Sorry it’s been so long to post here. Happy 2012 and good cheer to all!
The run down on what we’ve been doing–we visited our former house-mate and friend, America, in Portland for a week. We’ve missed her very much and haven’t seen her since we left Washington, DC in 2006. It was great to hang out with her and her husband Shamir there in Portland. We also enjoyed the drive up and back–it was green, wet, and just very pretty.
We purchased new tires for Wesley while there (no sales tax and better pricing) so upon our return to San Francisco Bay area, David changed out a clunking ball joint and then we took the car to an alignment shop. On the drive back to the boat, I saw a nice little cabinet shop in Redwood City. I immediately thought of the wonderful piles of firewood (mahogany offcuts we had in San Diego from our huge boat planking project) and how those are pretty much gone now. I have stashed about a week’s worth of mahogany, oak, and other hardwoods under the floorboards. We’ve been using the kerosene heat and cooking stove mostly since I’m stingy with the wood these days. So, we stopped in the cabinet shop and the very nice fellow manning the desk did give us their hardwood offcuts. Some very kind fellows in the back also brought us a bit more as we were loading. Nice people. We shared the new little firewood stash with friends Jackie and Mark since they’ve been primarily using wood heat on their boat lately. I hope the cabinet shop will be a good source of wood for both boats in the future as well.
As I walked into the shop, I was immediately transported to three different places: first, the shop of a wonderful wood re-finisher in Corpus Christi, Texas. He taught me how to clean up the finish on David’s grandmother’s bedroom furniture and he refinished several pieces of furniture for us while David was a flight instructor stationed in nearby Kingsville. That refinisher also had some lovely cherry shield back chairs that I really coveted. They belonged to a customer who had the refinishing shop strip them and then never returned to pick them up–but the nice man couldn’t bring himself to sell them because he worried that the own must have good reason for not returning for such nice chairs and would eventually come back. The chairs remained in the shop for the 3 years we lived in Texas. The Redwood City shop had a similar set of chairs sitting in the front room. The second place I was mentally transported to was….home in Washington, DC. Our workshop was so very nice there–the cabinet saw, planer, dust collection system…oh…so good for projects…and so many projects we had there in our house! And, finally, I thought about San Diego and the awesome tools we had access to at the North Island wood working shop as well as at the boat yard. Oh, yes, and our still huge stash in San Diego of Sapele and AYC for completing Mahdee’s interior!
Seeing all that cabinet work going on and the refinishing projects…makes me realize that I’ll be really happy once we’ve settled into the Bay area for a bit and we can outfit another workshop, bring our woods North from San Diego and start doing projects again. David is itching to build our main saloon table. Of course, the problem there is that we actually have the lovely large pieces of Sapele for that project on the boat! Just not all the tools…
