A Word About Wood!

With a project like this, WOOD is king! Obviously, we were trying to preserve the structural wood as mentioned. But we also wanted to ensure that we had other uses for wood from the site. We had the wood that was used as the second floor in the old barn, we had some stored up there that had been drying for 50 years. We had a "false floor" on the first story that I needed to have ripped up. We had taken down an old "stick barn" used in curing tobacco and even had to tear down a corn crib (used to store corn back in the 20s and 30s.

The second picture you see is the flooring used on the first floor. It was rather thick and varied in width. Hard as nails (which I'll talk about later.) The wood became somewhat of a story of its own. We had to get the lumber, build a building to house the lumber, find someone to get the lumber like we wanted it, then re-store the lumber, throw away damaged lumber (pesky termites) and then finally arrive at a finished floor somehow. And do all of this while maintaining some form of sanity.




All of this left us with a pile of lumber, all of which was old long leaf pine from the farm and quite rare nowadays. Consider this, most of the lumber was probably at least thirty to forty years of age when timbered. That means the lumber we were now using was at least 100 years old. This last pict is just one pile of what we had salvaged. As we went through the process we discovered there was a lot more than pine in that stack. There was poplar, cedar, maple and some walnut. 85% was pine, but within the stacks was enough to pull off some rather interesting projects.