Dreams, naivete', and furniture...
One of the original reasons I became inspired to learn how to make things, and to have a workshop, was so that I could make furniture. I was in a furniture store in 2006 where I spied a beautiful high-backed upholstered chair with a really simple geometry yet an astronomical price. I was pretty sure that I could build it for about half the cost in materials, and thought I might have fun doing it, too. I never did build it, but ever since then I've had the dream of outfitting my apartment almost exclusively with furniture I built.
That was the dream. How naive I was. Nine years and a whole makerspace later, it would have been cheaper and simpler to have just bought that damn chair. :-) Nevertheless, the same naivete' that I exhibited when I thought "I can build that" was also responsible for giving me the guts to go ahead and jump off the cliff with the Columbus Idea Foundry. In this respect I feel that naivete', although certainly not a strength, was absolutely a reason that I forged forth with such a challenging endeavor. If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I'd have started the shop.
Regardless - I still have an apartment that needs furniture. I've long given up the pipe-dream of building everything myself (I was lucky that I could almost successfully assemble my Ikea dresser), but I have pivoted to a dream of populating my space with furniture that was built by members of the Idea Foundry. And that would still be pretty cool!
My good friend and our shop manager Matt Hatcher started this trend for me. He repurposed some gigantic metal doors and gifted me one as a spectacular art feature in my living room. Not only did this require him preparing and lacquering the door, but also building custom hardware to mount it to the wall. This included cutting, welding, machining, and drilling four very heavy duty brackets to which the 100 lb+ door could be affixed.
But he also went one step further, and added some red-green-blue LED lights, with a remote-control that allows one to change the color, intensity, and even a fading pattern of colors to backlight the whole assembly....
Pretty cool, eh? Keep posted to see what other CIF-created art and furniture I'll bedeck my halls with. :-)
(And thanks again to Matt for kicking off this concept with such a kick-ass piece!)
