atlanta – Dark Horse Woodworks

Celebrating 10 years of Dark Horse Woodworks

January 11, 2018 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

I was tempted to keep this photo to myself, but decided I may as well put it out there, especially since fellow small business owners will relate: That first check was cause for celebration!

In the middle of the holidays, I realized that another important occasion had crept up on me: the 10th anniversary of Dark Horse Woodworks. Our first day of business was December 28, 2007, and like many of my fellow cabinet makers, our first place of business was my garage.

When you go out on an entrepreneurial limb, it’s both exciting and terrifying. Taking my sideline full-time was a risk and a leap of faith, and back then, I wouldn’t have dared think ahead to whether the company would still be around a decade later.

I’m very happy to be one of the people whose leap of faith paid off; big anniversaries like this one are nice because they make you stop long enough to look back and take stock.

A character-building experience

There’s no question that running your own business brings plenty of headaches, trial-and-error learning and moments of sheer panic. Even when your venture becomes a success, you go through times when you feel nostalgia for the days when your business was smaller and you had less on your plate.

Some days, success means keeping your sense of humor and perspective intact long enough to avoid crossing that dreaded boundary where the thing you love becomes the thing you dread.

Thankfully, along with all of the challenging times and learning curves, Dark Horse has also seen more than our fair share of high points – positive changes in the business itself, exciting honors and gratifying feedback for our work, and great relationships with peers in the industry.

Bigger space, bigger ideas and a bigger universe

Dark Horse Woodworks’ growing physical footprint may be the most obvious change we’ve seen in the past 10 years. Looking back, the thing that astounds me most is the fact that I built a few kitchens for people in my 400-square-foot garage. Now that I have 6,000 square feet (and wish I had even more), it just seems impossible.

Early garage shop days…

A tight squeeze.

Using every bit of space – vertically and horizontally.

Along with the increase in square footage, we’ve also expanded the technology we have on board, which has enabled us to expand the services and types of cabinetry we can offer. (We’ve written on the blog about our Zero-Edge technology and about the CNC router that we added just this past year.)

We also joined the Cabinet Makers Association (CMA), the association for professional cabinet makers and woodworkers in the United States and Canada. This turned out to be a huge decision for us; after all, at 10 years old, Dark Horse is still a newcomer compared to many CMA member shops that have been around for several decades. I always learn a lot thanks to the generosity of more experienced CMA members.

On top of the relationships and resources, we’ve also been recognized with multiple CMA “Wood Diamond” awards every year since we joined; being recognized this way by our peers is important validation that our work is hitting the highest marks.

Accepting one of our 1st-place Wood Diamond awards from CMA president Matt Krig in July 2017

A couple of years ago, I was honored to be elected to the board of the CMA, and I always enjoy being part of the regional events, shop tours and trade show activities. In March, I’ll be doing a presentation at the CMA’s 20th Anniversary conference in Denver, and this summer, I’ll be a CMA speaker at the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta. It’s a good feeling to have gone from being a novice in the cabinetry/small business world to having learned enough to be able to share some often hard-won lessons with others; starting and building Dark Horse has been a little like getting a 10-year business and entrepreneurship degree.

Teamwork

We would never have made it this far without clients, architects, designers and homebuilders who trusted us to team up with them on their projects.

I have some really great clients who have become great friends since we did their projects, and I’m especially appreciative of the folks who hired Dark Horse back in the early days before we had a track record.

And of course, I could never have made the business a success without the people who have worked for me over the course of our first 10 years; thank you for helping Dark Horse deliver quality and workmanship to each of our clients.

Icing on the cake

We would be bad marketers if we didn’t share the good news when our work gets coverage in the media, so if you follow our blog, you may have already read about some of these things.

But marketing aside, seeing your work in a publication or recognized in the community is pretty thrilling on a personal level, so I wanted to mention those kinds of high points in this anniversary post, too:

The Friar Tuck project was featured in a New York Times real estate story.
The Oakview home was featured in Dwell magazine magazine.
I was glancing at Dwell’s website one day and found more of our work in several of their online features.
Curbed Atlanta featured a home with a Dark Horse kitchen (created with Zero-Edge technology) in July.
Dark Horse was the cover story in the Winter 2017 issue of PROfiles, the CMA magazine.
The CMA invited us to participate in a video series in 2017 and gave me a chance to talk about how we got started, why I love what I do and some of the technology that is taking Dark Horse into the future. Feel free to check out the interview (it’s a bit over two minutes long).
Our work has also been included on the highly respected (and popular) Modern Atlanta home tour three times.

Thanks to everyone for your support and cheerleading; I’m looking forward to seeing what our next decade brings.

~ Chris Dehmer

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A lucky glimpse of our work on a “mid-century modern treasure”

August 18, 2017 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-08-18 at 4.46.51 PM For most of our projects, we create cabinetry for multiple rooms in a home, and we end up with extensive photos of the final “product” that we share in our gallery.

For a recent project, we worked on only one room, creating high-gloss kitchen cabinetry with the Zero-Edge technology we invested in last year. In this case, we did not do the installation, which is rare for us. Work is hopping, and I never followed up to get post-installation photos of the finished kitchen.

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Fortunately, this beautiful mid-century modern home went on the market not long ago, and it drew the attention of Curbed Atlanta, which featured the home in July (“In Druid Hills, midcentury modern treasure is ‘unadulterated’ for $799K”).

Screen Shot 2017-08-18 at 4.48.29 PM

It was great to see the finished kitchen, and thanks to the kindness of the staff at Domo Realty, which is handling the sale of the home, I’m able to share screenshots of the kitchen here.

A view of the kitchen from the dining room

If you enjoy mid-century modern, I highly recommend that you take a look at the Curbed Atlanta feature, as well as the Domo Realty listing for extensive photos of this distinctive home.

And the folks at Domo also passed on a compliment that we appreciated: The house is under contract, and they told us that the kitchen helped sell the house. We enjoy seeing all of our projects through from start to finish, and that kind of feedback is the icing on the cake.

Christmas in March

June 16, 2017 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

routerphotonew At Dark Horse, we’ve always had an Old-World emphasis on craftsmanship, quality and attention to detail.

But we don’t believe that having Old-World values means you can’t embrace ways of working that are very much New-World. In our 10 years in business, Dark Horse has experienced first-hand the benefits that great technology and an open mind can bring to our process and to the final product we deliver to clients.

Awhile back, we shared photos of Wildwood, our first big high-gloss kitchen cabinetry project that was made possible by the Zero Edge technology we invested in last year.

In March, we had another red-letter day on the technology front: Our very own, shiny new CNC router was delivered.

For those who aren’t in our line of work, it may be pretty challenging to convey just how exciting this was, but we’ll give it a try.

So what is a CNC router?

Let’s start with CNC.

We found a pretty straightforward definition online at technologystudent.com:

CNC [stands for] Computer Numerical Control. This means a computer converts the design produced by Computer Aided Design software (CAD), into numbers. The numbers can be considered to be the coordinates of a graph, and they control the movement of the cutter. In this way, the computer controls the cutting and shaping of the material.

Dark Horse will now be using a method sometimes called “screen to machine” to cut the parts for our custom cabinets in-house.

We draw the components on a computer screen with design software, which then sends code to the CNC router. The machine takes that data and cuts all of our cabinet parts so that they come off the machine ready to go — all holes for hardware are drilled, etc.

Thanks to the interaction of the software and the machine, the router grabs the right tool for the task at hand, then changes to another tool automatically when needed.

With screen-to-machine production, the possibility of injury is greatly reduced (fingers are on a keyboard, not next to spinning blades), and the accuracy is ridiculously good (1/1000 inch).

To see the router in action, check out this time-lapse video of our new machine cutting trolley signs to be sold by South Atlantans for Neighborhood Development (SAND).

A logistics win

There are many intricacies that this process makes possible – including generating a single file with a unique name for each sheet of material that is going to be cut and a label for each piece.

Basically, once the design is approved, files are sent to our network that tell the machine every operation that is required for the parts on each sheet; in addition, a printout is made for each sheet that has a barcode at the bottom corresponding to the file name of the sheet to be cut.

The operator scans the barcode at the bottom of the page, the machine loads the correct file, and then it begins the process of cutting.

After the cutting is finished, the Dark Horse team can take each piece off of the machine, apply its unique label, and sort the pieces according to the type of edgeband they are going to receive. We can start the edgebanding of those pieces while the next sheet is being cut.

Another member of the team can then begin to put the boxes together as soon as all of the parts for that assembly are made.

Flipping the process

My interest in programming and software has led me to approach decisions about technology investments in an unusual way. Many businesses invest in expensive machinery and then learn how to use the software that makes it run.

At Dark Horse, we’ve always gone in the opposite direction; to me, it doesn’t make much sense to have an expensive machine sitting idle in my shop while my team and I spend time wrapping our heads around how the software works.

So we buy the software first and learn it inside and out through tutorials or videos.

By the time a new machine is delivered, we’re ready to roll. This doesn’t mean we never have questions once we start using it; that’s a given. But those questions are easier to resolve quickly if you have a solid understanding of your software and machinery.

I believe this philosophy has been a major factor in our success. With this machine implementation, we were up and running at full speed as soon as the machine was integrated into our software, which was only one day after the machine installation was complete.

Two months in, we are completing projects that fully utilize our new technology in about one-third of the time we were spending before bringing the CNC on board.

~ Chris Dehmer

Join an industry group for an instant network and plenty of great ideas

April 5, 2017 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

One of the shop tours organized by the Cabinet Makers Association

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know that Dark Horse is a big fan of the Cabinet Makers Association (so much so that I became a board member last year).

The best part of being in this group is the ability to draw on the knowledge of other members; in the grand scheme of things, Dark Horse is a “newcomer” compared to some shops that have been around for several decades, and I always learn a lot thanks to the generosity of others.

And it’s always a great moment when we find that we can offer some wisdom to other shops.

On-call help

The idea for this blog came up when we were putting together a post (we’ll publish it soon) about our new CNC router, a game-changing technology/machinery addition at Dark Horse.

We chose to invest in the software that partners with the router first, and learn our way around that piece of the process before buying the router.

Now that we have the router, and we’re gearing up to put it all together and start cutting our custom cabinetry pieces in the Dark Horse workshop, I have no worries about any questions that are sure to come up in real time and need quick resolution.

Why? Because I know that I can always pick up the phone and call one of my CMA friends who already have a lot of hands-on experience with CNC routers.

As with many situations, your personal network of friends and industry colleagues can often deliver the answers you need even more quickly and effectively than a manufacturer’s customer service “hotline.”

And this advice isn’t just for building industry types …

When you start a business, it’s tempting to want to go it alone and look at the others in your line of work as competition – even if they aren’t literally vying for the same customers, you may see them as competing against you for awards or respect or reputation.

You’ll miss a lot of opportunities to learn if you think this way.

I highly recommend that you find the equivalent of the Cabinet Makers Association for your industry and join up and be active; with groups like this, you get out what you put in.

I’m looking forward to my next chance to pick up some new ideas in a couple of weeks: Just before one of our big industry events in Chicago, the CMA is sponsoring one of its shop tours so we can check out nearby cabinetry companies.

I’ll be there, looking for ways that Dark Horse can up our game.

Grateful: A quick look back at a year full of opportunity

January 3, 2017 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

NYT kitchen

It’s been another great year for Dark Horse, and none of it would have been possible without the faith that our clients place in us when they hire us to help build their dream projects.

Below are a few of the 2016 highlights we featured on our blog over the course of the year; click through to read more details about each story if you’d like.

Thanks to all of our clients, supporters and friends for sending us work and reading our stories over the past year: We wish you all a great 2017.

~Chris and the Dark Horse team

NYT kitchen

April 13, 2016

Dark Horse featured in the New York Times

Our work debuted in the New York Times in the spring!

The Friar Tuck house, a beautiful modern home renovation we worked on a few years back, was on the market, and the Times chose to feature it in its “What You Get” real estate series. Each story in the series features three properties of varying styles in different areas of the country that are for sale in the same price range.

In the story, “$1,800,000 Homes in Kentucky, Atlanta and New Mexico,” we were called out for the award-winning kitchen cabinetry in the home.

August 26, 2016

Chris Dehmer elected to Cabinet Makers Association Board of Directors

Chris was honored to be elected to the board of the Cabinet Makers Association (CMA), the association for professional cabinet makers and woodworkers in the United States and Canada.

“Being part of the CMA has given Dark Horse the opportunity to connect with and learn from many stellar wood-working businesses across the US and Canada,” Chris says.

September 1, 2016

Dark Horse wins 5 Awards from the Cabinet Makers Association

You can imagine how excited we were when the CMA recognized Dark Horse with four first-place Wood Diamond awards and one third-place award at the CMA awards ceremony in Atlanta this summer!

The Balmoral project

First place, Euro Kitchen under $25,000 category

The Wesley bar

First place, Residential Bar (European) under $25,000

The Olympic house

First place, European Library under $25,000

Third place, European kitchen under $25,000

The Stonehaven project

First place, Mudroom under $25,000

October 5, 2016

Seamless: Dark Horse acquires “Zero-Edge” capabilities

We’ve acquired the technology to produce cabinetry and furniture components with seamless edges. Zero-Edge Technology, as it’s usually called, is a game-changer for our company and the industry as a whole.

Dark Horse holiday tradition: Collecting toys for kids in need

December 21, 2016 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

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At our company holiday party earlier this month, we kept up our tradition of collecting toys for the children served by CHRIS 180 (formerly CHRISKids), a wonderful Atlanta nonprofit whose mission is to “heal children, strengthen families, and build community through mental health counseling, training, providing safe housing, and real-world skill building.”

I’m so grateful for all that CHRIS 180 does in our community, and it always brightens our holidays to be able to help make the season special for the children served by this organization.

Thanks so much to our team, friends and clients for their generosity in helping us make this possible: At the end of our party, we were happy to find that we had collected about 100 toys – from dolls to bicycles.

We hope our clients and friends are enjoying the holiday season so far!

~ Chris Dehmer

Seamless: Dark Horse acquires “Zero-Edge” capabilities

October 5, 2016 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

We have big news that our friends in the furniture and wood-working world may understand best: We’ve acquired the technology to produce cabinetry and furniture components with seamless edges.

Zero-Edge Technology, as it’s usually called, is a game-changer for our company and the industry as a whole.

Why is it such a big deal?

In short, because it’s always a challenge to add edge-banding to panels without a noticeable seam that is prone to fail eventually. Zero-Edge banding is more heat- and moisture-resistant than typical edge treatments.

REHAU, a polymer company, agreed to let us share these images from a presentation they created:

rehau-1 rehau-2

One of the trends we’re seeing in our work is the increasing demand for high-gloss cabinetry, and to create these cabinets, you have to have zero-edge capability.

With gloss acrylic, you can’t have a glue line, so the zero-edge machine melts the back of the edge and trims it off so your creation appears to have always been a single component.

If you happen to be fascinated by technology, design and woodworking/cabinetry, and getting into the nitty-gritty of this sort of thing interests you, the folks at Woodworking Canada have written a great article about the future of Zero-Edge technology. Here are a few of the highlights/excerpts from the article:

“If what’s happening in Europe is any indication, and it usually is, then the demand for zero edge will increase dramatically in North America and Canada, and most experts agree that in as little as two to five years, invisible edges will make up a significant portion of our market as well.” ~ Murat Dugan, president of IMA Canada Corp, a pioneer in edge-banding

How does it work?

“Using a co-extruded, active layer that is colour-matched – rather than applying hot-melt glue as is the norm in traditional edge-banders – the new system creates a zero edge or invisible glue line that is difficult to distinguish from one produced using a laser unit.”

What are the advantages?

“Not only is zero-edge aesthetically pleasing, but it also makes for stronger and longer-lasting edges and offers anti-bacterial benefits that make it a great solution for restaurants, health-care and similar public uses.”

And zero-edge is often necessary for “contemporary, slab or high-gloss cabinetry, which continues to grow in popularity.”

We love being ahead of the curve at Dark Horse – thanks to our new investment, we can produce the high-gloss acrylic cabinetry called for in our next two projects. The zero-edge machine also opens the door to commercial projects and will enable us to provide some services that shops and even homeowners in the region have not had access to until now.

Stay tuned to see what new territory Dark Horse heads into next!

Georgia’s Gorilla Golf tourney to support Dian Fossey fund’s conservation efforts

September 12, 2016 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

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On September 27, Dark Horse Woodworks’ Chris Dehmer is participating in the 6th Annual Gorilla Golf tournament in Atlanta, which raises funds to help gorillas in the wild.

The tournament is organized by Ape Conservation Effort (APE), a Georgia non-profit comprised of volunteer members who share a passion for animals and a commitment to saving the great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).

Want to make a donation? Here’s a note from Chris:

Dear friends of Dark Horse:

I’m excited to be golfing in this year’s Gorilla Golf Tournament; playing involves raising a minimum of $500 for this great cause, and I wanted to share info on the event in case this is a cause you feel strongly about, too.

100% of the proceeds raised will benefit the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI), headquartered in Atlanta. Gorillas in the wild are critically endangered and desperately need your help; there are fewer than 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the world.

For more than 45 years, DFGFI has been dedicated to gorilla conservation through daily protection, anti-poaching efforts, research, education and helping neighboring communities. Your contribution will make a difference: Extinction is forever, but endangered means there is still time.

Want to help me raise money for this great cause?

If you’d like to be a sponsor, you can make a contribution online or via mail.

Online: Visit the “sponsor a golfer” page on the APE website and look for my name.

Mail: Make checks payable to Ape Conservation Effort (please be sure to include my name on the memo line). Send your donation to:

Ape Conservation Effort

800 Cherokee Avenue, SE

Atlanta, GA 30315

Thanks for considering this great opportunity to support DFGFI, and for helping Ape Conservation Effort raise funds and awareness to save this majestic animal.

~ Chris, Dark Horse Woodworks

Dark Horse wins 5 Awards from the Cabinet Makers Association

September 1, 2016 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

BalmoralBarView In our relatively short history – Dark Horse was created in 2007 – we’ve had a lot of good news come down the pike.

If you follow our blog, you know that our work has ended up in Dwell magazine a few times; that homes we’ve worked on have been featured on Modern Atlanta tours; and that a home we worked on years ago was featured in the New York Times a few months back.

But there’s nothing quite like being singled out by our peers across the United States and Canada with Cabinet Makers Association (CMA) awards. We’ve been fortunate to win Wood Diamond awards every year since we joined; these honors means so much because we know that our fellow cabinet makers truly understand the time and attention to detail that goes into every one of our projects.

So you can imagine how excited we were when the CMA recognized Dark Horse with four first-place Wood Diamond awards and one third-place award at the CMA awards ceremony in Atlanta last week!

So what is a Wood Diamond Award?

The awards recognize cabinetry companies of all sizes in the United States and Canada for work submitted in 38 categories. This year the CMA added a third project budget classification to further narrow down the submissions by dollar amount. CMA members can now submit projects that fall into three project budget categories: Projects Under $25,000; $25,000 – $50,000 projects; and projects costing more than $50,000.

All judging is done by CMA members who did not submit any projects for consideration.

Hats off to our visionary clients and partners

Without design-savvy clients, designers, architects and all of the other talented people we partner with on projects, Dark Horse would not have award-worthy work, so we have to share our thanks for this year’s Wood Diamond projects; below are a few details about the work that was recognized.

The Balmoral project

First place, Euro Kitchen under $25,000 category

For the Balmoral project, we created a sleek kitchen featuring a bar area with suspended cabinetry above it. The kitchen island incorporates open, lighted wine storage, and we also created a hidden pantry.

Balmoral house

Chris Dehmer elected to Cabinet Makers Association Board of Directors

August 26, 2016 by darkhorse with 0 Comments

We’re happy to share the news that Dark Horse Woodworks’ Chris Dehmer has been elected to the board of the Cabinet Makers Association (CMA), the association for professional cabinet makers and woodworkers in the United States and Canada.

The CMA is a professional organization enabling “cabinetmakers and woodworkers from both the residential and commercial markets [to] get together and share their hard earned knowledge and experience to help one another.”

Chris was elected to join Mike Mitchell of Burger Boat in Manitowoc, Wis., and Keith Smith of Keith Smith Custom Builders in Greer, S.C., as members-at-large on the board of directors.

Dark Horse joined the CMA just a few years ago, and we’re proud to have had our work recognized in all of the organization’s Wood Diamond Awards competitions that have taken place since then; the CMA awards covering our walls are great marketing tools for us because they tell prospective clients that our work lives up to the high standards of our peers in the industry.

(You can read about some of our CMA-award-winning projects here and here.)

“Being part of the CMA has given Dark Horse the opportunity to connect with and learn from many stellar wood-working businesses across the US and Canada,” Chris says. “Dark Horse was just a few years old at the time we joined and I didn’t have a background working in a shop, so it’s been invaluable to learn from other CMA members and be part of such an active and educational organization. I’m honored to be able to join the board and become more involved.”

~ The Dark Horse team

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