(Mom's old boots)
Time has certainly been happening for a while since I last published.
As you might expect, material has been piling up, like scrap wood.
What follows is a year in a life, a good year gone by.
This dresser was decrepit, musty, and delaminating. Hours went into rehabbing its function before I could get down to aesthetics. A good helper helped me to an imaginative transformation when we began to peel off the layers. And of course the finished product needed some pink.
Then there was a real job: good while it lasted, a fair share of suffering, plenty of laughter and in the end it ended. I found myself working in very beautiful places. Wonderful old scraps were commonly found and in them I rejoiced.
As always, I found time to explore my relationship with fire . . .
Beauty abounds.
At some point I handled much more T111 siding board than ever intended.
I certainly didn't care enough for my health and safety, but here I am still alive.
At times, this work afforded me places of space and of peace.
With the family, I visited a workshop of some boatwrights.
In Hickory, I trapped four racoons in three days. First came ginormous Purina-fed Rocky and then his perhaps-mate Ramona. Then there was Beezus, Ramona's perhaps-little-sister, pictured below. Yet another, even smaller raccoon was next and I took perhaps-Rocky&Ramona's-lovechild very far away.
After this Rocky and Ramona returned and we had a serious talk in which Rocky was told they should never come back. And they never did.
With Justin and Charlie I helped repair roof, soffit, fascia, and rafter tails on a much-loved old family getaway on Lake Norman. We also cleared much brush and fashioned a new cover for the pump house.
Charlie is the dog.
Justin visited me in Asheville when I learned that
Sierra Nevada Brewing Company is giving away very good crate lumber. As massive equipment and machinery are unpacked at their new east coast flagship in
Mills River, high-grade mostly-German crates are free for the taking. Don, the Site Manager, gave me a little tour and a run-down of the incredible efforts they are making to reduce the impact on the environment.
(a very small sample of what is available)
(note the size of the nails)
Pictured above is one of the helpers who moved my share of the booty upstairs.
I took on a week of work on my Mom's land, a general farm-and-garden variety: replaced a barn-post, cleaned and repaired metal roof and gutters, built raised beds, mixed trenches for asparagus, hauled well over two tons of fieldstone down a steep mountain pasture with a wheelbarrow, and hung a new swing.
I even managed to make it all fun!
Now it may seem impossible, but my next caged animal is even cuter than the last:
Clover the Bunny now has a new home, built almost entirely from Sierra Nevada pallet boards.
This one will definitely be getting a dedicated post before long.
And finally, awhile back I was inspired by this hardwood floor in a little furniture shop, old and honest.
And now I know to what end.
More to come as it progresses . . .
] j [
ps -I believe the "tea-biscuits" in the last image are aged Southern Red Cedar. I'm slicing them from a rough sawn timber cutoff I found in a closet tear out. I'm not an expert on ID-ing hardwoods so if anyone has a better idea, let's hear it. But let's not belabor the identification, or we might end up like
this guy.
