Building with the Barn Boards

We named our last coffee roast for some of the inspiring material that surrounds us here on the someday-farm on Sundown.  Piled in the old barn, behind some of the more modern construction scraps from the big remodel of Anita’s place, there was a small library of weathered grey boards.  We don’t know what all they might have been used for over the course of their life, but they’ve seen some time outside.  Though some may have been from an old fence, we refer to them all as ‘barn boards.’ We used several of them in construction of some of our basic shelves and furniture as we started settling into the house.  With just a quick cleanup from a stiff wire brush, they were pretty good—soft grey, distinguished with age, they made good legs for smoother shelves, butcher blocks, and more, as we started to build a surprisingly matching set of custom furniture for our little place. 

Mabel poses on the reclaimed-wood bookshelf. 

But as with many things, as we gained some more skills, we started to take the woodworking up a notch or two.  Over the holidays, Noah invested in a planer, partly to be able to take advantage of free rough-cut wood that we can pick up from a friend’s small lumber mill in town (also our source of sawdust, but that’s a whole other story).  The planer also allowed us to take down the rough outsides of these barn boards.  The main target was for making a tabletop out of those salvaged barn-boards.  I’d never planed boards before, but it turns out to be a somewhat magical process, peeling away the rough outer layers, even of scruffy, hard-used boards, to expose a smooth, often surprisingly bright surface underneath. 

In this sneak peak at the kitchen table, which we just finished this past week and are completely in love with, you can see the what was lying below that weathered barn-board surface (and a piece of un—planed board, for contrast). 

It’s beautiful (even better with the beeswax finish I'll talk about soon)....beautiful enough that we are actually starting to look around at our coffee table, butcher block, and shelves, and seriously consider taking them apart to plane down their barn-board legs to expose some of those bright colors and grains.