Monday, March 29, 2010

We have a plan

No pictures this time, just some information for those of you who have placed orders with us. We are not as far along as we had hoped on our building projects, and we are not caught up on orders from our backlog from the little fire. We have a bit of a deadline on the building projects because we are currently living in a house that belongs to my brother, and soon he and his family will be moving here and they will need their house. And obviously we have a deadline for each bed order.

We are only two people and our plan is just to do the best we can on both fronts. So we are going to plan on working on the house and shop during the daylight hours before the kids get home from school. Then after that working into the night as long as it is safe (sleep deprivation and power tools can be a bad combination). Then do it over the next day. Also we are not adding any new orders right now. So we will just keep working our way through the orders that we have as fast as we can. But this will not be as fast as we would normally be able to. Meaning the speed we anticipated when we scheduled your orders. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this causes to anyone. We hate to set a delivery date and then change it. We will be in touch with each of you when we get to your delivery date and let you know what is going on. And if you read this and you have any questions just feel free to send us an email, we will get back to you. The address is fhlunsford@msn.com

We are making progress on our building projects and I will get some pictures up of that and of the new beds as we get them done.

Thank you

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Play kitchen finished

We are so happy to have completed this project. Have you ever had a season that just did not go well? After we took on this job, we had injuries, sickness (flu's, colds, I'm pretty sure we had the swine flu all at the same time, even food poisoning. I recommend avoiding that at all cost. Especially if you are a family of six and five of you get it within 45 minutes of each other.

We have had tools suddenly break for no apparent reason and we started our wood shop on fire.

Needless to say we did not finish this when we had hoped.


We owe a huge thank you to our customer. They were so patient and kind throughout the whole thing. I hate it when we can't meet a deadline but it does sometimes happen. We really appreciate the customer hanging in there. We really hope that they are happy with it. We put it on a bus today and it is on its way to its new home.



Another huge thank you to them for asking us to build it in the first place. They asked if we would design a play kitchen. It sounded like fun so we said yes. We loved building it. And when we get a little more caught up and we are looking for more work I am going to advertise these and see if we can sell more. As always if you are interested in buying one or you have any questions about anything you can email us at fhlunsford@msn.com .




Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Full size James loft

We have so many things started right now, it is almost overwhelming, I keep telling myself to just breath and focus on finishing the thing I am doing at the moment. Which right this minute is blogging. Here is something we did finish. It is a full size James style loft. It is stained Early American which I love. It was nice actually to build something simple with everything else going on. This is our first design and one I still like. And if you need affordable this is always a good choice.
Right this minute my hubby is finishing another project that we have had going. A play kitchen. I will post lots of pictures of it, it is very cute. We also have two toddler bunk beds going, a bed with two dog kennels built in, and a Jeremy loft with stairs and a bookshelf. Wow when I read that back it sounds like I should get back to work.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

A little progress

This is the very beginning of our new shop. I know it is not a very exciting picture, but it is an exciting prospect, for us anyway. This structure will double as some storage and a place to work. It will end up being mostly for storing lumber when we eventually build a pole building for the final wood shop. That will give us the ability to keep more lumber on hand, as well as possibly some finished furniture. I look froward to the day when all of the furniture for the weeks delivery does not get stored in my living room. Our main focus on the whole building a house project at the moment has been on meeting the power company's requirements to get power in. We have a septic system already installed and now we need to get the footing poured for the house. My dad dug the big hole for us with his backhoe. And we almost have all of the forms up to pour the concrete. We have made that a priority because without power we really can't build a single bed.

The only snafu in the plan is that we had a couple inches of rain last week and the hole is full of water, well not full that is an exaggeration, but it does have water in it. Too much to work in the hole right now. But it will have to dry up eventually. In the meantime we have plenty to do.


We do have one side poured, all we have to do is make the rest look like this.



Thursday, March 18, 2010

A small change of focus

First if you came here to look at pictures of beds, you did find the right place, simply look through the older post and you will find what you are looking for hopefully, and if you have any questions you can reach us at fhlunsford@msn.com

Okay, now to the temporary change in our focus. So if you are fallowing along, we had a small fire that has left us below our full building capacity. But we were just about to be building a new shop, and a new house anyway. So we have been working on those things. We are moving from a corner of my dad's farm that my brother has a house on to another corner of his land where we are building a place of our own.

I have some pictures on the camera to share, but I keep forgetting to bring it in and download them. I will get them on here before long. I think I mentioned that we are going to try and do some things that are "green" which is a term I am not fond of but anyway we will be incorporating some things that lean that direction. Mostly because what it good for the earth is also good for the budget in the long run. The first of those things is that we are building a small house. It will be about 1,200 to 1,400 square feet when it is finished. Which is not tiny but for a family of six also not spacious. But we think that by keeping it of modest size we will save on the construction price, and also on heating, air conditioning and the time it takes out of our lives to maintain it.

One more thing about our building process is that we are building the house on a cash in our pocket basis, with out a loan from a bank. We have both worked in the construction industry enough to know how much control banks try to take of your home project when they are supplying you with money, we don't want that. And with everything that has happened in the home finance world in the last few years we do not want to get involved in that at all. So once you decide to go that route, you have to know that things will go slower and that you may have to be inconvenienced in small ways along the way. We are willing to take the good with the bad and in the end we will have a home for our family that is ours.

Our ultimate goal is to have our house be using solar power and our workshop to be on the normal power grid. Simply because we use a lot of power to build the beds and the cost of a solar system that would power our workshop is out of our range. In order to get a better price for the hook up to the power grid here the electric company requires that you have a septic system installed, we finished that on Tuesday. Also you have to have the footing for a foundation poured for at least 700 square feet. Last night my dad finished digging out the hole for us to pour the footing in. A huge thank you to my dad for bringing his equipment and his expert abilities to help us.

Ok enough blabbing, I will get pictures up next time and be less wordy. Oh yeah and I will have some bed related pictures soon as well, and our little kitchen is almost finished so expect those pictures soon as well.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

good news and bad news

Whenever someone says to me that they have good news and bad news and ask me which I want to hear first, I always want the bad news first, I just like to get it over with. But I am going to start with the good news. I like to to look on the bright side. Here as promised are some pictures of the Captains bed that we delivered last week. It is stained Puritan Pine, and it is a full size bed with six drawers on each side of the bed. It turned out great I think. I love this color.
This is the door to access the storage area under the bed. And obviously the picture below is of the drawer fronts.

Now on to the bad news. We had a small fire last week in our workshop. I say small because we did not lose any tools or material. But the reality is that a fire is never a good thing, unless it is in a contained area, say a fire place and you have nothing else to do but stare at it. I like fire that way. When however, you are taking a nap in a chair and your husband opens the door and yells "the wood shop is on fire!" it is most definitely not a good thing. We did catch it right away, and we did as I said save the tools and the material, so it could truly have been much worse. The structure itself though is a complete loss. So it is going to be a bit of a disruption in things. On the bright side, we were only two weeks away from a break in which we had already planned to build a new workshop. So maybe it will not end up being a total disaster. So the long and short of it is we may need to ask for some patience until we get things back to full capacity.


Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Ebony

This is another of my favorite colors. It is ebony. We have more of it coming up I think, at some point things end up running together for me. I know I have said it before but stain is my preference over paint. It will hold up better, and you can see the grain of the wood through it. You can get stain in so many colors it boggles the mind. This is a Ciera style twin over twin for the record. And it will come apart to make two beds at any moment that they decide they would rather have two twin beds than a set of bunk beds. I imagine they will often randomly think how comforting it is that they could just instantly have two twin beds. Ok sometimes my imagination gets way out of control.
But I did like this bed. I am very happy with how the finish turned out. And I think this is the first one that we built with the new saw that we had to buy after the other one broke. If you want to read that story it is in a past post. He likes his new saw. It is actually a better saw than the old one anyway. At least that is what he keeps telling me. He tells me that the new, cool, better saw ( it is also prettier if you ask me) makes it much easier to put the beds together.
He is on his way home now with pictures on the digital camera of the full size captains bed that he delivered today. I am looking foreward to seeing them and I will share.