Flash back two years when we decided to jump in the deep end and have our own website. That’s when the reality of HOW to do it sets in. Neither of us are “code” people so it was imperative to have the heavy lifting already in place. Now anyone can pay to have a website designed and developed but we couldn’t justify the $ for our type of business. Enter WordPress.org. My limited understanding is this is all open source content for people like us up to professionals who want to design a website. This was where we started.

Many of the basics to developing the website were easily setup. Having the website actually look like something was not that easy. Finally a web search (can’t count the hours) found what I was looking for. A tutorial walk-thru from start to finish. Think classroom. Here it is: https://colormelon.com/free-portfolio-website-tutorial/ . I can’t tell you what a life saver this tutorial turned out to be. I followed along in a separate browser window completing the instructions as I went. Unbelievable. A couple of hours later we had a website. Thank you Colormelon.

Now we had a website. We added some images and I actually wrote a couple of Blog posts. A writer I am not. English was not my strong suit in grade school so writing is painstakingly long and tedious process. That was in mid 2018. “We need to breath some new life into our website” was declared every month since. Covid-19 happens and we HAVE to breath some life into our website AND create an e-commerce Store.

Looked for a e-commerce Plugin and found Ecwid. It had great reviews and I’ve found you can activate a plugin from your WordPress Dashboard, set it up and deactivate or delete it very easily giving you the opportunity to see it Live without much hassle at all. Once Ecwid was setup it provided everything we needed in a usable and attractive Store package integrated directly into our website. Love it.

Another thing I love about WordPress.org is the ease at which you can change “Themes”. Themes are the base look, feel and presentation of your websites content. The way the page looks, the header, your images, etc. Because of some issues with our original theme we switched to the current one, Poseidon by ThemeZee. To change to it took all of 5 seconds. Previewed the theme, played around looking at our website using this new one and decided to Publish. Mouse click. Done. The sweet thing about this is it’s that easy to change themes. If you come across one you like better. Click. Done. Your content just goes along for the ride.

I will post again about our Store once we see some activity. If the next post is dated two years from now, well that answers that.

Here are a few things posted to the Store…

Once I pried the drawers loose I could address the problems of the case.

First up was the warped top. The entire chest was made of solid wood using 1 by’s (1″ thick wood). This was a workhorse piece of lumber in the day. Think roofs, floors, furniture, buildings almost everything could be made from this wood. We see a lot of casegoods made with 1 by’s and for me any solid wood piece is a big plus.

Luckily the top was bowed (think smile) vs cupped (think frown) and had less than a half inch gap. I started with a bunch of clamps to pull the top down and then brad nailed the heck out of it.

Next up came the rotted legs. One of the back legs needed a new piece to level the dresser out and one of the front legs kind of the same. I cut a piece of scrape for the back and needed to fabricate a two by four for the front.

The 2×4 I shaped with a Shinto Japanese rasp (check ’em out they are an awesome tool) to look similar to the original.

Next up were the drawers. What a mess.

After a bunch of sanding the drawers are back to functional and I can turn it over to Roie. She decided on a two tone cottage rustic look. She also replaced the remaining original knobs with new basic round wood pulls.

This is why we do what we do.

OK it’s not for everyone but we just love it. The first few times we went we had NO idea what the heck we were doing. We didn’t know how to bid, what we did when we “won” something, the frenetic pace of the whole process. In a word LOST.

As the weeks and months went by it all started to find a rhythm. You got to know the style of many of the auctioneers and how they handled their “ring”. When to start a bid and when to follow a bid.

Most importantly we started to understand the business side vs the personal side. The difference in winning a bid that makes good business sense vs the “I’m going to win this thing and you can go @#$C yourself”. I’m guilty of the latter more so than Roie. Maybe it’s a guy thing.

We try to attend an auction each week but depending on our inventory of finished items and works in process we skip a week or three.