FARM GARAGE SALES YIELD USEABLE TIN AND WOOD

I belonged to LISTS once, they'd come automatically as a group discussed farming, soap making,keeping goats, things I kenned for. Today the  listers were talking about retrieving old wood from nearby farms. One lister said that he'd had a cabinet maker build furniture out of the rustic, aged wood, it was that good. He'd taken down a hundred feet of pine and a hundred feet of oak.Really weathered stuff.

I know about this first hand. My redwood fence was 50 years old. My landlord built it. Whenneighbors demanded we tear it down, I put it on risers outdoors, tarped it. CHRISTO appeared, a Honduran worker, and after he finished the garden work, I asked him to build bookshelves. He'd built his whole house in HONDURAS. I got the most gorgeous shelf. The redwood has a grain like the surface of a creek, rippling. He sanded it, brushed it, stained it maple orange and then varnished it. It is stunning.

A list subscriber told us that his cabinet maker built a welsh dresser and  tables out of the oak floorboards. "We used what we could of the exterior pine panelling to make firewood/kindling but pine doesn't last very well. We reused the cedar rafters as fence posts. The main support beams were either fire wood or became the supports of the run in sheds, depending on their quality.

The old tin from the roof reroofed (with some caulking) the run in sheds and the chicken coop. The oak that did not become my furniture was taken by the Antique Tables people. They didn't pay me for the oak, as Iagreed to trade what was left for some of his labor. (In a store the welsh dresser would probably have cost me $2-3K) I didn't pay them for tearing down the barn into re-usable pieces and stacking it up neatly. There was some disappointment on their side that the support beams were pretty much unusable for their purposes. They left the job half way through because it became evident the tearing down process wasn't going to come out even with the cost of material (usable by them). I traded a neighbour with a  caterpillar some round bales of hay for the demolition, fire and burial of the ground floor, which took him two half days. I feel like I got a great deal.

If you can surf for barns, do it in Northern California. They're all made of redwood and this wood lasts.My landlord circled the 1/4 acre house that I rent with redwood planks. Neighbor wanted to put up cyclone fencing, I personally carried the fencing to several risers, lay it out, asked my worker Cristo to build shelves. He accentuated the grain, like the thready surface of a brook, staining it maple, then varnishing it. Gorgeous.