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More about The Pine Closet
The Pine
Closet started as an imaginary concept in a small business class at
George Brown College in Toronto in the fall
of 2000 by sole proprietor mais lee. It was a required course for the College's now defunct
Furniture Technician Program. Not thinking that she would ever be able
or brave enough to operate her own business, mais wrote up a business plan
for a wildly imaginary women-oriented, community-based, and
cooperative-spirited gallery, cafe, woodshop & studio - she ended up getting
an A+ on the paper - her instructor probably got a good laugh out of reading
it.
mais graduated with honours from the program later that year. She
found employment at a custom cabinetmaking shop, owned by a fellow George
Brown graduate. She learned a lot from the owner and other competent
cabinetmakers in the shop. She probably would still be working there
if not for closing of the shop due to unexpected difficulties approximately
six months afterward. To this day mais still cherish the experience
she earned working at what she calls "the cleanest, most organized, and most
efficient shop" in which she's ever worked.
mais then spent another six months working as a frame-maker at a custom
upholstered furniture shop. There she began to grasp the zen of
running a band saw and also mastered the care and handling of a 13 gauge
staple gun (and the fingers involved in the use of these machines).
When work at the furniture shop was not challenging enough anymore, mais
left and joined the circus of the movie industry. She met lots of
really cool people - and some not so cool ones. Set-building allowed
her to combine and exercise both skill-sets from her cabinetmaking and
frame-making experience. She also learned a lot about construction,
general carpentry, and how to survive walking around for ten hours on end
with a 20-pound tool belt around her waist.
Feast or famine is the one true phrase of the movie industry. When
work slowed mais started taking odd woodworking jobs from friends and
friends of friends. By then she had acquired a very basic set of
woodworking tools and machinery in her basement. One of her favourite
activities is staring at the walls in her basement trying to envision how
she can make better use of the odd 400 or so square feet of semi-musty
space. More challenging was how to get sheets of 4'x8' plywood down
the stairs into the shop by herself, how to cut them up when the best place
for the table saw was between a wall and a support post 8' away, how to most
efficiently transform the same dust and chip spewing woodworking space into
a spray booth, and how to get finished cabinets up the stairs, out the
backdoor, and sometimes down a snow and ice-covered driveway into
a vehicle.
mais built quite a few projects out of her basement before she decided to
call this her full-time job. She registered her woodworking business
in the spring of 2003 and named it The Pine Closet. Although quite
different from the original dreamy concept of a community-based partnership
gallery, cafe, woodshop, and studio, The Pine Closet is nonetheless one step
in a direction mais did not think she would dare to tread just a few years
ago.
In the fall of 2004, four years after the initial conception of The Pine
Closet, mais moved her shop out of her basement into a real industrial
space. The new venue, although comes with a major price tag, allows
her to focus her creativity and problem-solving skills on actual projects at
hand rather than the logistics of getting the projects accomplished. "This is Plan A" she says, "I owe it to myself to give it a shot."
Although The Pine Closet has become a real business requiring real overhead,
mais continues to call it "a hobby gone mad".
"I try not to work very hard - I love what I do and I want to
keep it this way. A lot of people I know dread going to work - I only work
when I feel like it. I am very lucky this way."
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