The long-time buddies spent years working together in the home-construction business, but, boy, have they ever branched out.
You might say they've gone their separate ways in order to run their own companies. Goldfarb has a suburban office for his current niche of home repairs and improvement: The Handyman Service Inc., www.thehandyman-service.com.
"The small stuff kept coming up on the big jobs," says Goldfarb. "We were installing kitchens and bathrooms. Homeowners kept asking, "Could you do this and that, too?"
Levy's company is called Custom Anything, www.custom-anything.cc. "I also do all of Jay's laminate and custom woodwork," he says.
And speaking of custom woodwork, they still love to cooperate on special projects.
Their built-from-scratch gypsy caravan, for one, required Goldfarb's Internet-sleuthing to find examples of the European equivalent of an RV for nomadic peoples. You can still see these colorful, horse-drawn wagons parked a distance from the road as temporary gypsy encampments in rural England. The last sighting for this reporter included a half-dozen caravans drawn into a semi-circle by a pond in Sussex or Devon. Horses were tethered nearby; kids moved around in frenetic clumps. A cooking fire burned. It was as if the scene sprang from previous centuries.
Beloved British author, the late veterinarian James Herriot, described similar gypsy scenes from the 1930s, including a charming tale about gypsy children taking good care of their pony and getting it well.
The lifestyle associated with gypsy caravans might have been spartan, but some wagon exteriors were highly decorated. Levy says there are several overall caravan shapes, including ones so curved they're nearly cylindrical and some with bow tops, as he and Goldfarb chose to build with tongue-and-groove poplar lining the sub-roof, a curved interior ceiling with cupola-like skylight. Beadboard pine paneling was used on the wagon's walls. Built-in cabinetry is solid mahogany, and Goldfarb found a diamond-paned window at an antique shop for the rear of the wagon. They converted the casement window to form two horizontal frames that tip outward.
Inside and out, there are at least 400 wooden appliques, each hand-painted in bright colors--red, green, blue, gold--by Goldfarb and his wife, Shelly.
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