Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Reinventing yourself - part 3

When your "business plan" runs out of gas

Almost every one of you has a set of goals you are working toward. These goals are actually a "business plan" for your lives. The more carefully the goals are defined, the more likelihood you will achieve the goals. When they are achieved, it is time to move on and that generally involves reinventing yourself.

You may laugh at the idea that casually stated life goals are a business plan, but you would be dead wrong. Business plans, after all, are not a five pound package of charts and figures. They are a statement of purpose with some effort to say how the purpose will be achieved.

A business plan can be written on the back of a napkin or in a thousand pages of minute detail. What matters is that the people writing it intend it to happen and are committing themselves to make it happen. If the commitment is not there, the plan is a useless exercise. If the commitment is there, the plan will work even if it covers only part of a page.

The big problem with business plans, or personal goals, is that they may be based on a short-term horizon, like a couple of years. Those few years can fly by and your life or your business begins to flounder and you don't know why. It is simply because your business plan and all of the intention surrounding it was directed to getting to a point in the future with no thought as to what would happen thereafter.

For example, the girl who plans to "get married" has to reinvent herself as a wife once the ceremony is over. The student who is dead set on graduating at all costs has to reinvent himself as an employed person once graduation is over. In both cases, the individuals involved could have done better by extending their planning much further out in the future.

You only get what you intend and most of us shy away from plans that extend too far into the future. As a result, we make plans for the next two or three years and concentrate on getting through life without too much collateral damage. When we arrive at our goals, we may have totally forgotten how we originally formulated them and we find it very difficult to refocus our efforts on a more distant set of goals.

That is why it is worthwhile to keep a file of ideal scenes, business plans, and all of the other planning efforts you have written down on napkins. You should revisit these plans at least once a month to see if you need to make any course corrections.  Chances are, you will need to take at least one of your earlier plans and extend it out into the future. If you don't you will find yourself inexorably grinding to a halt in some area.

Reinventing yourself rejuvenates you and gives you new activities to focus on. It is the best way to master a constantly changing world.

Take a look at the plans you have for your life. How many of them extend past the next five years? How many of them take into account that most of you will not be working at the same company five years from now? How many of them take into account that you have situations in your life that will change drastically in the next five years?

Open your mind to the possibility that desirable opportunities await you if certain changes can be made in your skills and in your knowledge. Embrace the idea that reinventing yourself is a step forward, not a retreat from failure. If your business plan has run out of gas, it's time to write a new one which will carry your further. Don't bewail the fact that your hard-won goals are being rendered worthless by time or circumstance. Get a grip on yourself and reinvent yourself as the person who can solve your problems.

Just remember, there is no rest point in life. There is only motion. Things get better when you do the necessary actions to make improvements in your life. Otherwise, they get worse. There is no other alternative.

Wishing you success in your next reinvention... :)

Gathering places - part 1 of a series

It recently dawned on me that all of the really special communities I have enjoyed had an abundance of gathering places where people could mingle with like-minded others on a frequent basis and converse freely.

A neighborhood or a development without a real gathering place never develops a sense of community, even if it contains thousands of people. A community with many gathering places promotes the development of new business and social contacts on a constant basis. This will do amazing things for the economic health of the community.

There are certain key elements that make up a superlative gathering place:

The place is run by someone who is able to create an atmosphere that immediately makes you feel welcome and hires employees who can do the same.

You are able to talk with other people without having to shout to overcome the ambient noise level

A high percentage of the people frequenting the place know each other by sight or are willing to engage strangers in conversation.

Most important of all, the place must enable you to make new friends.

All kinds of places become gathering places when these conditions are met. I have been in coffee shops, garages, bars, and restaurants which performed the vital function of giving people a place to meet and to catch up with the latest local happenings.

I don't think these places just happen. I think they are the result when someone decides to create a sense of community and this is given a higher priority than simply making money.

I don't think there is any conflict between making money and creating a community, it's just that keeping the priorities straight insures that the gathering place will succeed and will prosper.

The underlying principle is quite simple: encouraging rational communication promotes understanding and increases the affinity of the group involved. As the group finds common interests through improved communication, the members develop business relationships and act upon them. If the gathering place delivers what is needed by the community, it will attract supporters who will add to the value of the place by encouraging interactions and by recruiting new members.

Gathering places have been doing this for as long as civilization has existed, but the vital importance of these places may only be known to architects and city planners. In this Internet age, there is no reason why everyone can't be involved in creating gathering places or supporting those who are doing it already.

In the next post in this series, I will discuss the salient features of two Floyd gathering places and their critical importance to this growing community of artists and business people.

Oddfellas Reopens

There was joy and celebration in Floyd this weekend when Oddfellas Cantina reopened after a month of renovations. Rob Neukirch had closed the restaurant during most of January to carry out much-needed renovations to the restaurant's storm-damaged kitchen.

On Friday night, Gretchen and I enjoyed a fantastic new Oddfellas crab cake recipe while Kristopher Hale, Professor of Music & Director of Guitar Studies at Emory & Henry College entertained us. The food and the guitar playing were superb.

On Saturday night, we were joined by Doug Thompson and we demolished some Delmonico steaks and a curried salmon dish that was absolutely delicious. The entertainment consisted of the multi-talented Billy Miller, on the left, backed up by Chris Luster, on the right. On several of the tunes, Billy accompanied himself using his Harmonium as a drone. The effect was startling, but quite pleasant.

Billy sings in a wide variety of styles ranging from folk to scat singing. He and Chris provided hours of enjoyable music that never seemed to dominate the room. The audience was intently scarfing up their food, but soundly applauded each piece performed.

John Winnike sat in for a while and played lead guitar while Billy played the flute. I had a great time taking pictures of the performers, but you need to see what Doug Thompson accomplished using only a cellphone camera.

Rob Neukirch is the driving force behind Oddfellas. A talented singer, actor, and all-around nice guy, he makes every customer feel special. Here he is checking on Doug Thompson, blogger and frequent customer. Rob is the clean-cut guy on the left.

Rob has created an outstanding menu which is constantly being updated. I find it hard to categorize the menu because there are southwestern dishes, Middle Eastern dishes, vegan dishes, and Southern favorites. I think I can sum it up by saying that there are dishes for every taste and the presentation and service are excellent.

Rob has Chris Luster booking live music performances four nights a week, so you get to hear the best regional talent, no matter when you go there. There is an abundant supply of professional talent in the Floyd area, so you are always in for a treat.

Go there! Eat well and enjoy yourself. Tell Rob I sent you. He is a good guy and deserves all of the business he can handle.

Reinventing yourself - part 2 of a series

What kind of reinvention will make sense for you?

Recognizing that you can change and being willing to change are the first steps to reinventing yourself. How to accomplish desirable changes in a way that is right for you will be the subject of this post.

Reinvention is not necessarily an "Extreme Makeover" drama as seen on TV, but the results can be spectacular. Even so, many successful long-term changes come from actions that others cannot easily see, except that you eventually appear to be happier and more successful.

Some people are inspired to reinvent themselves because they are failing in some area of their lives. They finally choose reinvention after everything else fails.

Others, like a young professional woman I admire greatly, are looking to reinvent themselves because they can see that their present course of action is leading to less enjoyment in life. This is often the case when someone strikes out on their own or with a startup and realizes that their dream occupation is becoming far less satisfying because of factors beyond their immediate control.

In the latter case, success may have led to intense competition, which is essentially commoditization, of what was once a unique offering. This commoditization may only lie in the mind of prospective clients, but it means that the client views your offering and the offerings of others as essentially interchangeable.

The usual response to this situation is to cut prices which leads to cutting costs and all of the special services that made your offering unique in the first place. The net result is that the creativity is sucked out of your job and it becomes a drudgery and a grim effort to survive.

In a company, this is when the bean counters rise to power. Those good, grey people can wring every penny out of operating costs and you as a creator find your attention is on cutting costs instead of taking risks and building a successful business. If you are a sole proprietor, you find yourself adopting a bean counter mentality and measuring success in terms of cash flow rather than job satisfaction.

UPDATE: For a real life example of the barriers to reinventing a company that is in trouble, read this poignant and disturbing post at BigPictureSmallOffice.com.

There is a large place in the world for companies and people who are good at producing cookie cutter products and services at the lowest prices. If this is not your choice of futures, you need to reinvent yourself. This can be very frustrating when your past success has created the competitive situation you are now having to deal with. You must either find a new frontier to conquer or must find a way to distinguish your offerings from all others, which is, of course, reinvention.

How do you go about it?

Whether you are reinventing yourself as a result of failure or because of success, the process is basically the same. You need to take a long, hard look at those things you are good at and choose a course of actions which will allow you to use those abilities to earn a living or gain the support you need from others.

You may have to redefine what "success" is because you may have been struggling to achieve a goal that is essentially self-destructive. If you have been measuring your success by the cars you drive and the suits you wear, you may have been ignoring the many acts of self-degradation you perform daily to keep wearing those suits and bearing your fancy job title.

Try looking at those activities which will increase your integrity and self-respect. Balance those against the need to support yourself and your family. Try choosing a course of action which produces valuable products or services that others need and want and work out how you can provide them.

This may not be a slam dunk process. You may have to invest some time and money getting the training you need to produce products or services that are economically viable. This training may consist of doing work or taking on a job at no pay to establish yourself as a competent provider capable of doing professional work. This is the current equivalent of doing an apprenticeship. It has been done successfully by many in fields where apprenticeships are not historically common.

Risks and rewards

Reinvention requires thinking outside the box, because staying in the "box" is the antithesis of creative effort. The box is a supposedly safe job, where you serve at the whim of others and survive by keeping your head down and your mouth shut.

When you reinvent yourself, you are breaking the rules you had unconsciously adopted to keep yourself in the game you had chosen. You are choosing to take responsibility for your future. This is a good thing, but it is also scary. You will probably find more people telling you to stay put than encouraging you to make changes.

If you are looking for agreement in life, you will find it very hard to make the decisions required to reinvent yourself successfully. The only advice I can offer you here is to choose your friends and advisors carefully. The ones that are comfortable with you changing are probably the ones that you can rely on to give you useful feedback. Even then, you are going to have to make decisions for yourself and take responsibility for the results.

If you can go at it in an unserious way, you have the best chance for success. If you can say, "What if I..." and carry that thought out into action, you will probably do well at reinventing yourself.

Just remember, whatever happens, the results are not permanent. If your new course of action leads eventually to a dead end or a less than satisfactory result, you need to pick yourself up and reinvent yourself again. You will find that reinvention becomes easier with practice. :)

Let me know if I have not addressed your particular situation. There is a lot more that can be said about this challenging activity. You might want to read part 1 of this series

SmartMove - was my experience an exception?

I had a highly satisfactory experience with SmartMove and I have written about it on this weblog several times, but I am receiving email that would indicate that other people are receiving totally different levels of customer service.

I have written to the people who were responsible for my great experience to ask them what is going on. My contacts were:

Rick Ontiveros, sales, <rontiveros@gosmartmove.com>,
Sherrie Arvin, customer support, <sarvin@gosmartmove.com>,
and Steve Fay, Marketing, <sfay@gosmartmove.com>.

The reason I am following this up is that the mixed messages from SmartMove are extremely damaging to their brand image and should be corrected at once. I hope to have a response in the next few days. The speed and content of the response I get will tell me a lot about the future prospects of SmartMove.

One of the biggest disappointments for me is watching a company destroy its initial competitive advantage by poor execution and indifferent customer service. Creating a viable business model is difficult enough. Watching a company destroy an excellent working model through poor management is painful.

I hope that the SmartMove team has the will and the ability to sort things out quickly before negative customer experiences stall their momentum. Credibility is a fragile thing. Once you lose it, prospective customers will seek out other suppliers.

The same is true of bloggers... :)

If I recommend some company or individual and my readers cannot get the same service, I want to know why and will publicize what is happening so others will know exactly what is going on.

Company cultures have a finite life cycle, unfortunately, so it is important to have the latest data on what a company IS DOING NOW in order to make valid buying decisions. Past reputation may be a poor guide to what you can expect from a company today.

If other reader have used SmartMove, I would be interested in hearing of your experiences and learning who your particular contacts were. Let's see if we can make sense of these differing results. Is it a company problem, or an individual problem?

Stay tuned for the next update on SmartMove.

Building/moving to a new home - day 127

Once more with feeling

You may have wondered if I'd forgotten how to blog. Such is not the case at all. I spent the last three days driving this 27 foot U-haul moving van and have not been able to post.

Here is the van in profile. It is every bit as big as it looks.

We made a decision last week to bring the rest of our belongings to Floyd so we wouldn't have to pay another month's rental on three storage units. A round-trip rental of a U-haul moving truck was actually cheaper than a one-way rental.

I picked up the moving van in Roanoke and managed to figure out the five-speed stick shift before I had gone too many blocks. After twenty miles of stoplights, I was up-shifting and down-shifting without having to think about it. The fact the my first leg would be driven empty made it much less stressful.

The hardest part to learn was to allow enough room when I made turns or drove into a filling station. I didn't hit anything, but I had a few near-misses until I got used to the width of the truck and the enormous turning radius.

Finding stations that sold diesel fuel for trucks was another adventure entirely. You can't just cruise into a station and check out the pumps when your truck is more than 30 feet long and requires 12 feet of overhead clearance.

Several times I saw Diesel signs but the pumps were set up for automobiles and small trucks only. I finally found my supply of Diesel fuel by looking for beat-up filling stations with large driveways and high canopies. Once I knew what to look for, I spotted these diesel stations on the outskirts of every industrial area I passed.

The loading and unloading of household goods went almost like clockwork. I had enlisted teams of helpers at each end of the run. It took three and a half hours to load the truck in Palmyra and three hours to unload the truck in Floyd.

Driving back with a full load of household goods revealed every quirk of the old van. It had 239,000 miles on it and the steering was not as tight as it once was. After a while I got so I could anticipate how it would handle various road conditions, so it wasn't as wearing as it might have been.

The entire drive was done under severe wind conditions. The warnings from the weather bureau were not exaggerated from the damage I saw in the pine forests I passed. In one stand of pines, about 5 percent of the pines had been snapped off about a dozen feet above the ground while an equal amount had been blown over. The crosswinds were strong enough to sway the van so I watched my speed carefully.

The trickiest part of the entire drive was negotiating the last few miles of country lanes. Winding roads that I normally flew over in the Dodge van required careful driving to avoid severe lurching in the moving van. The country lanes follow the terrain faithfully. Every bump, hollow and swerve are duplicated in asphalt. When you drive a large truck full of fragile equipment and furnishings, the road assumes a far more menacing aspect.

My unfinished driveway presented the most formidable challenge of all. Several trenches have been dug across the drive for power, water and electricity. Every one of the trenches has collapsed to some extent because they were dug and refilled when the ground was frozen. Every subsequent thaw causes the earth to subside. Driving over these sunken trenches was the final test and fortunately nothing fell over or was broken.

As I write this, all of our worldly goods have been moved to Floyd, everything has been stored away safely, and we are sitting in front of our fire surrounded by sleeping cats. We have weeks, perhaps months, of unpacking and finish work to do, but we have essentially completed this building/moving to a new home phase of our lives that began about four months ago.

Thanks to all who have followed this adventure and have offered their best wishes and support. I hope that this narrative has been useful to those planning a similar move. We have put in a lot of hours but the results have far exceeded our expectations. We have learned a lot during this experience and hope that your moves go as well. If you have questions I have not answered, feel free to send me an email and I will do my best to get you a useful answer.

Our future projects in our new home will appear in the category Country Living.

Reinventing yourself - part 1 of a series

Why reinvent yourself?

Personal reinvention is not for everyone. It is just one way of changing the game of life you are currently playing. If you feel you have reached the point in life where you have everything just the way you like it, this is definitely not for you. Your best course of action may be to continue what you are doing, with a few minor course corrections as conditions change.

Just don't be surprised when your carefully constructed lifestyle capsizes and you find yourself scrambling to put the pieces back together again. Life has a way of smacking us alongside the head when we aren't watching what is happening around us.

There is no rest point. There is only motion. Things get better when you do the necessary actions to make improvements. Things get worse when you leave them alone and hope for the best. Your body, your house, your occupation, all require constant attention or they will gradually break down and disintegrate.

Whether you are working or retired, you will gradually go downhill unless you are accomplishing something worthwhile. If you are not needed by somebody or lots of somebodies, there is less and less reason to live. This is probably the biggest reason for sudden death immediately after retirement.

Keep your options open. Consider what might happen if you could manage to reinvent yourself.

Signs you are overdue for reinvention

You find yourself complaining how unfair life is
You keep telling people the same stories again and again.
You haven't had a new idea in several months
You are frustrated by your job, spouse, yourself
There is no magic in your life. Everything is dull and boring.
Other people in your environment seem to be busy and productive and are enjoying themselves

Signs you understand reinvention and practice it effectively

You don't have time for complaints, either your own or from others
Your attention is on what you are doing, not what you have done in the past.
You tend to enjoy life and find it continually interesting.

Where do you start?

Locate that area of your life which is least optimum. That is the best place to concentrate your talents. Take a long, hard look at the things you have been trying to change. How many of them were efforts to change others?

You have almost no chance of success at making others wrong for what they are currently doing. You have to be extraordinarily skilled to get others to a point where they are willing to change their minds about things they consider important.

Your best approach to almost any hopelessly deadlocked situation is to figure out who you would have to be in order to solve the problem and then take steps to become that person.

Recognizing that you can change and being willing to change are the first steps to reinventing yourself. How to accomplish desirable changes in a way that is right for you will be the subject of a future post.

One observation: blogging may force people to reinvent themselves. When a person writes enough articles about a subject area, they begin to run out of new material. If they aren't open to reinventing themselves, the blog shuts down due to lack of interest.

How many of you find that you have had to reinvent yourself since you started blogging? How many feel you need reinvention, but don't know where to start?

Building/moving to a new home - day 123

Sunday reflections

It's Sunday morning and the fragrant smell of cooking bacon wafts through the house. I have finished the first phase of my regular morning chores and am hoping to get in a few words before breakfast.

I look out the expanse of back windows through the trees, across the meadows, to the mountains in the distance, and I am at peace.

All of the effort we have expended has been worth it. Gretchen and I have made many great changes in our lifestyle in the past 13 years and each change has brought us to new friends and new adventures.

Since adventure consists of overcoming challenges, we have also had a continuing series of new challenges to meet and overcome. We have many more on the road ahead, but we have a strong partnership which sustains us in moments of difficulty and we enjoy the tasks we have set for ourselves.

Not all tasks are fun. Some are pure drudgery but they must be done as required to keep the household functioning.

I know we have made the right choices when I catch Gretchen's eye as we handle our chores and I get an answering smile. We enjoy doing things together and sharing household tasks as well as project tasks. This gives us the ability to co-create in many areas without conflict.

As some of you may know, it is a lot more fun to work together creating something than doing it alone. Shared creation builds a strong bond and when a couple can share in this way, it adds a great deal to their life together.

One last point, when I said I was at peace I meant that life with all of its confusions and excitement is satisfying in the extreme. There is no rest point, no plateau, no "happy ever after" as far as we are concerned. There is only more opportunity to enjoy good friends and to create new business relationships. As long as we can make more right decisions than wrong decisions, we will be able to continue this adventure indefinitely.

I need to break for breakfast. Will continue later...

Four months and counting - how is it all going?

The house is a warm and comfortable oasis in the midst of continuing construction.

We now have a wide front porch with a fine, broad step that welcomes visitors.

Our new side porch provides a sturdy place to shuck off muddy boots before coming into the utility/mud room.

The pillars, beams and joists of our back deck stand strong against the wintry sky. The Windy Hollow Construction team have been erecting this fine deck against the odds of wind and severe weather. We, and our cats, should be able to walk out on this broad expanse and survey our wilderness domain by the end of next week.

Occasionally I have been able to help Bob and Kari in their construction work by holding a heavy beam in place while they secure it, but my contribution has been more in the area of planning and fetching of supplies.  They are so competent in their teamwork that I would only slow them down.

I have my hands full handling the many details that make up a properly functioning house. Putting up shelves and towel racks, installing computer networks, unpacking boxes, and figuring out how to keep the mud outside keeps me busy from dawn to dark. I need to work more efficiently, because my work load is actually beginning to pick up.

The Reverse Osmosis water purification system arrived Friday and I need to get that installed as soon as possible.
We have another medicine cabinet to install.
I am working on building replacement handles for the wood stove.
The office needs to be set up and a computer network put in place.

Most important of all, I am renting a truck this week to pick up the rest of my tools and bring them down here from Charlottesville so I can start work on client projects in my workshop. I have not had a functioning workshop since late October so this must be handled soon.

The Carnival of Homeschooling

Monday, January 16, 2006 marked the third week of the Carnival of Homeschooling. I think it is a good sign that homeschooling continues to gain strength.

The Carnival mission statement reads: Why homeschooling is usually a better option for children than public schools. We'll also explore homeschooling issues in general, educational thoughts, and some other random stuff.

I have been favorably impressed with the maturity and good sense of home schooled children. This is not something that every parent can manage, but those that can homeschool their children are giving them the best preparation for life I can imagine.

One of the biggest surprises for me was learning how homeschooled students cover material in far less time than students in school environments. A few hours of homeschooling each morning is the equivalent of a full day spent in a school system. Field trips are often a normal part of the weekly homeschooling schedule. Every shopping trip is a chance to teach valuable lessons in managing money and running a household. It is no wonder that homeschooled students excel when compared to regular students.

Even when parents cannot homeschool their children, every bit of education that parents can provide personally is valuable. My sister and I attended public schools, but our parents spent a lot of time teaching us how to relate to people as well as crafts and skills like woodworking, marksmanship, and photography. The lessons we learned from them are still fresh in my mind after all these years.

I have added the Homeschooling Carnival link to my blogroll.

Fall-away stove handles are frustrating and dangerous

A great idea that wasn't

I am sure that the design team at Vermont Castings which came up with the fall-away stove handle was soundly congratulated for coming up with a safer design that saved the company money.

Their "brilliant" design innovation was to remove those cumbersome and useful stove handles and replace them with useless stubs that could be operated only with a separate handle that has to be stored safely away between each  use.

Opening and closing hot stove doors is now a juggling trick involving a log of wood, a hot handle stub, and a separate handle which has to be stuck in a tiny hole between every movement of the stove doors. What used to be a simple three-step operation has now become a ten-step operation.

Traditional stove handles

With traditional wood or wire stove handles, you approach the stove with a log in your hands, crank the handle to open the door, put the wood in the stove, and crank the handle to shut the door. No big deal for those with opposable thumbs and a modicum of intelligence.

New, "improved" fall-away stove handles

With the fall-away handle, you have this interesting scenario:

Approach the stove with a log
put down the log
Find the fall-away handle where it has rolled under the stove
Open the stove door
Put the stove handle in the holder at the left side of the stove
Pick up the log and put it in the stove
Pick up the fall-away handle out of the holder at the left side of the stove
Close the stove door
Put the fall-away handle back in the holder at the left side of the stove
Realize that you need to adjust the damper or poke at the fire
Pick up the stove handle again
Operate the appropriate handle
Put the handle down
Pick up the poker and flail about in the fire
Pick up the handle from where you left it and close the stove door
Put the handle away in the little holder way off at the left of the stove.
Notice that the fall-away handle is chipped from when it fell on the tile hearth
Resist the urge to hurl the fall-away handle into the wastebasket.

This is what happens when a fall-away handle falls onto a tile hearth. Notice the big chip out of the top right side.

I asked my local stove dealer if I could get the old kind of handles as a replacement for these useless fall-away handles. He told me that all the stove manufacturers were switching to the new handles and that they were much better than the old ones. I looked around his showroom which has many operational wood stoves and saw that every one of them had the old, useful handles.

I told him he might feel differently about the new handles once he starts using them.

It does not seem as if anyone did much testing of these new handles under conditions of real use. I have sent an email to Vermont Castings mentioning this article since they do not provide any means to provide product feedback on their site. It will be interesting to see what their response will be.

Is there a solution?

My hope is that some enterprising shop will figure out a way to make coiled wire handles that can be attached to the handle stubs that jut out from this wood stove. Then this stove and others like it will be much easier and safer to use.

What happens now is that I often find myself grabbing the stub with a gloved hand and twisting it because the fall-away handle is inconveniently out of reach. When my glove is dirty, it leaves the smudges you see in the photo on the right.

I also find myself putting the fall-away handle down on the hearth tiles between actions because I am holding a heavy log in my other hand and poking a handle into a holder is awkward and inconvenient.

Buying extra fall-away handles and epoxying them in place is not a workable solution, as one researcher found out. The fall-away handles are ceramic and quickly get hot if they remain attached to the handle stubs which stick out of the door.

I am looking for a replacement for these fall-away stove handles. If you have any information on possible solutions, I will be glad to test them and publicize the results. If I cannot find them, I will design some myself.

UPDATE: I designed a set of do-it-yourself replacement handles that you can make yourself.

Read all about the do-it-yourself handles and the current state of the Dutchwest product here.