CityView Magazine

36 November 2022 Kurt Ballash works on some new projects in the 2,800-square-foot building that houses his woodworking shop. He loves to work with wood because of its natural quality. "It's real," he says. Ballash especially relishes working with cherry wood. "e smell of it, the way it works, the way it feels. Everything about cherry is a pleasure to work with." Ballash, a stocky man who stands about 5-foot-5, says he "bootstrapped" his business. "I literally built it with only the resources and materials that I inherited from my grandfather," he adds. "e reason why I started playing around with wood again aer I got out of the service was because we had the tools in my garage from my grandfather and some pallets that my wife spontaneously wanted me to make a table out of. "If I had not inherited those tools, I don't know that I would have fallen back into woodworking like I have. I might not have returned to the creative side of lumber." e terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, inspired him to action. In 2003, Ballash joined the Army and started out as a combat engineer. A year later, he was training military dogs to detect explosive threats with the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. He later became a combat medic. "I was taking people off the battlefield," he says. During his military career, Ballash served seven deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Qatar. Putting struggles behind On a hot, humid day in late July, Ballash was working on some new projects with Connor Gaede, 28, in the 2,800-square-foot building that houses his woodworking shop. A skylight provides natural lighting amid stacks of lumber and woodworking projects underway. e building is not far from a "When Jamie passed," Ballash says, "it was a painful experience. But the community of people that have rallied behind me, despite that loss, was transformative on a number of levels for our business. I believe 100% that Jamie is up there with God and interceding on our behalf, dropping little hints into the right person's ear. Whenever we're shy or whenever we're feeling stressed, whenever we're kind of on the verge, we always make it.

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