SLO LIFE Magazine Oct/Nov 2018

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44 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | OCT/NOV 2018
et’s take it from the top, Jory. Where are you from? Yeah. I was born in Los Olivos. I was born at home, I was homeschooled, all that. We moved to Hawaii when I was about a year old. We lived there until I was 16. Then my parents decided to move to Pennsylvania, which was a complete culture shock. My Lsisters were older than me and already out of school, so I was the only one that had to go along with them. They moved to Pennsylvania because they just loved adventure. They’d never been there in their life. My mom loves the season changes, the trees turning different colors. So they decided to sell everything and ship whatever was left to Pennsylvania. They’d never been there before. We flew in. We rented a car and just drove around until they found some place they wanted to live. Where did you end up? It was Doylestown, which is a tiny little town about 30 miles north of Philadelphia. Up until that time, I had been homeschooled. Now I was in public school. I got out of there as quick as I could; graduated early. Went back to Hawaii. Stayed there for a year, and then moved to California when I was almost 19. At the time, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I grew up working in construction and carpentry. My dad went to Cal Poly for architecture. And he went almost all the way through before dropping out; he decided he didn’t want to be sitting at a desk. He always had that; he was always into design, for sure. And so, when I was a kid, I helped him build our house from the ground up. I mentioned that I was homeschooled, but I just drove my mom nuts. She’d tell my dad, “Take him to work.” Why didn’t you stay in Hawaii? Everything is centered around the tourist industry in Hawaii. I worked at a restaurant and a surf shop, but if you have any aspirations to do anything else, you should get out of there. I went to Cuesta for maybe a semester. I’m not cut out for school. I just don’t have the patience. So I started working with my uncle, who builds reclaimed furniture. I had this idea for a piece and I asked him if I could build it. I told him I’d do it on my own time and we could split the profit. Looking back on it now, it wasn’t very good. It was sort of a mix between a credenza and a dresser. It was decent though; it had this curved front, it was bowed. So I bent the wood and spent a lot of time getting it just the way I had envisioned. At the time, he had some retailers he worked with up north and I remember driving up with him to Carmel. The store was called the Carmel Bay Company. We walked up to it and my piece was in the front window. I was so stoked. I’ll never forget that feeling. Did the piece sell? It did. It actually sold in just a few days, so I said, “Hey, do you want to do another?” It started like that. I was hooked. I loved designing. I loved just coming up with a design idea, and then making it come to life. When you do that, and build it with your own hands, and then someone likes it, it’s just so cool. The whole thing for me is it’s such an honor when someone likes it, wants it in their house. That’s a very intimate, personal thing. You’re like, “Hey, this stuff is growing up with them. They’re going to have it their whole life.” And I love to think about how, back in the day, people would invest in a piece of furniture. And it wasn’t cheap. They would buy furniture that was expensive, but they would buy it with the intention of handing it down to their children. And it meant a lot to them. It was a family heirloom. We’ve gotten so far away from that. Now it’s like, “Well, it’s cheap. We’ll toss it when it breaks or when we don’t like it anymore.” What do you remember about your move to the Central Coast. I remember building a compost toilet. [laughter] And I didn’t have a shower, so I would hose off. Basically, I was living in the shop where I worked. I would come to San Luis on the weekends. I had friends here, but mostly I would just work. I still do. I work really long hours: 12, 15, 16 hours a day. Last week, I put in one 19-hour day and one 20-hour day. I get so excited when I’m doing something that I just can’t wait to see this thing come to life. It gives me energy. Ever since I was a little kid, I would just skip meals. I wouldn’t get hungry; I was just completely focused. I don’t sketch my designs on paper first; they’re all in my head and that makes it really exciting, but also scary because, at a certain point, you can go too far. The security of having a rendering on paper gives you a pretty good idea for how it’s going to turn out. But when you don’t have that, you don’t know how it will come together until you’re done with it sometimes. I bet that approach keeps you on your toes. The weird thing is that my wife tells me I do this almost every time with every single project. I get to this point where I start panicking. I can’t sleep and I’m like, “Oh, man. I’ve done it this time.” Invariably she goes, “You say that every time.” And I’ll say, “No, this time I’ve done it. I don’t know how to come back from this. There’s something off and I’m staring at it, and I don’t know what it is. There’s something that is missing, and I can’t figure it out.” And she’ll come to the shop and look at it and say, “It looks fine.” And I’ll say, “No, something’s off.” So, I think what happens when I’m like, “Something’s off, something’s off,” is I’m in this kind of like half-anxiety, half-excitement, and half-panic state during the process. At that point, that’s when time kind of disappears. And I’m like, “I can’t sleep, so I might as well just do this.” Because I’ll just be laying in bed there thinking about how I screwed this thing up. How are you able to put in so many hours? I mean, I have two kids now, seven and nine years old. But now we live on this property, which was always my dream to have my shop at the house. It changes everything because I’m able to eat at least two meals with the family and hang out every night. Then, when the kids are asleep, I go right back out there. I really wanted my kids to grow up in the country. To me that was success. That was my goal. I had been renting a shop in San Luis; it was big, about 3,000 square feet, and I was getting a really good deal. I was only paying $1,800 a month, which was great. But, when you combine that with what we were paying to rent our house in Los Osos, it was $4,500 a month. That’s almost five grand a month just on rent. So, we started looking around for some land where we could have our house and a shop, but everything is just so expensive. So we started looking further and further out. How far out? I stopped for lunch in Paso one day flipping through one of those real estate magazines, and I found an ad for 13 acres way up by San Miguel. It had a whole bunch of pictures of a crappy double wide with one shot of this amazing shop. So, I drove out there, down all these dirt roads to find it. Then I pull up to this shop and my mouth just drops. It’s on top of a hill. It was the most beautiful shop I had ever seen in my life. It overlooks the surrounding vineyards; doors that open all the way up, a wraparound redwood deck. I said to my wife, “You’ve got to check it out.” She’s like, “That place is way too far; it’s in the sticks.” I did not want to push it at all because I knew she would resent me forever if I did, so I just kept quiet. She sort of walked around, taking it in, and then said, “For some reason I feel at peace here.”>> OCT/NOV 2018 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 45
Page 1 and 2: LIFE SLOmagazine FLAVORS FOR FALL R
Page 3 and 4: M O D E R N • C L A S S I C • J
Page 5 and 6: OCT/NOV 2018 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE |
Page 7 and 8: GENERAL BUILDING CONTRACTORS . LAND
Page 9 and 10: SLO’s only local community-owned
Page 13 and 14: Singer, songwriter, producer, guita
Page 15 and 16: TILE SHOWROOM & NATURAL STONE SLAB
Page 19 and 20: Because you deserve the very best r
Page 21 and 22: MACHU PICCHU, PERU ALPIGLEN, BERN,
Page 23 and 24: SCARBOROUGH, ENGLAND TICINO, SWITZE
Page 25 and 26: OB Hospitalist Program PROVIDING AN
Page 27 and 28: E X P EC EC T B E T T ERSM ERSM BHG
Page 29 and 30: T. KEITH For Our Neighborhoods! Cal
Page 31 and 32: SEPTEMBER ’18 9/3 Morro Bay moved
Page 33 and 34: Gary Hale & Terri Kahn Janet Windma
Page 37 and 38: I said we had time for a short ride
Page 39 and 40: Mark Adams’s albums are available
Page 41 and 42: Call Today and mention SLO LIFE for
Page 43: TRIAL AND ERROR A few years ago, ar
Page 47 and 48: “ It was great working with Graha
Page 51 and 52: New Patient Special $99 Exam, X-Ray
Page 53 and 54: Elder Placements realizes the IMPOR
Page 55 and 56: BELLS PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVE GARTH OCT
Page 57 and 58: PASO ROBLES SAN LUIS OBISPO SLO SLE
Page 61 and 62: ARCHITECTURE LANDSCAPE INTERIORS Ne
Page 63 and 64: + OUTDOOR MOVIE NIGHTS ARE BACK! Jo
Page 65 and 66: Help Us End Hunger In San Luis Obis
Page 67 and 68: At Semmes & Co. Builders, we are gu
Page 69 and 70: SPONSORED ANOTHER LEVEL Browse our
Page 71 and 72: SPONSORED the sense of place, local
Page 75 and 76: 䰀漀挀愀氀䔀琀栀椀
Page 77 and 78: VARICOSE & SPIDER VEIN TREATMENT Lo
Page 79 and 80: BRAHMS | Symphony No. 3 CABANISS |
Page 81 and 82: smart, eclectic, art to live on Eat
Page 83 and 84: WIRELESS INTERNET FOR THE CENTRAL C
Page 85 and 86: First Presbyterian Church is commit
Page 87 and 88: JESSIE’S TIP: This meat sauce can
Page 89 and 90: HOME TO EDNA VALLEY’S MOST . DRIN
Page 91 and 92: NEXT CONCERT 10th Anniversary Celeb
Page 93 and 94: FINN PLUMBING Inc. old school quali
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“Early to bed, early to rise, wor
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| HAPPENINGS WINTERMEZZO At Festiva
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OCT/NOV 2018 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE |
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SLO LIFE Magazine Oct/Nov 2018

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