Dan + Melissa = Responsible Consumers

I met Melissa and Dan and their sweet newborn for the first time at my shop a few months ago and immediately clicked with them. She mentioned to me that she had been following me for about a year on Instagram and loved the pieces I was making. They are in the middle of remodeling and redecorating their home. As we walked through my shop, they expressed to me how they were wanting to use local, good quality, sustainable resources to make their home beautiful and wanted me to be a part of that process. Melissa came across my Instagram feed by searching various hashtags: #austinlocalbusiness, #localbusiness, #localatx and #madeinaustin, just to name a few. After they had bought a few small items as Christmas gifts, we discussed making them a table top. And this is what I came up with. Upon delivery, they immediately fell in love with it, which steered our conversations to more fun projects in their beautiful south Austin home. You can check out all the photos here.

This couple is inspiring to me because they encourage me to continue creating and they remind me that I myself am a client of someone else. They remind me to shop locally, shop sustainably, shop small, and shop beautifully. It pays to research, whether its through Google or through Instagram or Facebook. Find an artisan, a creator, a maker that you like and admire, save up your money and purchase that new coffee table from them, not the big corporation. Let's be honest, their stuff isn't as good anyway. Its the small artisan (or most that I know and work with) that care about you, your piece and your true satisfaction. Trust me, it pays to research and to save up, and wait.

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They had some fun too when I delivered it. (:

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Clark Family Farmhouse Dining Table

I grew up with the Clark family in Dumas, Texas. My dad went to work with Clark Farms when we moved to Dumas when I was only a few months old. The Clarks had a really cool half section of land just outside of town, where they had their homestead set up on the one of the corners of this 320 acre half circle of farm land. This farm, this house, this piece of land was really a major memorial for me as a child. The Clark family was extremely involved in many areas of my upbringing and my feet ran on this soil quite a bit in all the years I lived in Dumas. From the snowy winters of getting the snow mobile out and riding it around, to the church wide functions like the Annual Corn Boil or the Sunday afternoon football games on the "football field", this was a place that many knew very well. The house that sat on this piece of land was built in 1965 and lived in by Wayne Clark and his family. Several years later, his son, Brent moved into this house with his wife and two daughters. One of those daughters, years later, grew up, got married and had a kid, and eventually took over the family home and made it hers, a 3rd generation home.

Last year, the family unfortunately discovered black mold in the home and had to make the decision to tear the home down. It was a sad time for entire family as they watched their home of 50 years being leveled to the ground.

My client's grandfather, Wayne, lived in this house for the longest, also grew up in a small town near Lubbock. On that farm, a couple old barns stood for many years and protected farm equipment, hay for the cows and other things used on the farm. As the Clark family discovered they were going to have to tear down the family farmhouse in Dumas, they also learned that these barns, near Lubbock, were going to be taken down as well. It was then, that Emmy decided she wanted to preserve these 2 iconic structures somehow, so I got a phone call.

We discussed building a very large farmhouse dining table that would sit in her her home, in the same place that the old family home was being taken down. She wanted this table to feature both the old house and the old barns from the farm her papa grew up on. And that's exactly what we did. She and her husband drove down in September with a trailer load of rescued wood, both from the house and the barns.

The table top is made entirely of the rescued barn and house wood from the Clark family. The steel base are made from mild steel. It measures 12' long and 4' wide. It was designed to seat 14 people comfortably. Features 2 - 6' Benches to that line one side of the table.