In one sense it is quite lovely when commissions of a different kind come along. But in another it is a painful reminder that I really should specialise in one particular field.
Take these 8 chair seats.
Nothing is needed but fabric, foam and a staple gun. The fabric is there in the form of production offcuts, the contacts for a foam supplier are there. The staple gun and staples were stocked up for the previous job of the same kind. Simple.
You lever the old fabric off the staples (with the tip of a long, strong screwdriver), cut new pieces, put in new foam and click it shut with the staple gun. As if it should be finished in half a day.
The reality, though, is something else.
First you discover that the production offcuts are not enough for exactly the right combination, and you drive into town for a new load. You choose and put together until you have exactly the right and beautiful colour combination.
You ring the foam contact to bring the foam back on the same trip. But they are having a labour crisis right now and the lead time for orders is 2 weeks. Fine then; there is nothing wrong with the old foam. It will last as long as the new fabric.
You take out of the drawer the staple gun that has been resting there a long time, and discover that the staples have vanished. You look for them for several hours in your perfectly ordered workrooms and cannot decide whether you found them a new and better place while tidying, lent them out, or somebody has nicked them. There are always builders wandering about here. But whether and why they should want my staples seems hard to believe.
So you get that whole armada of builders up on their hind legs with all their staples and staple guns, but neither the first nor the second nor the third will do or will fit. Staplers that hammer staples into chipboard and softwood beams day after day cannot cope with a plywood chair seat. The staples just go in crooked and bent and you may as well pick them out again and start over. In the end my table is full of different staplers and their staples. And staples hammered crooked.
I even got one stapler working. Of every 10 staples I only had to dig 1 or 2 out again. That way I finished 7 chair seats. With the last one, though, what happened was that the stapler packed its bags and said it could not be bothered any more. It banged away as much as it liked, but would not give out any staples. There was no jam inside it; to check I changed the strip of staples several times (from exactly the same box), but nothing.
I will probably have to fix the last piece of fabric on with chewing gum.
Altogether this small job took more than 3 working days and is still not finished.
So now I face a choice: buy a proper tool with a compressor for the future, or limit my field of activity for technical reasons.
For that one chair seat I will have to find a solution once normal people's days off are over. At the moment they refuse to take my calls.
🙂
