Found Wood – Story #1

We are lucky to be connected to many cottages through our family and friends. Our luck continues when they hear about our woodworking adventure and they let us salvage wood from their properties to turn into good wood pieces for the home and yard. We do not cut down trees for our projects but rather collect pieces that fell or were felled for other reasons. This is one of those stories.

Some of our relatives have a cottage on leased land. The land owner determined several mature poplar (aka cottonwood) trees needed to be cut down. When the land owner cuts down trees on the cottage lots around this lake: the cottagers are not notified; they have no say in the decision; and then are responsible for most of the wood removal and disposal.

We helped with clean up. The long drag marks across the property suggested most of the branches were taken and probably chipped. They did leave several sticking out of the ground - one we had to pull out with our truck. The tree trunks, however, were cut into chunks and left scattered around. Each piece measured over one foot long (over 30cm), up to 3 feet across (80cm) and many weighed well over 50 pounds (23kg)!

Some of the smaller ones we made into campfire chairs. Some of the bigger ones we took to a mill to get sliced and those disks are drying. The natural spaces in the middle are just waiting for epoxy resin pours to become beautiful table tops. We’ll do one as a sample and post it on the website. These pieces will be made to order because of the large amount of time and material used to create them.