Today is Labour Day - a celebration of workers everywhere. We love our crew who do various tasks to help us create the signs and features we are known for. The shop was quiet today, save for Lainey who volunteered to come in through this weekend to water the flowers around the property. Lainey often works in the shop but also willingly helps with the landscaping and other important tasks. She will be part-time as she heads back to University this week. Thanks for all you do!!
Hardware a plenty
We have long ago figured out it pays to buy in bulk - especially with items we often use. A trip to town to buy a needed bolt or screw is expensive when you factor in the cost of fuel and labour. Screws, nuts and bolts along with most other hardware are much cheaper when bought in bulk as well. The downside is that you need to store these things logically and handily. Initially, we built shelves and as our collection grew, we eventually graduated to homemade bins. The trouble is a fifty-pound box of bolts doesn’t fit in them and bins that large take a lot of room. Wall space has always been at a premium in our shop. A while back I was at our local hardware store. He was redoing his shelves and when I saw him emptying the old rotary nail bin I asked him if we could purchase it. The answer was yes and it was quickly loaded in our truck and on the way back to the shop. Each layer will hold hundreds of pounds of screws and bolts which means we can fit much, much more in a small corner of our workspace. As we filled each slot we whipped up some labels to make sourcing them really easy. Each year we get a little more organized.
Nothing to see here.
It isn’t often the shop is empty for more than a few hours as our projects come pretty steady as a general rule. We purposely scheduled a gap between the projects we had scheduled to be delivered this year and those for 2025. That quiet time in August disappeared when we did the extra three pieces for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska. The next project will begin in the next couple of weeks which will allow us just enough time to finish painting the outside of the shop and also get the garden sculpted and painted for the UnderHill suite at the Hazelnut Inn. It is going to be a busy time. Stay tuned…
