MYGROUNDUPSTARTUP Week 12 – “Finding Answers”

March 4, 2022

I talked to my boss about the clocks that are splitting and he told me that it’s wet wood. If you don’t remember from last week, I had most of the clocks destroy themselves almost magically. That’s at least how it felt. When wood is wet, it saturates itself and increases in size. Then, when the wood dries it shrinks back down to its original size. When I used the wet wood, especially the pallet wood, after a few weeks it dried and shrank back down to its original size. This is what caused the cracking and the separation. 

The wet wood was shrinking and it caused the clock to crack and split apart from where I had glued the boards together. That makes sense. I had no idea it was even wet. It didn’t feel wet at all but I’ve learned now that you can’t always tell only by the touch.

I feel much better now. Now that I know what the problem is, I can work around that. My boss was well aware of this and had learned this the hard way, the same as me. 

He built a makeshift dryer out in his woodshed that he uses to dry out all the wood he gets. It’s an attic fan with a heater and a dehumidifier that drains all the water out of the wood. But it works like a charm. I will just have to make sure that I only use dry wood from now on.  

New Plan

I realized again that I needed to zero in on a select number of clocks to build. I was trying to do too many, and it was stressing me out. I made a new list of clocks to build that is very simple and concise. Each style will have 3 sizes except for a few, such as the staggered clock. I’m very excited to get started getting these made. With dry wood this time. 

My Mental Breakdown 

It was late Sunday evening, and I had a bit of a mental breakdown at my girlfriend’s house. The rest of her family had gone to bed and it was just us talking. 

I began talking to her about wholesale vs retail. I’ve been debating about which would be better and going over the pros and cons as I did in week 9. I was simply talking it over with her. 

Soon, we began talking about our future and our plans as well. She is going away in the fall to school and both of our futures are very uncertain as of right now. As of this writing, I have one more year left of college before I am finished. Who knows where we’ll be or what we will be doing in a couple of years. 

Everything is so unknown for us right now and especially for this potential business. For example, I am currently a broke college student who can’t afford to buy tools and materials to build my clocks, especially with tuition payments too. This is why I’m so thankful for the opportunity that my boss has given me. But that’s just it. What happens in a year or two? 

One year from now, I will be done with school and will move out of my parents’ house and out of Illinois hopefully. Or at least out of Illinois by the time my girlfriend has her bachelor’s degree in a couple of years. What happens if I have several stores that are buying clocks from me and then I move away? Do I just tell them, “Sorry we’re closed until I can afford to buy a saw?” Will all my work be for nothing in a year? Even if I somehow managed to buy cheap saws, where would I work? I can’t build clocks in an apartment and I can’t use my boss’s shop forever. When I move out what will I do? This is really freaking me out. 

I’ll keep thinking about it and let you know what I come up with. Until then I’ll just keep looking forward to a week that’s stress-free for once.