Life has taken me in some interesting directions career-wise.
I have always loved making and repairing anything and everything. I trained as an electronics engineer which satisfied my need to fix stuff, then graduated to computers which was a career that took me all over the world but something was clearly missing.
I was clearly unhappy with work looking back, but at the time I was having a great, if stressful, time. My wife and I had just built our first kit car when it all came crashing down. My doctor told me to find another career or the pace I was running at would be the end of me. I didn’t listen, obviously.
3 years of not working, my amazing wife Della keeping it all together somehow while I tried to find something I could do led to my friend suggesting I learn how to lay floors. Not having exactly been a passion I was hesitant, but the money would be useful. Maybe I’ll just do it until I’m back on my feet…
Fast forward 15 years and I have my own business designing and fitting Luxury Vinyl floors and loving every minute (well nearly). Helping people put what is usually the finishing touch to their building project is amazing. I’ve met some lovely people, many of whom I consider friends and I wouldn’t have wanted to stop.
However it’s a physical job and now in my fifties it’s not getting any easier so I thought about what would work alongside what I was doing. I have for a long time been curious about epoxy resin floors and thought that could be a way to stay creating that was a little easier on the knees and back. I was discussing this with a friend, Jason who owned a kitchen shop at the time and he asked what else epoxy resin could do. Splash-backs? Bath panels? Shower panels? Doors? I said it could do all of that and more. We ordered a decent sized starter kit and Della and I started to experiment at home. The potential was obvious from the start and within weeks one of my customers commissioned a splash-back.
I realised quickly that this wasn’t going to be feasible to run at home, so I asked Jason what I could expect to pay for a unit as he had experience renting commercial property. Long story short, he wants to be a part of it, but a part of what?
What was I going to make? Things.
What shall I make them from? Resin!
My amazingly talented friend Sophie @mophydesign was drafted in to work on a logo After her lovely work on AM Flooring. Whether the RT was a happy accident or marketing genius we’ll never be sure but aRTy certainly describes everything we make!
Then the pandemic happened. I couldn’t go into people's houses, they couldn't come to the workshop so I spent most of the next 2 years honing my skills, creating a workspace specific for the needs of resin as a medium. It’s surprisingly fussy stuff. Temperature, humidity, dust all affect the results hugely. Then you need a separate area for all the cutting, sanding and polishing, painting…There is a lot more to it than I anticipated.
But now, I can offer live edge wood tables, (river tables) decorative epoxy furniture and accessories, splash-backs, kitchen doors, either new or preferably refurbishing existing items.
Re-purposing existing items is something I am passionate about. Yes I am working with plastic, but if it used to prolong the useful life of something or to turn otherwise not very useful pieces of character wood into beautiful furniture, I am OK with that.
Andy