The Joy of Moldings Shop

The interwebs has a saying, “A blog is not a business.” And until the start of 2019, The Joy of Moldings has been little more than a hobby site, a rough draft that’s not quite ready for prime time. At least in my mind.

In late 2018 however, a major change came to the software I use to publish The Joy of Moldings. This new software has finally given me the power to create the site I’ve always dreamed of but lacked the technical knowhow to create.

But what I also lacked was a coherent business plan.

For a while I put Google ads on many of the pages, and for a short while that helped pay for website hosting fees and various annual registrations, but I never liked them. They were eye sores. They made me feel like a smarmy ad man. So whatever method I came up with to turn TJOM into my full time job could not be the usual assortment of ads plastered everywhere or advertorials that are little more than ads disguised as articles or affiliate links to products you can buy at a thousand other places online.

I’m a craftsman. I want to make things. Beautiful, things. Things that make you love your home.

So that’s what I’ve spent the last three years doing, learning how to make ornate architectural details from that timeless and wonderful material, plaster.

I’ve also been building work stations for each stage of the process: a wood shop for building the master models and silicone molds; a plaster station for measuring, mixing, pouring and pointing the casts; a cast drying room and finally a shipping station, all squeezed into my minimalist workspace.

It’s been a slow, methodical process making all of this, especially with a day job that keeps me in a state of perpetual jet lag. But I’m putting the finishing touches on the whole shebang now and hope to have the first corner block designs ready by spring.

Breaking Stuff

On New Years day I felt brave enough to update the software that runs TJOM. I held my breath and, much to my relief, the site did not up and die.

However, I’ve never installed new software that did not break a gaggle of other things, and fortunately for me, the things that broke on TJOM when I updated to the new version of WordPress were text formatting issues. That’s why on old posts you’ll see random things like links that are the wrong color or paragraph titles that are too small. They are annoying but harmless, and there are too many of them to fix, so we’ll just have to live with them.

Soothe and Simplify

I want you to have a calm, distraction-free reading experience while you’re digging through the design tips and tutorials.

To that end, the first changes I’m making are to declutter the site by removing the sidebar and simplify the site navigation. I’m also creating more white space to pad the posts and pages, again, because it’s a calmer environment for you to focus and absorb the material you’re reading.

The TJOM Pattern Book

Once I’m comfortable building posts and pages with this new, powerful software, I’ll slowly start transforming the Pattern Book–the core of this site–into the thing I’ve always dreamed it could be–a practical and useful molding pattern resource. But that’s going to take a lot of work and will have to wait until after I have the shop up and running.

I hope you like the changes and the direction The Joy of Moldings is going. As always, my goal is to help you decorate your home with moldings in such a way that you’d rather be at home than anywhere else!

Cheers,

Ken

P.S. If you’re interested, I’ve re-written my About page and included some new information about how TJOM came to be, information that I’ve never written about before.