For us, the Activity Room is kind of like a 1950’s game room or den.  We’re breaking some rules here.  Architecturally speaking, the room is a formal living room.  Before the remodel, it was the master bedroom.  But with three children and one on the way, it is the true heart of the house.  Well, okay, it is the heart of the house AFTER the kitchen.

This is the room where all of the real activity happens (especially in the hot Texas summer when it is too uncomfortable to go outside and we are bored with the pool).  We need this space partly because the children have small bedrooms.  We kept them true to the original home — a modest 9-ft by 11-ft each — and they share with a sibling, so there isn’t a lot of room for play or toys in their rooms.

I’ve struggled with decorating this room.  It needs to be wreckable.  I mean, four kids, they are going to trash it daily!  But it is also one of the first rooms you see when you come into the house, so it needs to be presentable to a certain extent.

The decor has gone through a natural evolution.  The 50’s diner table has been the centerpiece from the start.  It is an indestructible butcher block with a solid iron base.  My father found it for me at a garage sale almost 20 years ago.  It had been in the guy’s garage, was covered in oil, he bargained and got it for $25, and brought it home and refinished the top, spray painted the base a gloss black.

The chairs are from IKEA as are the wall shelves.  The cabinet behind the table is an old purchase from Target, back when they first started carrying furniture and when it was still fairly well made and not just pin nails and particle board.  I would love to replace it with a vintage sideboard, but I know the kids will destroy it, so the cabinet does the job for now.

The blinds are 2-in faux wood.  I’ve searched for the “perfect” vintage curtains for years.  A friend reminded me of ReproDepot.com where I might be able to find something that could easily be made into tab tops.  I will take more pictures later, but for now suffice to say that we have a closet to the right out of view that we will be hanging new doors in soon… and of course with this will launch a new line of interior doors and millwork over at Crestview Doors!

The amazing thing is that the vintage Moe lamp really ties the whole room together.  In fact, I felt like I never knew what I was doing with this room until I found that lamp.  It never ceases to amaze me how one item can make a room.

Now that we keep separate websites and separate blogs, I don’t blog much about Crestview Doors here anymore. But I have to take a sec to brag about our awesome new site design!
David and I have been working loooong hours to figure out how to best address three issues:
1. “Your doors take too long.” Last fall, our lead time jumped to 8 weeks on standard door orders. We’ve been doing everything we can to bring that back down to 3-4 weeks maximum. Inventory orders ship in 2-3 business days.
2. “Your doors are too expensive.” Relationships with our suppliers have changed as we have grown, and we have been able to bring those prices DOWN without sacrificing quality. The “Allandale” with double-pane, frosted glass is now almost HALF the price it used to be. Cha-ching!
3. “Do you do sidelights/transom windows/double doors/etc?” Some of the most satisfying projects are the ones where we are forced to think outside of the… doorway. We are ready to take on more custom entry projects including fire-rated doors for residential multi-family and matching interior doors for that mid-century redo.
Free shipping has come and gone, but for a short time our doors are ON SALE. We saw a purchasing slump in January (which can be downright deadly for a small business like ours), so we are hoping to see things pick up as people like us strive to save their neighborhoods from ugly, period-inappropriate doors.
Let us know if you see anything we might have missed in our upgrade. More soon!

We finally launched the Crestview Doors Online Store. You can shop all our models. You can even buy one if you want. It was a huge effort to build the site. Our deadline was Labor Day weekend and Christiane and I stayed up past 3 am that Friday night perfecting it.
It was very cool to see how our knowledge and skills meshed. We both do interaction design, but my background is more design and advertising, and Christiane’s is more programming and business processes. I did all the visual design and copy writing, and Christiane integrated the shopping cart with a CRM system and credit card processing. It all comes together on the product page and at one point we were exchanging snippets of code wirelessly via IM across the living room to get it done.
It was all very 21st century.
Writing is not my strongest skill. I can appreciate well crafted ad copy. I can even write some given enough time and the right mood. Unfortunately, the Crestview Doors website required a lot of ad copy. The biggest challenge was writing a description for each of the 35 models of doors. I started out on a roll, writing informatively about the designs I had been thinking about for months…

The Pasadena is our most adaptable design. It is grand enough for a large rambling ranch, and understated enough to add a modern touch to a small cottage. With its formal simplicity it can replace a windowless flush doors on a 1960s mid-century home without breaking the modern aesthetic.

Then I started using analogies…

The Woodrow is the ‘57 Chevy of doors. Like tailfins on cars, it seems to only appear in late 1950’s then vanishes suddenly, leaving a design that is highly evocative of a very narrow time in style history.

Then … it started getting late and I started to fancy myself a poet.

Like the eye of a cat, the Parkway is both serene and intense. It can add punctuation to a Ranch that changes everything. On a mid-century modern it lets in light without breaking the modern aesthetic. On a modern contemporary, it’s warmly institutional, like a schoolhouse door.

Then it got later … and I started to get punchy.

What does the Fontenot that you do not? Like a strip of highway flashing past you, the Fontenot is frenzied and ordered at the same time. Use it to add a swinging, fearless touch to your buttoned down Ranch. Paint it green and order is with custom blue art glass. Why? Because you know what the Fontenot’s.

Then I got down-right nutty.

Wellington! Weeeeeeeeelingtoooooon! Time for dinner!
The Wellington is the protected childhood of a hard partying English rock star. It is Weetabix and rage.
Add a homey touch of rebellion to your house with this 50s classic.

This oddball writing has been up on the web site for almost 2 weeks. Sales are going well, and traffic on the models with the goofiest descriptions is good. So now I’m wondering, is this wacky copy helping or hurting sales? Is it turning people off or is it attracting just the kind of customers we want? Do I need to fix it or call it a happy accident?
I really Fontenot.

        
Our research has yielded more designs. Meet the “Langston“, the “Pomelroy“, and the “Westhaven.” The “Langston” was spotted in the nearby neighborhood of Allandale, the “Westhaven” was spotted in Crestview, and the “Pomelroy” came to me in a vision. I really want that to be the next door on our house.
These and eleven more mid-century modern front doors have been added to the Crestview Doors website.

The big drum roll to the launch of the Crestview Doors online store has been going for a while. It’s very exciting to see all the product shots together. More soon. Promise!

This image is the result of about an hour of driving 10 or 15 blocks. Maybe about 10% of Crestview. By the time I snapped that last pic, they boys were taking turns slapping each other in the back seat, the baby still would not sleep, and Christiane and I were seriously car sick. Research is not easy.
Normally I take photos of unusual designs, but this time I took a photo of every wood veneer door with inset windows we went by. Pretty easy to see which design was most popular.
Note the variety of the “Grover” design. The size, aspect ratio, and placement of the windows is different on all of them. The one on the bottom left has windows the size of sheets of notebook paper. The one on the top right is it’s evil twin with small narrow windows arranged high on the knob side.
Which one is the real “Grover”?
If any one is counting: 31 high on the hinge side, 5 high on the knob side.

I have so much to say, I don’t know where to start. In no particular order.
1. We’ve sold all 12 doors and we’re pausing production until July.
2. Having built and shipped 5 doors, I know my costs much better. I updated the price range on the web site to $1500 - $2500. Most doors will be about $1700 including shipping. Local doors in Austin, TX will be less.
2. I’m sending cutouts from the doors to new buyers as soon as they order a door. These can be used to test stain and to show off to friends. They have a nice feel, like a thick book.

3. I’ve been learning about crating and freight. It all cost more, weighs more, and is a lot more work than I thought it would be. Luckily, the 300 pound crate just fits into Winona (our minivan). And I can get 3 crates in her before her fenders touch her tires. Though, she looked a little scared as the forklift pulled up to her backside.


4. I tried to fire the glass shop, but the other ones are much worse, use the same suppliers, cost more, are farther from my house, and their materials suck. Look at these two reeded glass samples. The shop I’m using has the luscious stuff on the left. Everybody else uses the stuff on the right. Ick.


5. The illustrious John Park of Park Haus ordered a door. I had told Christiane, just the day before “We gotta get someone with a cool blog to order one of our doors.” John, seriously, who told you about our production company?
6. We made a “Grover”. I spent days and days designing and redesigning and second and third guessing all the proportions. At one point I found myself with a polynomial defining the height and width of the windows and I had to look up the quadratic equation to solve it. There is such a variety in that design at the vernacular level that it is difficult to define the whole style with just one design. The “Grover” is our signature door. I think this one came out perfect.
7. I wrote a Crestview Doors values statement. First draft is below the fold. Most statements like these boil down to “More good, less bad.” I’m making ours real, specific, and blah-blah-blah-free.

Continue reading Being in Business

I had decided to work with a local glass shop. They are close, not corporate at all and, I am beginning to learn, totally incompetent (see below). My first door was ordered on March 15. I bought glass right away.
Here is the comedy of errors in order:
1. Made 3, not 5 pieces
2. Made two more, broke one
3. Replaced that one, but put the wrong color spacer in it.
4. Replaced that one, but put a big ugly tempered logo on it.
5. One of the pieces from step 1 had glue between the panes and had to be rebuilt
6. Today I pick up the 2 replacements, wrong thickness. Now that I’m looking at the thickness, I realize 2 others are the wrong thickness.
So two months, 9 pieces of insulated glass built, countless phone calls and trips to the shop and I still have 4 bad pieces and only one good one. And that’s just one door. Four other doors are being held up by 10 pieces of glass that I had to return. They’ve been telling me tomorrow since Thursday.
If the mill hadn’t been a similar (actually worse) comedy of errors, I might have noticed earlier.
I tried to go to another glass shop. A big corporate shop. They cost more and the materials suck. The reeded glass there is a joke. I wouldn’t have known the difference, but the glass from the little glass shop of horrors is gorgeous.
Lots of people are spontaneously telling me not to give up. Hmm.
Here is one cool thing that happened in the last week. I found a shop to build name plates for the doors.

We banged one up attaching it to a two-by-four to test out different nails and screws. I’m looking at the difference between engraved or printed serial numbers.
The rectangle at the top will have an image of the door and the wide one will have the date and customer name.
I’m printing the first batch with black serial numbers. The numbers are raised and have a little texture to them.
So which do you like, printed black serial number or engraved?
Editied to Add: I tried another glass shop, and it sucked much more than the Little Glass Shop of Horrors. Everybody sends their IG glass orders to the same place. So it’s not the problem, but how you deal with the problem, and LGSoH has been not half bad.

The first run of Crestview Doors is almost over. We’ve sold 10 of the first 12. After the last 2 are sold we will stop taking orders until June.
That should give us enough time to build and ship those doors, evaluate the business model, and to build the online store.
With the Violet Crown Festival over, I had a little extra time to build mockups for a customer. Put you mouse over the small images below to see the different doors. The first one is the current door. The 2nd is a “Piedmont” with dark cherry stain and a vintage escutcheon, and 3rd is a “Pasadena” with black paint.


Which one would you choose?

I returned 11 of the first 15 windows to be rebuilt. I still don’t have a finished door to photograph. It’s amazing to me that 5 people have bought doors from me based on illustrations. So I’m getting photos as quickly as I can.

BTW, those are not my hands. (I hear that’s an old Martha Stewart trick. You photograph someone wearing a blue sweater while making hand made soap. Then publish a picture of Martha in the same sweater.) This is Michael, a very experienced and perfectionist carpenter. You wouldn’t know from his beautiful old-world tools, but he starts his projects in AutoCAD.
I wanted to show the solid wood construction of these doors. Describing it in an email falls short. Here you can really see how solid it is. And these door are heavy.

For customers who have already ordered a door, I’m sending a block cut out from their door to test stain on. (I can thank one of my customers for that great idea.)

These go in the mail today.