On-the-spot, spot-on collaboration

So, we’ve taken a number of field trips over the past year to learn about coffee roasters and meet potential vendors at the farmers’ market and check out the chickens that’ll be laying our fresh eggs for the café. The latest trip was a little jaunt out west on 290, in the Oak Hill area, just a stone’s throw over the Hays County line. Our mission? Meet up with Jim Sloan and his team out at Sloan’s Custom Cabinets.

Jim and the guys are building all of our workstations and that cool curvy thing you see in Murray’s renderings of the space. We got out there and it was what you might expect, if you’re the sort to ponder what a woodshop is like, which I admit I’m not. But it made sense to me when I saw it — a huge work barn space, filled with wood and big fancy machines with names like Cosmec and Saylor-Beall.

The curved pieces of wood were especially lovely, reminiscent of the skateboarding half pipe I once had installed in the backyard for my son when he was ten. Jim says everyone asks if these pieces are half pipes, so maybe we should consider having an extra set made and installing them for that purpose in our shared lobby. I’m sure the landlord would be thrilled.

What struck me most about this trip though, was not the nearly finished pieces — though they really are lovely. What I dug was watching spontaneous coworking — accelerated serendipity, if you will — in practice. Because Jim had to break it to us that our dream of a 24” wide Parallam bar for the café was going to potentially turn into a nightmare. He could only get the wood 18” wide, which would mean a bar barely wide enough to accommodate a laptop. Or else it would mean trying to figure out a way to put boards together to make it the right width. This would require some major finagling and a good bit of extra expense and waste.

Then Jim asked if we’d considered stained concrete for the bar. This launched a discussion on the benefits and drawbacks and out came the pencils and right there, on the plans, this and that got sketched, pros and cons were debated, and together we all opened up to more possibilities than if we’d strategized individually. Then we took the ideas back to Murray, who had other ideas to add. We’re leaning back toward our original plan for the bar, but with some new twists. So thanks sharing your brain, Jim.