Friday, August 22, 2008

More Furniture Completed

It’s been pretty quiet around here this week. The weather has been gorgeous but hot, so we’ve been doing lots of outside stuff, but Tom and Selwyn have managed to finish some of the furniture for the guest cabin.

They finished the jobio table a few weeks ago, and that’s now on our deck. We put the plain sapodilla table on one of the porches in the guest cabin, and this prickly yellow and sapodilla table on the other porch.


This table is inside the back guest room. The light wood is prickly yellow, but Tom isn’t sure what the dark wood is.

Tom actually put some thought into which tables should go with which rooms. Each of the beds in the guest rooms is made of a different type of hardwood, so Tom tried to mix the types of woods used on the tables and the beds so each room has the maximum amount of types of wood to see.

The pictures of the two newly finished tables are taken without the Plexiglas on top so the wood can be seen without any glare. We put Plexiglas on the table tops so they can be easily cleaned and so the grooves in the wood don’t pick up too much dirt. We thought about using real glass, which would be good because it wouldn’t scratch and fog like the Plexiglas, but in order to have the glass be relatively crack and shatterproof, it would have to be so thick that it would add 80 pounds to each table. Since we move these tables around, we didn’t want to add that much weight.


Tom and Selwyn also finished two suitcase stands. The one that is folded is made of mahogany, and the opened one is made with a variety of hardwoods. Tom shamelessly copied the design from a suitcase stand we purchased at a gift shop in San Ignacio. These stands are in lots of hotel rooms around here, and are available in all the gift shops, for good reason – they’re attractive, practical, relatively inexpensive and easy to make, and they can be used as portable tables or even seats as well as suitcase stands.

We’ve had so many inquiries about making furniture for other people that we’re going to add a Furniture page to our www.moonracerfarm.com website. Tom is comfortable enough with the designs, the wood supply, and the assembly processes that he can figure out some sort of pricing. The only thing remaining to be investigated is the costs involved with shipping the different pieces of furniture out of Belize, although that doesn’t matter if people want the furniture for use here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good idea! I'll bet Tom will be covered up with orders!