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.