#farmhousemodern

May 3, 2021
3 min

Expanding Beyond the Garage

If you've been a long-time viewer of our videos...you've probably heard this a few times! Every single week it's, "Maybe one day we'll expand beyond the garage..." But when?! When will you finally do it?! Uhh....technically this past week, I guess. It might not be a commercial space yet, but we're one small step closer to our "big goals" (or "pickles" for some of you out there lol) Let's start at the beginning. Why did we feel like it was time to "expand beyond the garage?".

832 views

Jennie

Apr 26, 2021
7 min

How to find the BEST customers

So, you've officially decided to start making money with your hobby. That's a big, exciting step!! You want to find a ton of customers who love what you do and keep coming back for more. But how do you do that? How do you find customers that appreciate your work and are willing to pay for the time you've spent mastering your craft? What traits do those kinds of customers have? Being able to tell if a stranger will make a good customer is a skill that takes A LOT of practice.

513 views

Jennie

Apr 19, 2021
3 min

So you want to start a business?

Over the past couple of weeks we've been selling quite a few cutting boards to Realtors as closing gifts...more boards than we had in our inventory, actually! So it was time to re-stock! Easy enough, right? Apparently not... You've probably watched some of our past videos where we batched out a ton of boards (if not, check them out!) and it was a fairly seamless process. We have an entire checklist written up of how to buy, mill, cut, glue, sand, and finish the wood for the b

1,389 views

Jennie

Apr 12, 2021
3 min

Building a Modern Desk Prototype

So as most of you probably know, our business plan here in Houston is to sell closing gifts to Realtors who will deliver our packaging and advertisements to a homeowner with a big, new, empty house. That homeowner will then see our marketing and know that we build quality furniture! Our problem is, we only have 1 piece of furniture up on our website right now for them to buy (a farmhouse coffee table) so we decided to remedy the problem... Since so many people are still worki

474 views

Jennie

Apr 5, 2021
5 min

5 Sales Tips for Young People

We get a ton of questions on both Instagram and YouTube about sales: "What products should I sell? How much should I charge for my cutting boards? How do I find people to sell my work to?" The majority of these questions come from people who have been woodworking for years (even decades, sometimes!) and have now decided to turn their hobby into a business. BUT - we've noticed that a lot of these SAME questions come from young people, too!! High schoolers taking shop class are

341 views

Jennie

Mar 29, 2021
4 min

Our Biggest Realtor Sales Meeting Yet

As usual, we had quite a bit going on this week. We were following up with some Realtors and a couple other potential clients. We also started building the furniture set we talked about in our last posts and live streams! But the most important thing we did this week was our very first meeting with an entire Realty office! Following up with a potential client (like these Realtors we've been sending boards to) is such a funny process sometimes.... We have our initial interacti

421 views

Jennie

Mar 22, 2021
4 min

Business Requires Ultimate Patience

That's the lesson we learned this week! When you start a business - the things required of you are not always written out super clearly and there is no manual or handbook teaching you how to operate. Sometimes you just have to anticipate roadblocks and be okay with being PATIENT. It's not supposed to be easy. This week our patience took the form of dealing with the bank.. So before we get into story time, let's run through a quick recap of our week - because not EVERYTHING ab

238 views

Jennie

Mar 15, 2021
4 min

Why Sales Is So Hard

In our last post and video, we talked about how we just got back from 2 weeks of flying Atmospheric Rivers with the Air Force out in Reno, NV. We made a few sales while we were gone during that time, but we still had a couple more sales to lock down and finish up once we got back! One of our sales was a work from home desk that we delivered right after we got back and the other sale was supposed to be just a single coffee table! BUT - it turned into an entire living room full

261 views

Jennie

Mar 8, 2021
3 min

Catching Up On the Business

So we just got back from a 2-week research mission with the Air Force. If you read our last blog post, we just had a record-breaking winter storm pass through Houston leaving a lot of us without power and water....and right after all that happened...we had to pack up and leave to go fly for our Air Force jobs! Not many people know this, but we don't JUST fly through hurricanes! For the last 2 weeks we were flying through Atmospheric Rivers over the Pacific ocean. An Atmospher

221 views

Jennie

Feb 24, 2021
4 min

How We Used Our Scrap Wood

There are a ton of YouTube videos on the internet teaching you some awesome ways to use your scrap wood. You can make small projects, gifts, or maybe even some shop furniture with leftover cutoffs from bigger builds. That's not what we used ours for this week.... You probably won't find any YouTube videos on how we utilized ours....lol Because we burned all of it in our fireplace to keep us warm after a MASSIVE winter storm rolled through Houston and took out our power and wa

374 views

Jennie

Feb 8, 2021
3 min

Splitting Up the Business

We had a lot to do this week - ranging from sales calls to building a desk and engraving boards! Not to mention that we had to take a trip to our Air Force unit to knock out some work there. All of a sudden our 7 day week turned into 3 1/2 days in the blink of an eye! So how did we handle it?! Obviously all of the work still had to get done...for both our Air Force jobs AND our business. There's always a way if you're open to change... Our solution was to start splitting up j

489 views

Jennie

Feb 1, 2021
5 min

The First 30 Days of Our Business

Well, our furniture business has officially been open for about a month now. So how'd it go?? What'd we do? How much money did we make?! All fantastic questions. Let's take a deep dive into our first 30 days of builds, accomplishments, and sales. The first thing we did this month was take you guys on a shop tour. We hadn't done on in kind of a while, so we figured we'd show all of our big changes - we had a few pretty significant ones. If you didn't get a chance to see that v

940 views

We're Open For Business and Ready to Sell!

Jennie

Jan 18, 2021
3 min

We're Open For Business and Ready to Sell!

We got a couple of little shop projects done this past week to make our building processes go a little smoother, but the most EXCITING part about this week was that we started selling! It's what we've wanted to start doing since we left North Dakota. It's the whole reason we did all of this work over the past year getting our prototypes and marketing done properly. We are so excited to be officially "open for business" and ready to start taking cutting board orders from realt

530 views

Jennie

Jan 11, 2021
3 min

An Even Better Charcuterie Board Jig

Yep. We're coming at ya with another video about our *ideal* charcuterie board jig to use on our router. In our last post and video regarding the jig, we showed you our first attempt at the template we wanted. It went pretty well for our first go at it, but we knew that there would most likely be another iteration to follow once we used it for a while and learned what we liked/disliked. Annddd sure enough - here it is! What sparked this whole adventure to build an even better

701 views

Jennie

Jan 4, 2021
4 min

Jennie and Davis Shop Tour 2021

Our last shop tour was right after we had moved down to Texas and got all of our tools placed where we *thought* we wanted them to go in our garage! Since then we've gained tools, gotten rid of tools, upgraded tools, and completely reorganized the space! We've had to do quite a bit of transitioning when it comes to our shop. When we lived in North Dakota and were just woodworking as a hobby and then selling custom work, our shop was set up COMPLETELY different than it is now.

728 views

Our Finished Coffee Table and Holiday Orders

Jennie

Dec 28, 2020
4 min

Our Finished Coffee Table and Holiday Orders

Last week we decided to completely take apart our old coffee table so that we could use the solid ash top to build our NEW coffee table prototype! It went pretty well! We got all of our remaining lumber milled and cut down to size, then cut out some of the decorative designs we needed in certain pieces. After all that was completed we were ready to tackle our tasks for the next week - which included assembling our new coffee table prototype! As much as we wanted to IMMEDIATEL

510 views

Jennie

Dec 21, 2020
3 min

Destroying Our Old Coffee Table

Yep. After all that work designing and building a special angled coffee table to fit our sofa chaise perfectly....we decided to completely demolish it. "What coffee table was that again??" you may ask. Check out the coffee table blog post AND this video right below: Why the heck would we do THAT?! Why destroy a perfectly good coffee table after you spent so much time designing and building it?? Well...it wasn't for selfish reasons. It wasn't because we hated the original. It

225 views

Jennie

Apr 27, 2019
5 min

Selling a Modern Sliding Barn Door

This is the finished sliding barn door after it was installed in the new townhome! The realtor we sold it to absolutely loved the modern design. Finding big clients who have big reach within a community is all about connections. It’s all about who you know and who knows you. This sliding barn door sale that we closed was a perfect example of that! The door was for a realtor in our area who was designing, outfitting, and flipping a townhome that was just built in a really cool

102 views

Jennie

Mar 8, 2019
3 min

Hickory and Black Metal Nightstands

Isn’t it always just the little things that hang us up in this skill of woodworking?! Figuring out how to use your tools just perfectly so that when you have to take off 1/8″ of material from the end of a board it doesn’t actually turn into 1/4″, placing tiny screws in just the right place so that your drawer slides don’t stick, not showing any signs of planer snipe on table tops….. I could go on…. But I won’t…. Because I know you know what I’m talking about…. Well, one of ou

116 views