About a year ago it dawned on me that I wanted to work with my hands. My first assignment was very simple: a litterbox, a bed and a rack to store your bike on. The material I used was OSB, which had been cut to the correct measurements. After this assignment others followed, along with a growing hunger for creation.
In September 2018 I started a course on Furniture Building at Encora in Berchem, Antwerp. By combining this course with a course on Business Management my ideas started to take shape and by November I was looking for a workspace. The search wasn’t easy at first, but a bit of luck guided me to FMT, a company that battles vacancy by renting vacant buildings out for very low prices. The introduced me to their newest project: The Stack in Antwerp.
This complex of sea containers (with acces to electricity and water) is occupied by a variety of businesses. Especially the location, easily accessible but not too close to residential areas, was a plus; Cor Quercis was born.
The first thing that caught my attention when I was starting up my workspace was the price for decent machines. If you want to work independently you need reliable machinery. My budget as young & starting entrepeneur isn’t very substantial, so I needed to find a solution for this problem. Luckily by then my network in Antwerp already had a lot of other furniture builders and workspaces in it, where I could go with my quest for machines on a budget.
A few phone calls and messages later everything started moving very fast. The closing of a workshop in the Southern part of Antwerp, the sale of some machines at a friends’ workspace in Borgerhout and the coincidental talk during a night out at Mechelseplein all have led to my current fleet of machines, which I all acquired on a very tight budget. This along with Tweedehands (a second-hand website in Belgium) where I bought most of my small equipment made Cor Quercis what it is today: a decent woodworking space.
But, machines are only a part of it. My website and logo were designed by my brother-in-law and his wife, the rest of my workspace was built by me and the pictures below were taken by a good friend.
So basically, what started as a small job for an aqcuaintance turned out into a fully operating workspace. This was impossible if it handn’t been for all the people who have helped and supported me, then and now. Thank you all! I can’t wait to see what the future will bring.
Photos by Erik Eggermont
