Sometimes I feel like the most fortunate guy in the world. With the new world business order seeing jobs heading to China etc in droves, the state of Maine USA has endless factories lying idle, which is a sorry state of affairs all in all, but one that held great potential for me. As a result we were able to purchase a perfectly viable old dowel mill just perfect for our needs.The factory and site offered lots of bang for the buck with just a little elbow grease required to get into workable shape (or so we thought…)Two years and about $50k later, and after superb efforts from some great local guys that I’ve got to know, we are now ready for business infrastructure-wise. Here is some of the fun we had transforming the old mill.Firstly, the roof….. The old flat roofs had endless leak problems, whereas pitched roofs work really well with the amount of snow we get in winter.
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Hard at work on a nice sunny day
The roof beginning to take shape
Another of our projects was to build a substantial mezzanine floor and install a racking system for easy selection of timber on a board-by-board basis…
Our mezzanine is built with about 10 tons of hemlock laid over steel trusses
All-in-all it took two weeks of solid effort from four men armed with nail guns and a compressor
We now have space for 180 types of exotic wood from the four corners of the globe – always enough to finish your project! (p.s. these racks are all now very full indeed!)
And thirdly, we set to work building a large showroom to show off some of the wood….
Hard at work on the interior structure. I can’t explain how cold it was when we were doing this work – hence the polar explorer outfit
We pretty rapidly got the room into good shape…
