Of Air Mattresses and Table Tops

I have now been in San Francisco for ten days.  The weather has been beautiful, the people great, and the food amazing.  I've moved from Mark's couch to an airbed on the floor of Hattery's conference room.  I'm up a little before six every day, awakened by the crew working on the new space underneath me.  A big pot of coffee, a granola bar, an apple, and I'm down to the basement, where a pile of reclaimed ceiling joists await transformation conference tables and desks. 

A lot has happened it the time I've been here: I've de-nailed 75 boards; my boss bought a full suite of wood shop tools from some folks down the street; I've planed one side of all the boards; with the help of an old friend from Alabama who just moved to the Bay Area, Chris Currie, we ripped the edges off all the boards to square them; and we started laminating the joists into table tops.  In between all this, I've been working away on the designs for the bases of the work tables, watching a little playoff football, and checking out some amazing food.  

Despite progress, there is still a long way to go.  I'm grateful for Chris's help, and the support of the folks at Hattery, and looking forward to getting on with it . . . .

The raw joists.  Old growth fir, they are from a building that is around sixty years old, meaning the trees these boards came from possibly began growing around the Civil War.  An privilege to work with such storied stuff. 

Pulling a lot of iron out of the boards.   

Close-up. 

The ReBuilding Life

This weekend, I found myself on the South Side of Chicago, dodging rain and doing a little construction for the Rebuild Foundation.  Saturday, I was up fairly early, digesting the headlines and trying to get in the laundry room before the rest of the building snapped up the machines.  After some breakfast and chores around the apartment, I loaded my tools into the 'rolla and wound my way to the highway.  The Dan Ryan Expressway is a miserable piece of urban engineering: it slices the city in half, and, despite seven lanes in each direction, was moving at less than twenty miles an hour on a Saturday.  During the week, it is a nightmare, beat to a standstill for about six hours a day.  As Kevin Costner once asserted, if you build it, they will come -- the worst scenario for a highway, as each expansion in lane width merely attracts more traffic and compounds the problem.


At any rate, after about forty-five minutes, I made it to the Chicago HQ of the Rebuild Foundation, started by Theaster Gates, artist, educator, and all-around renaissance man.  I couldn't figure out the gate to the place (typical), and I didn't have the phone number (also typical) of my contact there, Charlie Vinz.  So, in (typically) bewildered fashion, I wandered around the alley for a minute until Charlie appeared at the fence and let me in.  I felt an immediate, powerful sense of place -- the house was a sense memory of Greensboro, radiating the same scents, sights, and scenes as my old home.  It was deeply reminiscent of PieLab, built as it was out of old lumber and odd bits of imagination.

The Dorchester Street house of the Rebuild Foundation, with facade of salvaged wood.