Who are we and why are we doing this
Around the beginning of February of this year, Bob told me he wanted to buy an iDry kiln. To me, this was an idea that came out of left field, but apparently had it been milling about in Bob’s mind for a while. At first, he wanted to place it on our property. We live in the middle of a residential neighborhood. As a former city planner, I knew that probably wasn’t going to go over well with our neighbors living less than 10 feet away. The subject was dropped. Until….about a week later, Bob told me he had been looking at industrial properties near his work. Now, I knew this was going to be an idea to take seriously. So we talked about it.
Bob has been a hobbyist woodworker for over 30 years; I have not. I did take a woodworking class in 7th grade, but that’s where it stopped. I did make a pretty cool nightstand though. It was made of three hearts and it followed me through college and beyond. But since then, my experience with woodworking has been limited to sanding and staining a few things here and there. Bob has been working with local woodworkers on flattening their slabs and cookies over the past year with his custom-made CNC machine. He even helped to finish an epoxy table for a local customer, which turned out pretty amazing. He enjoys the work and wants to serve the community, but he doesn’t want to be a full-time woodworker. He loves his job as a product developer. In talking with local woodworkers, he saw that there wasn’t a commercial kiln within 300 miles. Drying is a crucial part of the process, so how could there not be one in Boise. He started to explore how he could provide this service. And the hardest part, how could he convince his wife to get on board?
Luckily, I’m a big fan of trees and appreciate the work that goes into woodworking. Living in Boise’s North End where the streets are tree-lined, seeing the trees get taken down knowing they will most likely end up in the landfill saddens me. After some research, understanding that the long drying time for wood is often what prevents these trees from being turned into furniture, helped convince me to not completely dismiss Bob’s idea. The opportunity to start a business together is another reason. I’ve wanted to find a business that we could both enjoy being a part of and the time was right. So, maybe it wasn’t that hard to convince me after all.
And probably the biggest question of all–why Welhous Studio? It’s missing an L and an E and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with woodworking or drying wood. We drew inspiration from our house and our property. Our house was handbuilt by the original owner. In the backyard, there is a brick well house covered in ivy, also dug and built by the original owner. We both have English ancestry so to honor the original owner and our ancestry we went with the old English spelling of welhous. So there you have it. That is our origin story and now that the iDry Plus is here, we are excited to get started serving woodworkers and tree lovers alike, to create beautiful pieces of furniture and art or whatever else they can imagine.
