Well here is my next little custom order, the brief was a storage unit to house 6 plastic storage boxes with a racing theme in royal blue with checkered flags on it. My original thought was to have cars on the design but the customer didnt want that so I drew up a fairly simple design, at the time I didnt think it looked all that special but after posting it to the customer she phoned back saying her little boy absolutely loved it. Apparently he had been taking the design everywhere with him and showing all his friends "look what I'm getting! no one else in the world has got one of these" bless him that gave me a little fuzzy feeling knowing that my piece was going to be so well recieved, i cant ever remember getting excited about a bit of furniture when I was a lad.
Anyway to add a little bit of something special for this design I wanted a super glossy finish, kind of like the shine on a flashy
racing car, so I opted for a high gloss water based glaze to go over the top of the acrylic gloss. I also wanted something different to the usual rounded edges on this especially knowing it would be very hard to get the gloss finish i wanted on the end grain of the mdf, so i put a slight bevel on the edges with a block plane. the detail on the sides is the checkered flags which is routed in to give it a bit of depth as well as making it easier to paint neatly. The plinth is also checkered but this time it was done by masking off alternate squares and painting over a whit background. The finishing touch is then a race track in the top which was done by cutting out a figure of 8 shape and then recessing a 9mm rectangle painted grey into the back of the table top. The result is a race track he can play on the top with without the cars falling off all the time. The edges were a bit of a knightmare as even though i had thoroughly undercoated and sanded them before sealing them with mdf sealer the gloss blue still sucked straight into the end grain and didnt give the finish i wanted, so I masked of the top and under side of the shelves aswell as the sides of the side panels and painted the end grain with an oil based black matt which covers very well as well as drying veryquickly. When the tape was removed the end result is better than I could have hoped for, and combined with the super high sheen on the glaze looks great. The design is also put together using wooden dowels and plastic block type brackets so it can easily be flat packed and moved before being reassembled.
Unfortunately I had a weekend break away booked and due to the drying times taking a little longer than expected little Josh had to wait a couple of days longer but when I got back and delivered it on the sunday morning I was greeted by a great big smiley face watching patiently out of the bedroom window, and when i installed it in his bedroom he was quick to load it up with his boxes full of toy cars and start setting them out on the race track.
So its been a couple of months now since our website went live and we seem to have found our natural page ranking all be it no where near as high as I would like, and now it is time to start thinking about optimizing our site. we are currently only getting about 5 hits a day to the site which whilst that has started to bring in sales they are fewer than i would like, i feel like I have been a little slack with my ebay store too recently, many of my items had timed out and I hadnt relisted them due to not getting any sales yet, but all that has changed now with my first ebay sale, so last night I set about listing many new items which is a very slow and boring job especially with my stoneage internet speed.
