This week marks the first contract for furniture labor sold by my apprentice.
Fixing The General’s Water Damaged Furniture
About six weeks ago Tim and I were working at a customer’s house (The General—a retired Marine Corp general). The General’s house was flooded due to a frozen water pipe above the upstairs ceiling. Water washed everywhere including directly down on the top of a nice antique cabinet from the circa, 1920’s. The cabinet was totaled and the General decided to give it to me. I barely accepted the piece because it was so badly damaged that I was uncertain I could ever get the money out of it needed to justify its repair. But we hauled it back to the shop.
I soon gave the cabinet to Tim with the instruction that if he could sell it, or wanted to keep it for himself, I would instruct him in its renovation. It would be his first independent project.
If the Key Fits!
The story took a strange but happy turn soon thereafter. My faithful apprentice was stripping and refinishing an old pie safe made sometime prior to 1890 (there was no plywood in it). The pie safe had a door with lock but no key and none of the keys on my sample key ring fit the lock either. Tim, on a whim (or an urge from the Spirit of God), decided to try the key from the 1920’s cabinet on the older pie safe—and it worked!
This is the stripped and refinished pie safe.
The Apprentice Becomes the Contractor
After contacting the pie safe customer with this news and conversing with them a few times Tim was able to contract with that customer to rebuild The General’s former cabinet for a price of $700. It is, admittedly, not a lot of money for the hours Tim will spend restoring this cabinet, but it is the birth of new skills that will help him become independent in this trade.
This is Tim’s excellent work on the rescued china cabinet!
Now Tim is branching out on his own in terms of skills, including how to contract work, pricing, materials ordering and more. And, I have the privilege to be his mentor all along the way.