I spent the day on the road traveling around the valley to various furniture workers that I am using on some projects. The purpose of the visits were to inspect the quality of the work, answers questions of the fabricators and just plain see how the furniture is coming along. It is a very exciting thing for me to do! Most commercial projects that I work on don’t allow for the time or really have a need for custom furniture. So when I get to design custom furniture and watch it come to life, I can’t help but feel like a kid on Christmas morning.

We have some great furniture makers/fabricators around the state; Seriously amazing craftsman that are making an impact on the quality of projects produced. As the Owner and I left one of the furniture maker’s shops, he said, “that is some exciting stuff, and you should really enjoy it, because we don’t get to do that very often…”

One of the things that sets these furniture makers apart is the way they do their drawings for approval. After we have design and computer drafted the furniture, it is sent out to bid to various fabricators. Once we select a fabricator – selection is not only based on price, but we also take into consideration their work loads and how long it will take them to complete the work – we request them to provide shop drawings. These are drawings that they produce to confirm to us that they understand the work scope and to create discussions for items that may be “gray areas” of the design. In our day and age, most companies turn around computer aided drawings for me to review. But there are a hand full of  “old school” fabricators that do full scale drawings. That means they draw them out on wood boards, or large pieces of paper at the actual size they will be built. Once the drawings are approved, they then use these drawings to create molds and patterns for their carving and cutting equipment.

Here are some pictures from my trip: