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

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.

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