{"id":7677,"date":"2025-01-26T05:01:40","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T10:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=7677"},"modified":"2025-01-27T21:09:19","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T02:09:19","slug":"phase-1-of-coffee-bar-complete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=7677","title":{"rendered":"Phase 1 of Coffee Bar Complete"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Back before 2016, I was actually pretty useless with my hands. I\u2019d always make this joke that if I tried to hang a picture in my house, my neighbor\u2019s house would be on fire. As I was moving away from the post-Kelby world, I could definitely see the aspects of social media burnout happening. I needed to find some sort of outlet that wasn\u2019t being a photographer or a person who did Photoshop tutorials. While I was always interested in photography, it just started to feel like it was for everybody else other than me. I wanted something of my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My good friend Kim Patti gave me a trial-by-fire school of woodworking to build my first kung fu dummy from scratch. Being with him and working on the project just felt invigorating. I was finally learning how to use my hands for something other than moving a mouse. My photographer friend became a mentor, someone who, to this day, I love very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I bought a cheap workbench and a used router on Craigslist. For some reason, I got interested in learning woodworking to build different types of furniture. As a big lover of coffee, I thought to myself, \u201chow cool would it be to build a coffee station where I could explore making coffee and woodworking at the same time?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I puttered around off and on, trying random projects. The idea was whether I could learn the individual skills I needed on smaller projects to get ready to build a bigger one. So off to the garage I went, building crooked thing after crooked thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When COVID hit, I wound up spending 90% of my time in bed with long COVID. To this day, I am not the same. I tire very quickly and have to take naps during the day. But the one thing I remember was that while I lay in bed, I found James Hoffmann on YouTube. He has an amazing series of videos on the science behind coffee and the process of making the perfect cup. I finally found the time to sit down, do something different, and just explore videos by him and Lance Hedrick. Not long after, I found myself selling all of the excess photo gear I\u2019d bought over 10 years and parlaying it into woodworking gear and coffee gear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I eventually ended up buying a Ascaso Steel Duo coffee machine and a Baratza grinder. When I was anxious to open them, the thought of the coffee bar came back into my head. I thought, “This is an amazing machine. Why don\u2019t I finally set out to learn the rest of the skills I need to finally build a coffee bar?” This time, I wanted to explore building it out of hardwood. I imagined Black Walnut with some Purpleheart and Maple. But I didn\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Facebook Marketplace I went to sell more gear and buy more tools. In between writing books, photography assignments, teaching, and working on my doctorate, I would spend time in the garage building simple projects and developing the skills to finally tackle the coffee bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I were honest, I don\u2019t think I needed to learn many more skills. What I needed was the confidence and the permission to try. Through a steady diet of 3×3 Custom , 731 Woodworks, Katz Moses, and Bent’s Woodworking Woodworking, I finally started saying to myself, “I can try this.” Even if I mess up in the process, the problem-solving would be really interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finally bit down, and over the semester break, I got back into the garage and got started. Two days ago, I finally finished phase one of the bench. I want to add some cabinets with windows in the front and a tamp station, but for now, the project is finished enough to bring into the house and finally set up the machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I look at it, I can see all the little mistakes\u2014where I could\u2019ve or should\u2019ve done something differently. But it\u2019s mine. I built it by myself with all the tips and tricks I learned through my own self-study, Kim, Patti, and the legion of videos on YouTube. I\u2019ll set the machine up soon, but for now, I\u2019m just going to putter around and see about fixing the little things I want to adjust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s taken years to get here, but it\u2019s been a really cool journey. One that, I\u2019m ashamed to admit, I\u2019m more proud of than a lot of the stuff I\u2019ve done professionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That first cup of coffee is going to be great\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back before 2016, I was actually pretty useless with my hands. I\u2019d always make this joke that if…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blog","8":"cs-entry"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7678,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7677\/revisions\/7678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}