[joshua32064]

As some of you may or may not know, I am the Director of Operations for a manufacturing company that produces wood veneer furniture for many different brand name furniture companies that you would be very familiar with. Because of confidentiality agreements, I can't get into who we produce for.

Nonetheless, as you may or may not have seen from another post, I just placed a deposit on my 25' International CCD. I can tell you that I am very excited about receiving the unit and using it often.

As much as I am excited about this unit, I have to admit that I am not a huge fan of laminate surfaces. I started to think about what could be done to the unit to differentiate it from the others and also give it a warmer look and feel without increasing the weight. I know that the word warm and CCD don't exactly fit in the same sentence, but if anyone has ever been to a "W Hotel" or the "Clift Hotel" in San Francisco, you know that there is a happy medium.

Being that our production facilities are in China and I have been over here for the last 7 weeks, I needed to find a little project for myself. I ended up thinking that maybe the best solution to adding some warmth to my unit was to mix the existing laminate with some rich looking wood veneer. The question was where should I put it? I knew that it might be hassle to start taking cabinetry down, etc., but I knew that it would be very easy to swap out the laminate dinette. To me, the dinette represents two radiused seats and a table top.

Today, we started working on a prototype of a new dinette seat that will look identical to the one in the International CCD. The difference is that the one we make will have a dark cherry wood veneer finish on it. I think that it could look very sharp and give the trailer a very rich look. If dark cherry isn't the way to go, there are thousands of other wood veneers and finishes to try. From my calculations, the entire set will weigh only 2% to 4% more than Airstreams. This is not that much and only equates to a few pounds. As the project develops, I will post some pictures on the web site if anyone is interested in seeing them.

The one thing that I wanted to ask you about, was how you felt about laminate vs. veneer. I know that laminate is easier to maintain, but there are plenty of trailers out there with Oak, Hickory, etc. As one who is not a HUGE fan on those types of woods, I was wondering what you thought about using woods within a trailer? To take it a step further, if someone really put there time into it, they could come up with an entire line that allowed a consumer to replace old laminate dinettes, counters, cabinets, etc., with identical pieces except in a wooden veneer with a wood and stain that they got to chose? I guess you could call it a refacing project?

I will be interested to hear your opinions.