Working with salvaged raw materials, like antique heart of pine or antique oak, make life difficult for the cabinet makers and woodcrafters. The wood is so old and so it has a life and mind of its own, making timelines very tough to navigate. You never know quite what you’ll find imbedded in the wood or how the wood will behave.
In fact, we have found Civil War era bullets embedded in wood with growth rings showing that the tree lived another 30 years before being cut down to be milled into framing joists. We’ve also found other metal bits from fences and chains, evidence of people using trees and the trees adapting by growing around the metal items.
And these metal bits hidden in the wood shred expensive saw blades. So before the old salvaged wood can be cut into dimensional lumber, metal detectors are used on the wood to try to find these hidden blade destroyers and extract them. But like the cabinetmaking itself, that’s also an imperfect science and blades are still wrecked from hidden metal.
But we’ve made cabinets before from 100 year old white oak beams and while the material was just exquisite: honey hued and tiger-grained with dark stained rust spots, it was also hard and brittle and a beast to mill. Because of the hardness, it was prone to splitting and breaking and getting it to the size for door panels was nearly impossible. It took forever to get that wood workable. But we got there eventually and it was just a beautiful kitchen.
Currently, we are doing a job with reclaimed heart of pine. We are milling old porch columns down into thin slices to use as veneer on the walls for wainscoting.
And the wood is rich and red and the grain is lovely. But the wood breaks easily, had a surprisingly high moisture content and the cabinetmakers gave up milling it on their shop saws and took it to a huge sawmill in an open field to be milled.
All of this was unexpected and took time: time that was all but impossible to gauge from the outset. But as this stunning period bathroom takes shape, it will have been worth the wait to use all of the reclaimed timber. And the client has that good feeling knowing that their bathroom wainscoting didn’t fell any new trees.
