Get on the bus, Le Marais bus!

In the world of eyesage, there are only Le Marais furniture photos.

Spring has finally arrived, we may, touch wood , be past the frosty nights. In Gongdok village the farmers have been rustling and preparing, trimming and transplanting, turning and fertilizing. We have only enjoyed the first blooming perennials and have yet to do any maintenance or preparation.

Starting with above, we did a job for a friend's friend's cafe. The Ban-dal-gom ( half moon bear) has been a round for a year or two and changed hands. Even with the unrealistic plethora of cafes- I estimate over 30 in a square kilometer- nearby, their specialty is roasting beans so they have a loyal clientele apparently. We made three two- person table sets and a long window table. This kind of contract offers us the opportunity to try new designs. We offered the family price as I call it, so finding cost effective fabrication is also important. This means few mortise/tenon constructions , straight legs and so on. The family is super satisfied and we have a free pass for coffee and baked goods anytime. The problem as I expressed before with Korean cafes is they open at 10 or 11 am.

The great thing is that this was the first work with my self milled lumber. The long table with blue legs was in the show room for just two days but was a big hit and prompted one immediate likewise order, and inspired a couple more.

Spring means residents are moving and redecorating and several weeks of work orders were taken in the last week. Yeonmi told the last such customer yesterday to expect a two month wait. So you know what I'm doing. I'll have to put in some time on Sundays, to compensate for some down time in June and a trip abroad with a visiting mate.
March was not slower, but just not crazy busy and I took time to play with wood I had been collecting, logs and boards and cut offs. I made the little bus above, a rip off of my own work; we have a similar little sculpture here at the house which I made in the first few weeks of my courtship with Yeonmi when I visited Nondit quite frequently- 6 years ago..?

With cut-offs we save in stacks of boxes, we make mosaics, and clocks and little decorative wall pieces , which we sell for forty or fifty bucks. They 're smallish things that people who are enamored with the store can take away with out shelling out more cash for furniture.

I try and allow an hour or so daily to tinkering on things that are not orders, but creative experiments using all the pieces of wood collected. It's these whimsical and original musings which make Le Marais unique and eye-catching to the passers by.



I made plant boxes with old weathered wood, small remnants from the milling and hollowed out logs such as pictured above. the long log wasn't hollow, it got the chainsaw treatment. Winter has been never ending and I got restless for some greenery in our lives.

I just got a fresh buchingdae or pa-jeon ( spring onion pancake) brought to me . Still warm and delicious ( the pancake part is right as it's 9 am on Sunday as I write this, the onion part is accurate for Korean cookery), little grandmother from house below brought it up. These neighbors are those with not much family- three out of four sons dead and a daughter who rarely visits. We do our best to help them, usually with rides to town and me with house maintenance. So with the rumble in my stomach satiated , I will explain the latest such episode.

I was awoken by a much needed Sunday nap two weeks now I guess, to haraboji ( grandpa) pounding on the door. He doesn't yell hello or 'Andy" just, "ya" which is like 'hey' in English. And seeing as I have never understood more than three words from him -he has , like, 5 teeth remaining and the strongest accent/dialect- after a phrase , he just said come down and look. It took me thirty minutes and four trips up and down the drive with tools and parts to wake up fully and devise a MacGyvered way of stopping the flow of water from the outside faucet's broken pipe. He had dug away all the gravel and busted the concrete, was scooping out water, and I plugged it with plasticine and a pipe clamp and promised to get the right goods the next day. He was pushing cash on me but I accepted minimally what the parts might cost. Twenty bucks is a lot of money for this old couple whose income is negligible. They are really subsistence farmers and get some income from chili peppers, garlic at market, and maybe a very modest pension.

When leaving the next morning, gramps comes out with a fiver saying ' sea- men" or " semen" or " she - men" which I repeated all three and he nodded. So I repeated those in my head for two minutes before concluding 'cement', an item already on his list. And besides, it's concrete ready mix he should want. So he drops the last syllable of words , I thought...this may be my strategy for listening in the future. He understands most of the Korean I bumble out in reply . Anyway the job was done, in a very improvised, resourceful and not journeyman plumber method. And another year's kimchi is secured. Actually, we have so much goddamn kimchi remaining, the kimchi fridge is still full. We must have 50 kilos at least.

These kids of relationships are a great part of country living: feeling accepted and integrated into the community although sometimes their are social and community pressures for which we don't have the time or energy to endure. The pipe fixing was interupted by the call by the other neighbor two doors down who needed me to lift his bloody tractor that fell off the ramp while driving it up on to the pick up truck. So If it's trimming trees, taxi service, or handyman work I'm glad to do my bit around Gongdok.

We'll have to see how things go when word gets out that we're selling the house and moving...