Magic, far and wide!

The last nine days have been fun. PURE MAGIC! It was our first opportunity to take Phoebe to Disneyland. She is at that perfect age. Tall enough and brave enough to go on every single attraction and yet still young enough to suspend disbelive and visit every one of the princesses, fairies and cartoon characters she could greet and get an autograph from. It was great fun to see a place I love through the eyes of someone seeing it for the very first time.

The weather was very warm in California and we enjoyed it. Just the same we didn't mind a bit as we stepped out from the airport on the way to the car and the raindrops fell on our heads. We were home and summer was definitely over.

Refreshed both physiclly and creatively it was time to get back to work once more. Today was spent returning calls and organizing things in preparation for getting back to work. Tonight we were welcomed back with a warm gold light on Vedder Mountain. This was the view from my studio...

Now it's back to creating our brand of magic once more in a place that has it own kind of magic...

-grampa dan

Finally, a place to come home!

Although I've always had my studio at home I never really had a place to store all of my tools and do our work. The garage was pressed into service but never more than two car bays, it was always far too small. There was always a tool trailer parked out in the driveway to hold the extra tools and give us a teeny bit more working room. The size of our garage always limited the size of our projects. Most of the time we did our work on the customer's site. 

In June of 2003 we finally bought our dream property and set about drawing the plans. The small acreage was in the tiny town of Yarrow, about 60 miles east of Vancouver, British Columbia. There was an old farmhouse on the property - nothing fancy, but livable for the short term. The shop would come first - and the house would come when it was time. I drew up the plans and brought them to Janis, excited that this dream was finally happening. She took one look at them and then shook her head. I was of course discouraged until she added...  'go back to the drawing board, build it bigger, build it fancier, build your dream, build it only once.' The result was truly the shop and studio of my dreams. No plain industrial box was this, for it was straight out of my imagination. It would be a shining example of what we could do.

The studio too was straight out of a storybook, the huge bank of windows facing the most gorgeous view to inspire me every single day. The welded steel desk was built right into the wall so I faced these windows as I worked.

Having a well lit, heated and spacious workspace for the first time ever allowed us to approach our work in a whole new way. We could now do most of our work from the comfort of home and only travel to do the installations. All the tools were organized and handy to where we needed them. New tools were added as well including a shop welder and a plasma cutter. We could now form and weld a framework for anything we imagined. There was an overhead crane to help lift heavy objects and even load them onto the trailer for transport when we were done.

The studio and workshop allowed me to be more creative than ever. And that is not likely to end anytime soon. We have in fact only just begun...

-grampa dan

Time to GIGGLE

We've had so many great customers through the years that have allowed us to build some pretty amazing projects, but most also kept one hand firmly on their pocket book, always keeping a watchful eye on the bottom line. It was good business for them but only allowed us to go 70-80% of what we could have done. I was anxious to go all out on at least one major project in my lifetime. We had been dreaming of a small theme park of our own for better than a decade. the turning of the century proved to be the perfect time.

Amazingly, the half-acre, wall to wall themed Adventure Golf was built in only 100 days (long days). It was the hardest and most complex project we had ever done. We pulled together a team of enthusiastic, seasoned and skilled workers from previous projects and built a beautiful lttle park with no constraints. We started at the back and worked our way to the front, each team member putting their hearts into the project. In mid-July of 2000 the public rushed in the front gate as we pulled our tools out the back gate.

Giggle Ridge was fun to operate and doing so made us much better designers of theme parks! We could see first hand what worked and what didn't. We owned and operated Giggle Ridge for 12 years. The park was the very best example of our work and it brought us some pretty spectacular projects in the next years. That is another story I'll tell tomorrow...

-grampa dan