Posts from the “vintage” Category

Rescue!

Posted on 13 February 2014

Unless something goes terribly wrong,* carpentry is not usually not about adrenaline rush. Firefighters burst into burning buildings to save puppies, while we shave another few thousands off a piece of crown miolding to make a perfectly coped joint. Slow and steady tends to suit my constitution, but a bit of urgency now and then can be nice, too. So I was excited to get the call from Lex, a repeat client of ours: “There’s an oak library in a house in JP, and they’re about to gut the building. We can have it if we can pull it out tomorrow; otherwise, it’s landfill-bound.” We jumped into action, though our shop is not equipped with any slidey fire-poles. The house was substantial…

Categories: History, Seen, victorian, vintage

Tagged: Jamaica Plain, library, oak, salvage, victorian

Luc on beam

Posted on 17 January 2014

We were at Longleaf Lumber in Cambridge this afternoon picking up some engineered cork flooring for a project. Longleaf’s primary business is finding, milling, and selling old-growth wood of the sort that can no longer be harvested in the wild (though they also sell new cork and bamboo flooring). They typically find material in old barns or mill buildings that are being torn down, but they are open to any and all sources of old, interesting wood. I’ve seen live oak timbers in their yard salvaged from the maintenance facility of the Constitution. Most of the old wood they salvage gets milled into flooring, like the pumpkin pine we used a recent project. But one of the great joys of visiting their yard is seeing the weird, random stuff they bring in. Today’s discovery was a pair of giant pine beams (with full-grown border collie for scale) from an mill they were involved in dismantling.

Border collie sitting on large old-growth heart-pine beam

Categories: Seen, vintage

Tagged: border collie, heart pine, Longleaf Lumber, longleaf pine, Luc, old-growth lumber, reclaimed lumber, southern yellow pine

3-D printers?

Posted on 14 August 2013

I believe it’s rare for tradespeople to think of themselves explicitly as business owners, and I’m not an exception. We see ourselves as makers of things, and we grudgingly accept the business side as the necessity that allows us to keep making. For example, in the past when people asked me about my business model, I used to fumble for a coherent answer. I’ve gradually come to realize that I do have a business model, though it’s been implicit for much of my company’s existence: We can succeed if we provide products and services that can’t be replicated in a factory. We’re based in Boston, where wages and expenses are very high, and we rarely make the same thing twice. This is not…

Categories: Shop work, Uncategorized, victorian, vintage

Tagged: bracket, corbel, Jamaica Plain, mahogany, sapele, shop work, victorian

Evan’s carpet soffits

Posted on 6 August 2013

One of the joys of buying an old fixer-upper is discovering all the wacky things that previous owners have done. Humility of course tempers the pleasure, as a boy can’t help but wonder which of his design decisions will turn out to be the avocado fridge of 2013. Sometimes, though, the universe is generous, delivering a detail so outrageous as to preclude introspection.

My colleague Evan recently bought a fantastic little Cape in Watertown, MA. It’s a solid house in a great neighborhood, and just the right size to be manageable. And it gave us all the gift of carpeted soffits.

But maybe the best detail was evidence of a previous layer of carpet.

Categories: Found, Seen, vintage

Tagged: 1950s, carpet, kitchen, soffit