to the first post and you can see the original sketch, and then the working drawing in .pdf format. This is the finished product. Total cost to the customer on this piece was $ 17,325 (higher than the estimate due to the added lighting).

[drcollie]

One final hi-res photo

[ckeefer]

That is one stunning piece of furniture!

[artielange]

Looks like it was worth all of the extra effort. Sometimes custom is the only way to go and it is very satisfying to design/build a project from scratch.

[aaron]

What a beauty. Putting Brian in the picture gives valuable perspective - my mind perceives it as a significantly smaller piece when he's out of frame.

[adenamound]

My brother and I had a custom cabinet shop until we both retired. In a small town in southern Ohio our clients wanted similar items but were not willing to pay the price. This left us with going out of town to sell which added cost such as transportation, motel/hotel cost. That helped to end our venture into commercial sales so now I do smalls and sell to gift shops or use that west coast auction site. Our last large piece was a Tiger Maple Flat Top Secretary Bookcase which now sits in my living room. The point of this is 'location is everything'.
I look forward to seeing the photos of the piece.

[aaron]

For the photos, scroll up.