Work that would have taken me a week to accomplish working alone was completed in roughly 6 hours with the help of family. Jeanine, her sister Susan, Kyle, and Nicolai all helped to apply a hard wax oil finish to the 68 drawer boxes that will go into the kitchen, pantry, bathrooms, laundry, and mudroom of the River House. Maya was in Vermont for the weekend, otherwise, I am sure she would have joined our work party as well.

We established a production line with Kyle delivering dust-free unfinished drawer boxes to the front end and picking them up from the back end. Nicolai and I were principally responsible for applying the finish. Jeanine burnished the finish into the wood with a ScotchBrite pad, and Susan removed all excess finish with shop towels. Things started slow as we explored ways to optimize our production methods but quickly turned into a well-oiled hard wax oiling machine (pun intended). It is hard to express the extent of my appreciation for all this help.

The time-lapse video above shows the completion of a small fraction of the total number of drawer boxes but gives a pretty good sense of the process. It is shown at 100 times normal speed.