Furniture and Wooden Sculptural Pieces/ Our Fine Woodworking Shop

Our woodworking shop is made out of wood from our own forest’s first ecological harvest. It is a demonstration of building construction techniques using boards in place of plywood. In pre-modern house construction a technique was used in floors, which layed “shiplapped” boards diagonally on 2x4 timbers, spaced as they are for plywood in today’s floors. Shiplapping translates to mean boards with a dimensional strip removed along both sides on alternating edges. The groove left after the strip is removed, is called a rabbit. It fits into those of adjacent boards, making the boards overlap. The floor surface then can be a flat plane while the board edges overlap. We made our shop using shiplapping, both inside and out.

So our system for making furniture and art is Jerel sits down with the person, who the piece is for (or communicates via phone, modem and picture scanner), and discusses styles and things they like, and what they need to meet their particular needs. A picture is drawn up and construction plans developed on the drafting table. From there it is into the shop, where outdoor dried lumber, made on our mill, is selected and brought inside for final drying. The outdoor drying done in drying sheds, has been dried at least a year, which is what is needed to dry an inch thick board. The wood-heated shop dries the lumber to the dryness needed to sustain size, in it’s future heated home. While it is drying indoors, it is put through the planer, which machines the rough splintery boards to a smooth surface. Then it goes through the jointer making the board edges perfectly straight.

Once cut into the dimensions for the end-product on the table saw, the wood goes through a sander for finer sanding. From there, it is sanded to perfection by hand. After being made into a project it is hand rubbed with a natural finish, either linseed or tung; oils that are derived from flax seeds, and the nuts of the tung tree. A chemically based finish, Polyurethane, is used for surfaces needing more scratch and water resistance, such as table tops.

It usually takes around 2 to 3 weeks for a large project like a china hutch. And then it can be shipped using a reputable house mover, at their prices, or customers may come and pick up their furniture, when it is done, at no additional handling or shipping cost.