Rented Workshop, Rush Order, Renting a House

We finished negotiations and started working in our rented shop.  There is an orphanage about a half a mile from my house that has a great carpentry shop.  It took a lot of talking, but I managed to rent half of it for a month.  We are able to work without interruption there…plenty of room to spread out and do many parts of the project at the same time.

I get the right half and we share the center area.

I brought my own tools, but they do have a lot of nice tools there.

A stack after the first coat of varnish and a stack waiting to be sanded.

Plenty of room outside to varnish.

On Saturday the 21st of December, as I was cleaning up the shop from a productive week, I got a call from a friend in Port au Prince.  He was in the market for some beds!  I was very excited until he told me that he needed them before the first of the year.  I took a page from my old boss’s playbook and said…”Sure, we can do it…We would love to!”  I made a few phone calls and rescheduled delivery dates for the other beds.  I told my team that we would have to work fast!  We did it…we brought 6 beds to Port and installed them while Beaver was picking up Jim Warren and the team from Gretna at the airport.

Jean Philipe and I rode to Port on top of our bed parts

Here is one of the rooms with three finished products.

And we now make drums!  A music teacher at the orphanage with the shop commissioned a cajon…basically a wood box that is a drum.  You mount a part of a snare to the inside and you can get quite a range of sounds out of it.  The music teacher was thrilled…even more thrilled when I would not accept his money for the prototype.  I just asked him to help me find a good market price for a drum like that in a place like this…he did some asking around and he told me that $50 US would be reasonable.  I am making these things mostly out of bed scraps, so I told him that if he found any buyers, I would sell them to him for $40 and he could mark them up and resell them.  I honestly didn’t think that anyone would pay that much for a wood box…but…he came by yesterday and placed an order for two of them ASAP.

Video took too long to upload…video coming sooon!

So, now I am finishing the order of 13 beds for one orphanage and beginning the order of 16 beds.  My time at the shop will be over around the middle of the month, but I think I can finish the project for a few extra bucks of rent there.  For the next set of projects, I will need a new place to work…and I found one!  The house that I wrote about last time is the place.  Apparently there was a little confusion on the rent, it is just under $5000 for a year.  I am still going to try and negotiate it down a little next week.  It will be a great base of operations for all that I have going on down here.  There is plenty of room in the yard and shade all day for building all things wood and metal.  There are some extra bedrooms to turn into an electronics lab and a computer lab where I can teach small groups those skills.  The house sits on a road with a lot of foot traffic, so it would be a good place for some kind of store in front in the future.

It is time to ask for some help.  I am renting this house for a year with an option to buy it at the end of the term.  I would like to buy this house in 2014.  I would also like to start construction on my school in Bayonnais.  This will all take a considerable amount of support from you and your friends.  I believe that what I am doing down here is making a difference and there is not much (zero) administrative expense in my operation down here.  Please consider signing up as a monthly contributor with the button on the top right of this blog, or making a one time contribution following this link to Journey Church’s Donation Page.  Select Scott Peters – Haiti from the drop down.  These two methods of contributing both go through my church, but every dollar is passed through to me.  Or, if you would like, and you know her, you could contact my sister Renee…she handles my financial stuff on the US side of things.

Thank you so much, please check again for updates, I am living a dream down here.

Scott