Before anything, I needed a workbench. A flat surface on a sturdy base, on which I can hammer, saw, sand and which can stand heavy loads! Of course, I wouldn’t buy a brand new one from an hardware store, one that was made in mass out of materials from all over the world. No! So I rolled up my sleeves, sharpened my pencil and I made a plan.
Yeah, the scale is wrong but that’ll do for now! Except that having a plan in mind is nice, but the Atelier’s philosophy is to start from recycled material and from there extract a form and a function. Again, I could have just buy the exact pieces of wood I needed from any wood supplier, but instead I went to a quest for rests I could use.
In Leipzig we are lucky enough to have the Materialbuffet, a second-hand hardware store that offers materials from recycling, gifts, completed constructions, bankruptcies, etc. In a word: RESTS! And the best part (on top of reusing things that are still valuable) is that they usually have it priced about 50% of the original price.
It is truly like the Ali Baba’s cave, one can find anything there, wood of course, but textile as well, lights, furnitures, and more! You get the idea, it’s a buffet! So I came across a bunch of long (and heavy) “KVH” (construction grade wood) timbers and few triply panels (in a rough state) for pretty cheap.
To be honest, bringing everything, alone, to the Atelier was a bit of challenge but I finally had enough material for my workbench. A few cuts (and sore muscles) later, I was assembling THE MONSTER! 2 m long, 1 m deep and 1 m high, luckily it’s on wheel (also from second-hand)!
I’ll need to find a woodworker vise and my dad gave me his metal vise (that belonged to his father before that). At some point I’ll throw another panel down on the shelf and I will call it complete. But in the state, it is already usable and I’ll finally start my first project: codename “L’Arche” (more info later).