GVTistic

Thoughts, hopes, dreams of our little furniture company.

[lifeinpoetry]

One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

Kōbō Abe, from Woman in the Dunes (via lifeinpoetry)

[durgapolashi]

Marianne Moore

[globevt]

We back, y'all. #shopmiddlewest #ontour #austin #sxsw #madeinmichigan #grandrapids (at Mount Bonnell)

[globevt]

Just another day at the Globe Vise & Truck Office.  Photo by maestier

[globevt]

Remnants of a dizzy bird. Big congrats @dizzybirdrecords and @heatersband on a rockin evening #dancecontest #wewuzrobbed #congrats #shopmiddlewest

[shopmiddlewest]

Middle West #1

9/19-9/20, 2014

[globevt]

That was fun.

[globevt]

In session.  

Photo by maestier

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This Spring - color.

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Heirloom in the middle.

[globevt]

Couldn't help myself.

[globevt]

Resuscitation

(An oldie)

There are no EKG blips or defib paddles, but there’s a resuscitative something to restoring a Globe Cart. An overworked, age-filthed Cart rolls in looking ready for the heap. Start rubbing in a little Danish Oil and dried up/beaten down Cherry lurches up from the morgue table gasping. Rub a little more and warm red hues return just to let you know that this one is going to make it. Let it fully soak in and mottled grains and ring-lines return. Before you know it, you’ve got a living, breathing piece of history that only wants you to put a drink on it and listen to its stories.

I’ve always been of the opinion that a simple tool has a sort of inherent beauty. The sleek angularity of a pair of scissors, the inert violence simmering off a claw hammer… I’d better stop before I get carried away but you get the idea. The rub here, of course, is who has the time for inherent beauty when there are nails to be hammered. For a century, Globe Carts lived square in this blind spot. Mundane in their youth, beat-up and overlooked as time went by, they did their job but failed to provide any memorable bells or whistles. We hear stories of hundreds being torn up for firewood or left to rot with the abandoned factories that housed them. An old tool that can be replaced on the cheap with a quick trip up to Home Depot isn’t really worth the time.

And yet here we are giving wobbly old carts spa treatments and handing them a starring spot in our living-rooms. Maybe we’re finally noticing some of that inherent beauty now that they’re not quite so useful (though many of these bad boys can still take a pretty hefty beating and keep on rolling)? Maybe they connect us to a woebegone era of handmade quality? Maybe saving them from a landfill gives us environmental warm fuzzies? The maybes don’t stop there, and they add up to something pretty damn important to Globe Vise and Truck. We figure we’re everyday refurbing a company and, in our more grandiose moments, an industry. Now if you didn’t see that ham-handed metaphor coming, shame on you, but whatever it is about this moment in time that makes us want to fix up old carts and show them off to company is the reason we’re here.

We’re hoping to use this space (read: blog) to explore some of the maybes, to talk about the history that makes us feel in our bones that we need to keep making this stuff, and to highlight the like minded folks out there that are making the world safe for those of us who want to keep building, restoring, and repurposing. We also want this to be a place for conversation. A place for you tell us about a cart you saw in Tupelo, MS or about the barn door you’ve transformed into a dining room table. In a lot of people’s eyes there is a whole lot more than just old carts sitting ready for the heap; this blog and this company are convinced a little bit of hard work can bring it all back to life.

[globevt]

Detroit Promises

On January 6th 1914, nearly 10,000 men lined up in 10 degree cold to apply for jobs at the Ford Motor Company. “$5 for Eight Hours,” read headlines around the world and the men showed up aiming at a piece of the promised prosperity. In the coming days, the crowds swelled larger and larger. Riots eventually broke out amongst the job seekers and Highland Park police were forced to turn fire hoses on the crowds despite the January cold.

Globe Vise & Truck builds furniture out of lumber salvaged from homes in Highland Park. An organization called Reclaim Detroit trains teams to deconstruct houses and keep the material out of the landfill. Their warehouses are filled with hundred year old wood that once made up Michigan’s first growth forests. The homes themselves weren’t particularly noteworthy before they were abandoned. Simple, well-built houses for the people working those 8 hour days. The promise they held, though....well, that would put to shame even the ornate mansions of the auto barons. 

They were homes built with room for families to grow. They had small dining rooms for gathering each evening and small back yards to be enjoyed after work and on the weekends. They were built close so neighbors could soon become family, and they all had street facing windows so neighborhood kids would know that someone was probably watching. These were homes built for holiday dinners and for grandkids opening gifts; they were homes built to grow old in.  

As Vincent Curcio says in his biography of Henry Ford, the truly revolutionary idea was neither the assembly line nor vertical integration but this democratization of prosperity.  The idea that it wasn’t just the plant owner who got to go home at the end of a work day to have family dinner in a home that they owned. That it might be possible for the skilled worker who built the Model T also to have the wherewithal to purchase and enjoy one themselves. It’s an idea that seems basic and obvious standing here one hundred years later. That very fact shows its power. 

I spent a day last week cleaning floor boards removed from an attic five miles from the Ford Highland Park Plant. The settled dust became near pancake batter upon contact with water and in no time I was ankle deep in the silty sludge of a forgotten home. All that kept the dirty job tolerable was the revelatory glee hiding under all that filth. Decades and dirt left their mark to be sure, but the tree’s curling grains bled thru to constantly surprising effect. The hundred year old promises were still there as well. The failures that have left all those homes abandoned are well-known and well-documented. That the wood is still strong and ready to build something new, tell’s me that the promise isn’t dead.       

[globevt]

Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500

Three weeks later and I can't quite get over this piece. It describes a place where good intention meets (sometimes unexpected) realities, and where optimism or pessimism seem to miss the point. Most importantly it describes real lives confronting very real change in a way that can't be wrapped up tidy little box.  

“It’s like the pilgrims,” he told me, looking out over the city. “They came to America for religious freedom and got along with the Native Americans pretty well. It wasn’t perfect, but they ate Thanksgiving together, you know. It was the people who came after. They said, ‘I can make money from this.’ They were the ones with the smallpox blankets, not the pilgrims.”

“That sounds like a total bastardization of history.”

“It may be. But it rings true.”

[globevt]

Form/Function

A factory floor should be a shrine to the Greek God of utility. Every design decision should have efficiency as its goal and hope. Since 1905, Globe has been a cog in that process. We’ve modified entire production lines to reduce operator movement by mere inches and we’ve pounded forehead to wall while trying to figure out how to give a parts rack just a little more capacity. It’s been a world of Just-in-Time, Lean Manufacturing, Kan-Ban Systems, and the everlasting quest to stamp out waste. In short, we’ve been living a function heavy existence.

 *

 More than a few of the guys in the shop thought we’d lost it when we first mentioned repurposing tired old carts and tables for the home. We’d do our best to explain our fleeting logic only to be met with incredulous looks and sighs of resignation. This was the big plan to reignite the company? This was how we’d combat a sinking economy amidst Michigan’s already collapsed industries?

“Won’t it be kind of heavy?”

“Will it fit in a house?”

“You don’t want to paint it?”

“Who exactly is going to buy this?”

Valid questions all that left us sputtering “trust us” even as we knew we didn’t have real answers. Times were proverbially tough, though, and anything was better than nothing so we started building. A paint covered Globe Cart was scrubbed, sanded, and oiled back to life. Desk length pieces of engineering paper were unearthed and ancient specs were put to use for the first time in decades. Steel was cut, ground, and welded. Wood was planed-down, glued, and finished. Despite the doubts, every step was completed with care and reverence because that’s the way a craftsman does their work. And as prototypes neared completion (probably to everyone’s surprise) we ended up with more than just well-built, durable, factory equipment built right to specification; we ended up with beautiful pieces of furniture (if I do say so myself).

 *

 Ray Eames is quoted as saying, “What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.” A small salvo in the form/function battle (that we all know isn’t really a battle), but it does make me think about 100 years of building what works. And of craftsmen who’re so ingrained in the world of utility that they don’t even realize their own capacity for art. It makes me think of Ray’s husband Charles, who asked, “Who ever said that pleasure wasn’t functional?” And it finally makes me realize that the function of any piece of furniture is far more than the obvious. Maybe then while we’re chasing beauty and history and whatever other ineffable idea has lately popped into our minds, we’re still very much living that function heavy existence.

[globevt]

Island living.

[globevt]

The Buena Vista Bar - Downtown Market Grand Rapids

[globevt]

Heavy Duty Wine Rack