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

 

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