Welcome Back

Long Time Coming 

   It has been a while since we updated the blog. Sorry about that folks. We have been happily busy building more beams than ever in the wood shop. We have rented a big empty space next to us, so we are in the process of expanding while already enjoying the new space it provides.

   In the upcoming weeks we will be updating the blog with pics of our expanding shop, so hopefully y'all can give tips or get some inspiration for your own shops.

We are going to demolish that back room to get more space.

New guy Randy in the new shop.

Stacks of veneers and beams.

Loading Up

Loading Them Up

Sorry for the length of time in between blog posts. We have been hugely busy, with a lot of big orders, and with figuring out the logistics of crating and shipping big beams. Here are some pics of us loading up our order to Dallas last week. We crated up a bunch of gigantic beams, the longest was 25 feet long! 

25 foot beam in a 26 foot crate

Richard working the forklift

7 big crates, 3 of which had beams tucked into beams...10 beams total

Y'all have a good week.

Abandoned Places

link to imgur file we pulled some photos from

 


Here at The Olde Mill, we use old pine that we get from torn down factories that are at least 100 years old. This blog post is a bit of a tangent, but we wanted to look at some interesting abandoned places. They are full of history, make for great photos, and seem somehow haunted by a trace of human life.

old beams!

 

 

 

Urban Exploration

Have you heard of urban exploration? It's the exploration of old, usually abandoned, structures, often times involving somewhat illegally entering, and lots of photos. There's a whole subculture of it on the internet. Even Baton Rouge has a blog based on urban exploration, Abandoned Baton Rouge.

  

Lee High  

  

   

          

from Richard Alois

Do It Yourself

 Do It Yourself

    Our ceiling beams will save you money, and are just about the easiest way to get real antique wood beams into your house. Our ceiling beams walk many fine lines. Our beams are a product about balance. They are artificial beams, hollow and lightweight, but we make them out of real antique wood. They are technically aesthetic pieces, but they have all the character of a used, antique piece of wood.

you can see the runner boards, pre-install , right above the TV

Save Time, Effort, and Money    

     We want to talk about how our ceiling beams fit into DIY (do it yourself) culture. We are big fans of DIY: if we think we can fix our car, we'll pop the hood before we take it to the mechanic; we'll build a table before we buy one; we'll paint the rooms in our houses and apartments on the weekend.

     Our hollow box beams allow homeowners to install their own rustic beams, with help from just a friend or two. When you find yourself thinking about remodeling, there are few things that make as much of a statement as ceiling beams spanning the length of your kitchen, living room or bedroom. Ceilings beams are a bold and beautiful addition to any room. And our hollow ceiling beams are about the easiest way to get that look.

     When you are remodeling your home, it can be intimidating to think about ceiling beams. You will have to add structural support, you have to hire a team of builders, or rent a forklift or even a crane. You, or your builder, will have to cut through the drywall in your walls and build framing to support the beams. You are skipping days of work by using our hollow beams, which can be installed in a fraction of the time. We love building beams for new houses too, but the area where they really shine is adding them to an existing structure, a structure that doesn't need the support, but could benefit from the beauty of wooden beams. Our beams can be installed with 2 or 3 people, and all you need is a few runner boards to attach the beam to your ceiling. They are almost as easy as foam or rubber faux beams, but have all the life and character of real wood.

     Of course,  if you have your builder or remodeler install our beams in your home, they, and you, will save on days of labor being cut out.

     Another benefit of our beams is, since the insides of them are made out of plywood - an engineered product - they will bend and warp far less than a solid ceiling beam.

installed beams

Shipping Beams

Shipping Beams

We got our first cross-country order in. We made two beams and are getting ready to ship them now. Here are a few pics of the crate we built to ship the beams in:

we put the small beam in the big beam

I had a dream about a beam within a beam

loading her up

So we are ready to ship! An unexpected benefit we found when planning to ship our beams is that since they are hollow, we can save a lot of space by putting small beams into big beams and then putting the big beam in the crate.

   

Butcher Block Counter Top

Have you considered using a butcher block counter top in your kitchen design? Whether you use it for an island top (like we have in our pics of The Olde Mill's Butcher Block Counter Top below) or cut a hole in it to fit your sink...

 ...a butcher block counter can be a beautiful (and surprisingly affordable) option. 

This an interesting article on 5 common myths about butcher block counter tops. Basically, it explains that despite some peoples' reservations about the counter tops, they are really no harder or expensive to buy or maintain. And wood is a very healthy option for a food preparation surface.

Our Showroom BB Counter Top

We made a butcher block counter top for our showroom, so we can show clients what it looks like in person. This one is huge at 4 and 1/2 feet by 8 feet! We are going to use Emmet's Good Stuff to seal it.

The Olde Mill Butcher Block Counter Top

The Olde Mill Butcher Block Counter Top

The Olde Mill Butcher Block Counter Top

 And, our counter tops are very competitively priced! Check em out at our website. Y'all have a good end-of-the-week.

Getting All the Nails Out

Denailing is the first step in making our ceiling beams. When we get our stock lumber (150 year old antique pine), it is covered in paint and splinters, and full of super old nails. One time, we found an antiquated cog in the middle of a beam (not sure how that got in there, even). Anyone who works with reclaimed wood has had to pull nails out of their old wood.

stock lumber

cog we found in lumber

Obviously, we don't want the blade on our sawmill to hit a rusty piece of metal, so before we do anything to our stock lumber, we have to run a metal detector over it and extract any nails, screws, or large lumps of strange metal.

metal detector

 Sometimes, it is pretty easy to lever a nail out of the wood with a crowbar or hammer.

crowbar

HL2 anyone?

But, other times you have to use a tool specifically intended for nail extraction:

nail tool

You put the two teeth on either side of the nail and then drive them into the wood until the teeth are dug in around the nail. Then, with your hand on the end of the handle for maximum leverage, you lever that nail out.

get a good bite on it

this can be a pain

When the denailer still can't dig in enough, you may have to chisel around the nail until you can get a bite.

And when we are all out of nails to pull, the real work can begin: cutting the log on the sawmill, which we will follow in an upcoming blog post.

Clamps, Time, and Pressure

Like a Fine Wine

Time plus pressure is part of the equation for the creation of most things: put carbon under pressure for long enough and you get a diamond; squeeze grapes and let the juice ferment and you make wine; apply glue to wood and apply pressure with clamps and let it dry overnight and the glue will adhere stronger than the wood itself.

diamond in the rough

stomping grapes

Clamping
Pretty much everything we do at The Olde Mill is done by hand. We miter the sides of our hollow ceiling beams into interlocking male and female joints, apply glue, and clamp them together.

beam clamped up

the abyss gazes back

Make Haste Slowly
Like most things worth doing (woodwork, making wine, waiting for diamonds to form), our beams take time (and pressure, and possibly some heat). Thinking about it takes me back to high school Latin, and the phrase "festina lente", or "make haste slowly". Not a bad motto to reflect on during your day; it makes me think about the steady, but not rushed, approach it takes to work in a wood shop. If you rush things, you will make critical mistakes that add up to a poor creation; you take too long and you'll produce so slowly that you won't make a profit. I've been guilty of both: like most things it takes a tenuous balancing act.

Y'all have a good week. Make haste slowly.

Tree Ring Science

What do the trees tell you?

There is a secret history of the Earth, hidden inside of trees. Did you know that tree rings are as accurate as a calendar? That tree rings are better than a calender at tracing the weather patterns and climate changes of the past, based on how they affected the tree rings growth? We knew, in the back of our heads, that tree rings represented the age of tress, but that was about as far as our knowledge went, so we turned to Google.

How do scientists use tree rings to create accurate maps of history? Dendrochronology . We think it is fascinating to think about the fact that you can accurately date a tree based on the number of rings inside of it. You can tell how high or low a nearby river was year to year based on the rings characteristics. If there was a specific climatological event one year (say a drought, a flood, a fire), every tree that got through it will have a ring that shows that event.

Where are the 80's?

What is it good for?

Tree rings can be used to reliably date pieces of art from antiquity. Lots of old paintings were either painted on wood or at least the canvas was attached to a wooden frame. If either of those are the case, then dendrochronologists can x-ray the wood and study it to determine its age (this can also determine whether or not an art piece is a fake or not; if it dates to too early or late, then it may be an imposter).

Stradivarius violins are the most treasured violins in the world:

Stradivarius

Antonio Stradivari, an Italian instrument maker, was born in 1644 and died in 1737. His violins are famous as being THE violin to play, and so, countless imitations have been made by instrument makers wanting to capitalize on the Stradivarius name, some going as far as marking the imitation violins as Stradivarius. Dendochronology is one of the best ways to determine the authenticity of a Stradivarius. The tree rings can date and place the location of the wood used to make the violin.
  

The implications

Realizing that an exact year is so accurately measured by a tree growing in nature seems crazy at first, considering how chaotic we tend to think nature is (storms, drought, random dispersal of plants and animals), but if you really think about it, we get our idea and measurement of a year based on patterns we observe in nature: the planets travel around the sun, night and day, the growing and harvesting of plants, the change of the seasons, etc. So our concept of time (years, calenders, etc.) is literally a map of the change and passing of objects in space, and of the life cycle of birth, growth, and death. Like tree rings. The universe spins like a clock, life is born and dies as it should, dendrochronologists count the rings in trees. 

this is actually a guy's kickstarter project

 

The New Olde Mill

The Olde Mill

Nobody makes custom hollow ceiling beams and fireplace mantels like we do at The Olde Mill, a new wood shop working out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Olde Mill offers hollow, lightweight alternatives to solid wooden ceiling beams and fireplace mantels, created with a custom technique unreplicated anywhere else.

the mantel stained

the mantel raw

Our fireplace mantel is lightweight (one person can lift one up alone, and install one by themselves in five minutes), but ease of installation isn't the only benefit. Our whole crafting process is done by hand with a meticulous attention to detail. Most hollow beams and mantels are made with two mistakes:

1) they leave an unsightly seem where the sides meet, and

2) they don't use real end caps to make the two end sides.

Most hollow beams just use the same grain as the long sides, and so you end up with a product that looks fake. Our beam sides are miter locked together in order to craft seamless edges, and our end caps are cut right off of the same logs we cut the sides of your beam or mantel from.  As far as we know, nobody in the country makes and sells hollow mantels with real end grain end caps or hollow ceiling beams made out of real antique wood with no seems.

And because our beams and mantels are lightweight, they are ideal for retrofitting. If you want to add ceiling beams to any room in your house, you can do so without having to do major reconstruction to support the weight of solid beams.

our beams and mantel in action

These pictures are from one of our first completed orders; they recently finished their new renovation, which turned out great. We are going to go to their house for more photos soon.

2014 Habitat Home Expo Show

We at Ourso Designs and The Olde Mill were excited to participate in 2014's Habitat Home and Garden Show in Baton Rouge last weekend.

We were honored to win Habitat Home and Gardens 2014's Best in Show for Double Booth. We made a booth to showcase our two companies, Ourso Designs (kitchen and bath design), and The Olde Mill (wood shop producing custom hollow ceiling beams, tables, mantels, and more from antique wood). Our booth was actually made from our hollow box beams, and showcased our design and wood products.

practicing setting up the booth in the shop

the booth in action

Habitat Home Expo award

Thanks to everyone who worked to make the event a success, and thanks to everyone who came and saw us. See y'all there in 2015.

Trusses (trust us)

Like the inner working of quantum physics or high-level strategy in basketball, I think I was aware of trusses without ever really actively thinking about them; I built a set of trusses as my second job at The Olde Mill, thinking that they would just be ceiling beams.

Our first set of trusses, after installation

                  

Like all of our beams, our truss system is actually hollow, which is great for installation (you save a ton of labor costs, and don’t have to rent forklifts, like you would with a solid beam), but our trusses and beams are not for structural support.

    

While building these trusses, Richard would use words (ridge beam, king post, corbel, etc.) that I was unfamiliar with, so it seemed like some research was in order.

Trusses, in ceilings, bridges, and radio towers, are used due to their ability to bear heavy loads, and for their aesthetic appeal.

A bunch of different truss set-ups. All easily realized with our hollow box beams.

   

King Truss

The king truss is probably the most basic and simple part of the truss. It is the middle piece of the truss, which supports the top and also serves as the resting point for the struts (the diagonal beams that finish the triangle - a very strong load-bearing shape in design). The tie beam is the long beam going across the bottom, with the principal rafter running parallel with the ceiling.

King posts and struts.

                                                    

Our first truss system was a classic King post setup:

Queen post

If you take away the single king post, and replace it with two symmetrical posts, you get a Queen Post truss.

Instead of one central post, we have two, one set to each side.

       

These are just a couple of the simplest truss styles. If you aren’t relying on the trusses for the actual support for your ceiling, you could make just about any design/configuration with our hollow box beams and trusses. You could get very complicated, or you could make your own design. But like perfect Fibonacci spirals in conch shells or the Golden Ratio in human faces, I think a good truss design will keep some of the honesty of practical geometry, even though it might not be strictly required in a non-supportive truss system. 

If you are thinking of installing ceiling beams, think about trusses too. Especially with high, vaulted ceilings, a truss system can bring an architectural element to your space, and bring a warm, natural feel to a modern space. Our hollow lightweight box beams made of 150 year old antique pine make designing and implementing your trusses super easy. Check us out at The Olde Mill.