Sanding and Staining
Sometimes building something great takes a little elbow grease! This week, we've been working on building out the space at our new location in Southwest Detroit. If you didn't know, we are setting up our first office at 1759 W 21st Street, Detroit, MI. We are located inside of the Detroit School for Digital Technology and we have a gated parking lot that is shared with Detroit Farm and Garden.
I really enjoy being in this location for several reasons. First, this is an exciting and growing area of town. Second, there are a ton of historic and cultural landmarks nearby - we are 2 blocks behind the Michigan Central Station and you can see the Ambassador Bridge from our main entrance. Third, there are great people that work in the space who are making things happen - Ezra Brown with The LifeLine Network and Karlos Harris of Koded Icons to name a few.
Anyways, back to the elbow grease. I started by purchasing some lumbar from Reclaim Detroit - they operate a pop-up location out of the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store on the Northwest Side of Detroit. The lumber was not pretty when I picked it up, but it had potential. I sanded it and cut it to size. I started with a 60 grit and progressed to a 220 grit until it was quite smooth!
The boards sanded and then aligned into their position as a shelf. They need to be stained at this point!
After sanding comes staining, and I use Minwax prep, a dark American stain, and then a finishing coat of Polyurethane.
Next up - that door! Someone painted it purple, much to my chagrin, so it took a few hours to scrape and sand the entire door. Originally I was going to sand only one side, but I decided that it would look funny with only one side sanded and stained. Here's the result!
If you're not going to do it right, it's not worth doing it at all. As you can tell, I'm all in on making Plum Health as great as it can be, from the little details about getting rid of those old layers of paint to the big picture of taking care of people. I'm really excited that things are coming together in the new space and I can't wait to serve more people in the community.
Bonus: here's a short vid of the ongoing work from today:
Thanks so much for keeping up with our progress and have a great day,
- Paul Thomas, MD