Wednesday - On The Road

This morning I got on the road early and drove to International Paper in Morristown. These folks make all manner of corrugated paper products, specializing is shipping containers, and they supply us with the triple wall corrugated sheet stock we use to build our custom crates. This stuff has the same stiffness and puncture resistance as ¼” plywood, but at half the weight – thus saving our customers in shipping cost.

Today I picked up two 5 foot by 16 foot sheets, folded them in half so I could legally transport them, and brought them back to our workshop. You will see these again in a few days when we begin building the crate. I got the spruce lumber for the crates’ perimeter frame and the Styrofoam a few days ago.

After backing into our dock and unloading the crate board, I reloaded the truck with a full load of furniture and art items that have been for sale in the On Hand Stuff category while we looked for a new location for the Treasures of Appalachia gallery. For the past four years Treasures has serves as the showroom/gallery not only for Smoky Mountain Woodworks but for 40 to 50 other artists as well. Everything there is hand made and locally produced.

We lost the lease on our former building last March. Now that we’ve found a new home for the gallery, we’ll move all this stuff that’s been stored here in our workshop closets back to the gallery and remove it from our web site.

I’ll have to shut down early today in order to get cleaned up and into town for an Elders meeting at our church. The time I have between finishing my trucker duties and quitting for the day is insufficient to complete the finishing work on the cabinet, so I’ll leave that for tomorrow when I’ll have a full day. Instead, I’ll use my limited time today to tie up some loose ends and to maintenance.

See you tomorrow.

Doug