Grasshopper and the Ant plaguing my thoughts.

 Not sure what to do with my business. It has been miserable as I have little office time, (now would be the office time, but I want to get this out of me somehow for posterity in my life.) Many remodeling or handyman companies bite the dust in the first year. About 90 percent. Well, I have lost money this year running the business. Our expenses outpace the income. This is in part due to my not pricing myself high enough. I did a brief calculation and came up with $65/hour, (this calculation involves my overhead and expenses divided by my working hours, plus what I need to make to live on), but alas, I need more. These years are tough, the wild inflation from covid times is still present, but there's not nearly as much of a labor shortage, and therefore wages are stagnant. Everyone knows this, but some hang the albatross around different scapegoat's necks, and it's very frustrating talking to people about politics, because when someone hits a landmine verbally, it feels like a jenga game coming undone. The allegory of the cave used to give me more of a complex than it does now; it seems as though most really are watching shadows on a cave wall. I really used to get a complex about it, because it seemed mean spirited or vain to draw such a distinction from those that are watching a puppet show (which seems so very real to them!), and those who see the world how it really is. 

And still, I have to reel back, because I will not in hubris claim to see the world how it is; the allegory is likely fractal in nature, but I will say, it is painfully frustrating to see what some people fall for. Okay, all this to say nothing myself. 

So trying to support a family is going only so so. When it is time to work I am tired, this is the root of my problems in the past week. Whereas I did well before, somehow I stayed up late a few nights doing office work and that fucked my schedule and sleep schedule right up. I worked too long of days and over weekends, and that's out of the rules in my experience, so I have been corrected by God insofar that I wake up a little late, have to go to the store one more time, my stratagems are convoluted and waste time and money, and the weather is uncooperative. I set a schedule, and the rain fucks it up, or recently it was Thanksgiving that fucked it all up. I have a handful of things to do before we have freezing nights, and I have fucked that up, because now it freezes every night and my schedule keeps on screaming down the line like a thing that is fucked up. I have to notify the customers behind my current customers, making my company look like a fuck up, and I can't seem to book new work because, adverse to keep losing money jobs (I am now attempting to make a profit on jobs), the customers don't like the new quotes and some are asking me to redo the quotes for lower numbers, which I have tried to engineer them again, and I get the same numbers basically- so that one's not a big deal, I can tell them what's up, but. I am having a lot of thoughts in studying my quotes versus my actual expenses to perform this work and the trips to the store, and little consumables that I forgot to put on the quotes, those fuck it all up. 

 

So I have to get better at designing my jobs successfully. But part of me also thinks, I should continue to play hardball, (these are my numbers, because I'm not asking for much- I am a small business with low overhead- it's just me self-performing every task comes with time which goes into my rate). I still believe I should get my business running efficiently and successfully alone before expanding the brand, but I would like to be more in the office (which sounds odd, because I do like to be in the field, but honestly, I am a spaceball and am good at sales and the creative aspects of designing and problem solving, plus I love people). But these trials and tribulations times are rough recently because I feel like a fuck up. Daylight if I have a day off I need to be working at my house on office work or in my shop, getting it organized, but with a family and a partner that's emotionally driven instead of pragmatic (and now I understand the absent father- although I am not one; it is the only vehicle for a low income family to respond to this post modern late capitalist hellhole, trying to stay afloat in their 30 year mortgaged house which somehow makes you desperate simultaneous with the 'security'. But I don't get that time until the late night when the baby goes to bed, or the witching morning- which has never been in the cards for me- I would never wake up and open my computer to create estimates before a workday. I love life, not work. I love work too, but I love to stay up, and to think and create. Morning has never been that for me. I do believe I am ready fro another round of early mornings regarding getting out to the job sites on time now though since I had thanksgiving with my small family. My parents are divorced of the past five years or so, and my dad has made the habit of driving up to Pennsylvania to see Heather and and the baby and the dogs and I, maybe once a year. My dad is very distracted and lively, easy to entertain, impossible to predict, and gone in a flash. I had some legitimate time to rest in these three days and hopefully I can get back to it. 

Test drove a Sprinter van today. My tacoma truck is worth more than a sprinter van, and I would miss having personal vehicle, but the sprinter might be a better tool for my business than any other tool I could purchase, and I would make money by switching into the sprinter, so it feels inevitable, but again, I need to see if my business is profitable, but perhaps that is a sight to see only after I go all the way down the alleyway, putting everything I have into the business- while also being the only person performing all the tasks. I am the bottleneck. It's a very about-me, but not about me in the slightest kind of thing, because I am giving it all to this thing for my family and all that. I'm comforted recently by this book Unseen Warfare by Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, which outlines what a sin it is to operate in vanity rather than grace, reshaping the mind towards the task through God and for God. This clarifies the mind, because it gets you out of the way of yourself, and it's a vital message for me at this time. I like Christianity and sometimes Catholicism when I study them, because so much of the writing has to do with the battles within and without toward some kingdom, and it is the salve that makes going on in a world with so much evil possible. 

That's gotta be it. I have to unravel this mess. 

I find myself home alone at lunchtime

 Business is going alright, although I have gotten into the zone where I have pending drawings which are holding things up. I have been offered a mural, but despite drawing for hours to try to solve the problem, my artwork seems to stay in this unformed realm. Perhaps then that is why art schools teach thumbnails and abstraction to head towards something more concrete. I always thought it was cheesy, being a genius young person with lots of brain plasticity, I could readily conjure whole compositions without much planning, but the more I involved myself in art education (all the while I was aging out of ease), the more difficult it became to make compositions. There, among the waning brain elasticity, were many more possibilities to achieve different styles and different ends. There were many more voices in my head. 

Thus a beginner has a sort of shine to them where every direction they go in is positive. I have not broken through all of my training's options and thus I am stifled in my attempts at composition, deft as my hand may be, and trained as my eye may be. This has caused me much stress as the woodworking and carpentry walls are somewhat closing in on me, as soon the same issues emerge, where I have multiple projects open, and much to learn, but in knowing the various ways to do something, and knowing I am lacking in a thorough apprenticeship ( a true death knell in keeping with my theories outlined here ), I become a little fatigued in 'analysis paralysis', or the options greatly outweighing the time to design. 

I need to learn to charge for design- or better yet maybe, outsource that to someone who can handle CAD drawing, and dry unremarkable renders. Because with permitting involved, or customer approvals involved, I am finding it hard not to need the drawings to have the special sauce in them; and it is holding up my building process, because I am too precious about it, or too casual, one or the other. I go from gestural sketch, to finish, no in between, and it is stifling. 

That's it for now, gotta get moving. Luckily, my quotes seem to go through.  So I have some cash to collect, and a check to collect and some mulch to spread, and some tools to pick up, and lots of housework to do. 

Bob-A-Lago

 I am down in Florida now. 

I was laid off by my job at the cabinet shop in Lancaster, PA back in January, then made myself an LLC so that I could give running my own business a try- for the most genuine attempt to date. I knocked out a few smaller projects; fixing a tongue and groove roof, $900, repainting a kitchen $1,400, doing some fencing and millwork for a friend, ~$2000 something like that, extensive interior drywall repairs, $1,300, drywall helping another friend out, $1000, and so on. But I got an unexpected call from my dad about his difficulties with remodeling his kitchen down in Florida. He asked; "is that something you have any experience with?", which showed his hand a little bit because I had been specializing in kitchen remodels for two years at that point, and he asked if I would be interested in coming down to help. 

I memed it to Heather several times, "Do you want to go to Florida?!", teasing it as a kind of vacation opportunity (because I imagined in reality it might be a slog and a stressful arrangement), but actually she began coming around to it and after a few weeks batting it around, we set a date and got our house in moderate order for a winter without tenants. We shut down the houses water and gas, drained some lines, and hit the road. The car was full for the drive down. Edith was a cool 11 months old and just getting used to walking. We tried to drive strategically to ensure that she would be tired for the long stretches i.e. early mornings, long breaks for a morning/noon walk and lunch, then a short afternoon drive, then drive into the night until hotel. We did this twice staying once in Virginia or North Carolina and the second time... I forget where. 

The second day I believe it was we stopped for our long break in a National Park in South Carolina near Columbia called Congaree, which was a preserve of the largest remaining tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the southeastern United States. It was a great chance to let the dogs run free for a couple hours and for Edith to explore nature 

and follow us on a trail. 

The end of that day we stretched out the evening drive until we arrived, baby absolutely crying from 

a sore butt, and cranky mom, 

at 12am on the dot, into my dad's house. 

The plans for the kitchen were varied. Bob, my dad, wanted a hole in the wall like a pass through, 

and his friend had demo-ed all of the cabinets anticipating something bigger and better. 

Bob had gotten Home Depot rendering of some cabinets that they were ready to sell him, 

and another friend of my dad's had mocked up a different design of the cabinet scheme. 

Each design revolved around a four foot by four foot pass through window as the main modification

 of the kitchen. 

I was prepared to project manage the kitchen for a flat rate agreed upon between my dad and I, which in hindsight was way too low (I gave him number commensurate to my wages as an employee at a company, then doubled- but it is very expensive being on the road and without a kitchen, and living out of a suitcase etc. We will need to re-discuss the rate but let me not get ahead of myself). SO I hit the ground running down here somewhat, I contacted many cabinet shops and tried to find material for building cabinets, or lead times for shops in case I wanted to contract out the cabinets. Well, everyone's lead time was six weeks, and I was not impressed with the quality compared to the price. Of course, hang this back on a rookie mistake maybe, but I really had no clear plan so I was just data gathering. I went to a City arts festival event with my mom and sat down for dinner with her friends, one of which is a realtor gay guy who is good at taking real estate and design. I appealed my problems to him and he advised (because he was the one who sold it to my dad so he knew its features), what kind of kitchen would be appropriate for this house. Instead of a Home Depot kitchen, it called for a high end throwback kitchen, with real materials and good cabinets. Most of all, instead of a pass through window, I was advised to open it up. 

I Contacted an engineer and an interior designer. The interior designer echoed to open it up and the engineer confirmed there was no load bearing with our existing wall. I interviewed a few guys from craigslist to help me with tiling, drywall etc, and one of them I went with for a while. He picked up the materials for me (my cabinet plywood) and all of the supplies to do the tile. He did the demo for the most part and we together installed a beam for the non-load bearing wall. (a beam to support the dropped kitchen ceiling). The kitchen was open but it looked a little too exposed. I fired the demo guy before he had a chance to do the tile, because he did some very dangerous moves (almost dropping the beam on my head, drilling through electrical wires, etc,), and generally I felt like he was going to Ruch the tile job, and he had already installed the dur-rock subfloor incorrectly and used the wrong thickness material too, such that a bad job was ensured, so I asked him to leave. I likewise fired the interior designer after we had a follow up meeting where she proposed tile, appliances, and sink basin, but I felt as though all of her selections were cheap and lacking harmony or relevance to the kitchen in question. I brought this up in a tactful; way, but she had no alternatives to her selections. Moreover, she sent us a bill afterwards reflecting her hours and rate which was $150/hour, and totaling close to $900. My dad and I went to a countertop store she recommended down in Tampa to look at the stones and I told my dad; "The idea of stone yards like this, is that you fall in love with a stone, so if that happens to you, just go with it, because your house is bold and your kitchen can handle it" He fell in love with a bold green stone very different than what the interior designer had recommended, (which was white), rendering the interior designer's vision void (it was basically a Home Depot grade Pinterest board anyways). I called an appliance company to have them assemble me a list of appliances to my specifications, and they replied with three appliance packages with pricing and install included- much better than selections from the designer. Not to just rag on her, just the price tag took me aback after I didn't like the selections. 

My dad started getting nervous about recommending any more of his friends to me, because I also burned a bridge with his friend who wanted to charge $2600 for putting in the wall passthrough. Me and the Crackhead from Craigslist demoed the whole kitchen and put in a header beam for about a hundred bucks. Make no illusion, I realize that I am not trying to race to the bottom with pricing and all that; but it feels good saving buck if you can use rough workers for rough work, and find the right skill for the fine work; and it takes vigilance to not get screwed. 

My dad's house is called Bob-a-Lago, a joke referring to Trump's Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach. My dad is a liberal who watches the news and gets his info that way. He gets sold on the narratives that dominate corporate news cycles, and dislikes Trump very much, (as do I but for different reasons), but somehow Bob-a-Lago is what he chose to sardonically name his property. Well, I think about the name when I fire people during this project, because of how Trump came up in development. That's an aside, but it is really necessary knowing when to cut ties in construction- and when you're working with new acquaintances, that is often. 

I found some good house painters off Craigslist and they quoted the inside with a good price. My dad liked them, and we had them paint the whole interior and now the exterior. Bob mentioned I am really just a property guy while I'm here, doing what he no longer wants to direct or personally do. Bob had some half's landscaping up front, and some cracked and aging pavers, which I pointed out, and got wrapped up in fixing. This felt inevitable so I bought $800 of Railroad ties, some stone base, and some large decorative boulders, and re-hardscaped his front entryway, giving a brilliance to the arrival on the property. I subbed out the techo-block pavers. 

I got an electricians number from my dad a friend of his, and he and I rewired the kitchen together to the new plan, which I had modified into a mostly-open design with a little cafe high wall next to a cooking station behind a partition wall. It should feel very functional while keeping a public-private relationship for entertaining without feeling too exposed. I hired out to a new tile guy, a friend of the electrician's, and he laid travertine in a French pattern to the material specifications of someone who quoted ~$6000 for the job. I wrote down all of his specs, said thanks, and had a gigger type install it for about $1600. We used Mapeielastic, which is a fiberglass membrane with a sticker back which bridges the subfloor like a decoupling membrane while providing a lot of anti-cracking strength- good for the natural stone. The tile store said it was overkill, which I loved because we used 1/4" dur-rock instead of 1/2" to keep it low profile, but I didn't want to sacrifice any strength. Tile is in and I have all of my carcasses cut and assembled. I am doing all of it on a job site tablesaw It took me a week at least to procure all of the tools to begin this woodworking. I hope I get to keep all of the tools. I wish my family would move down here, because I would be able to use my dad's property and outbuildings to begin a cabinet shop, but at the same time, I have some customer base and much to do in Lancaster too. I look forward to being home after these past few days. Heather is in West Palm Beach visiting her aunt Sue in her condo, and I am on the back side of a bad fever that everyone went through, but especially the baby, and more especially me. I think I got it worst because I had to crawl around in the attic and crawlspace below the house to run the electrical. I believe I encountered fiberglass and mold and dust which are still wreaking havoc on my system. The trades are interesting to learn but so much of it is unhealthy and it is a shame the rates for building is so low (and at the same time hardly affordable for the middle class). Crawling towards affluence in trades is bittersweet because so much damage is incurred. Anyways after sweating out a fever for a couple nights, I have felt drained. I developed hives> Thank goodness Heather chose this weekend to be away. I am miserable, and I have barely the gumption to begin my woodworking tasks each day. Nevertheless, the goal is to get drywall in, cabs in the kitchen, face frames on by mid next week, and then try to get drawer boxes and doors hung and finished and all that by two weeks from now, because I have some demand in Lancaster when I return and I don't want to miss my first spring rush as a new business owner. I focused on starting the business in March (as well as the birth of Edith last year, because those things that begin in March have lots of inertia). I am trying to eat healthy, despite not having a car. I bought 7 grapefruits and am trying to slam two a day with some vitamins. Hugo the dog and Stella the dog are down here. Today a neighbor follows Hugo back to this property because he was out and about on her property. She was upset because Hugo had eaten all of her Chickens and Ducks last week, (first we heard of it), and now he had come back now that they had bought their replacement chicks and were raising them in their garage! He didn't get the chickies, but he was sniffing their brood-boxes! It is Hugo's nature to do such a thing, but that is no excuse. We placed too much freedom on his little dog shoulders and from now on the regimen will be buttoned up, and we are all the sudden ready very real to leave. 

My goal is to get the cabinets beautiful and installed, with drawer boxes, and doors, and appliances, and the countertop scheduled, and the backsplash scheduled, the lights in and perfect, the drywall perfect and textured, and get outta here. I will not see the finished kitchen on this trip but rather after many months presumably away again.  

Started a Business

Got laid off from a job as a cabinet maker/ kitchen remodel/ woodworker. I initially took the job like a vanity project, where I wanted to learn the skillset so badly that I took a slight pay cut to work there. It was an okay arrangement. The shop needed a lot of help in the beginning which is why they hired me, but as winter set in and the shop transitioned to new ownership, the work dried up and layoffs were discussed briefly. I offered to take some time off to work on my own projects, and customer's (side work) projects, of which I always seem to have a short list, to which I received a 'go for it' from my employer. Well, a couple days turned into a week, and then my dad down in Florida needed his kitchen done, so I asked for a month off, and they said, well, let's just talk in the spring, but yeah we will take you off of payroll etc. 

So all this to say, and since now I have Edith and the dogs and Heather is full time mom; I have little choice but to go off on my own. And I am excited about it, but I just hope I can step up to the plate and stay organized. Already I am treading water with my small clientele, and new pay rate; my hourly, which I need to increase to really make the business work, but the projects I have so far done are at my old side work rate, and not a support my business outright rate. I am for example, currently undercharging for a kitchen repaint job, in order to help out the parents of a friend of mine, who helped me install my kitchen cabinets (which I built through that cabinet shop I was working at, and deserves a post of its own). Prior to that I repaired someone's porch ceiling boards which may lead to another job in the spring I can hope. Also I busied myself with a plaster repair job which was extensive throughout a woman's house for a good cheaper rate based that she was a former customer and I hadn't yet lost my job. 

My business is called The Philosopher Carpenter; in part because I feel distinguished from others in my quality of work; it has a certain logos to each move. In part the name refers to my connection to Goethe, among the greatest philosopher I know of, and of course the greater allusion is to Christ, the philosopher (an agnostic friendly undersell even) carpenter. It is through my work that I aim to be more christ-like, to reach toward christ-consciousness. To serve and to love, etc. 

Ironically some of the customers I attract with the name are liberal arts types, which, I should choose my words carefully, would consider themselves very smart while balking at any reference to Christ, but that's a slight digression and not the point, just something I think about sometimes. 

Fatherhood is going great so far. I mean, it is very difficult of course, and it is a full time thing, but I am tasked with living a less toxic life in terms of foods and libations, and chemicals from work. I am tasked also with managing my time more effectively in order to reserve time to be with the family, or too to relieve Heather of her long shifts of taking care of the baby and dogs. We are very lucky as a family to have each other. Edith is miraculously cheery and well coordinated and clever. I am very proud of her and have been since she was tiny tiny. She always understood the mission, from in the hospital where she was adamant to stand (she enjoyed being upright) to her milestones of walking, waving, clapping, babbling. It is very rewarding. And she give very sweet hugs and calls for "DA", "DA, DA, DA". 

This is among a small handful of early mornings I have pulled off since my layoff. It is something I have a great embarrassment about; not being an early riser, especially sine I have met the milestones of being a sole provider, homeowner, father, etc., yet I love to learn at night, or draw or push into a task into the quiet hours. Two sides of the same coin I suppose, but few can argue that the night brain is any better than the morning. Edith has adopted a later schedule as well, but last night I got an earful about my schedule not being that of the professional. Women know right where to jab it's embarrassing. So we shall see if we can turn it around a little. 

Lots to do, just for posterity I have to write one of these every now and then.