New Life for Old Wood
When I designed our Timber Frame table four years ago, I wanted a design that related to the architecture of modern timber frame homes. The timber frame table has since become our most popular dining table and has found its way into homes in the Rockies and Appalachian mountains.
However, timber frame architecture is not strictly a mountain or regional thing. One can find beautiful examples of timber frame construction around the globe in every geographical area. We recently had the pleasure of building a timber frame table for clients in Oklahoma City, OK.
Bruce and Suz Barkocy chose to convert a 200-year-old timber frame wheat-threshing barn into a fine, albeit rustic, home for themselves. Many of the Barn’s structural elements remain exposed in the finished home, creating a perfect environment for this table design.
Bruce saved the original floorboards from the barn and brought a pile of them to our shop to see if we could build a table with them. While he brought more than enough wood to work with, the deep cracks, insect damage, machine oil stains, and hidden nails brought on challenges I have always avoided. Even so, the historical value of this material remaining in its original home overrode my concerns about technical challenges. So we agreed to work with Bruce and Suz’s lumber on what was to become a challenging but very worthwhile project.
The lumber not only provided challenges in working with defects, but the Barkocys also wanted the capacity to host at least ten guests for dinners. The boards were only about 7’ long, with ends that had to be trimmed back to get to solid material. Initially, we all thought that two 7’ long tables could be done with this if we used breadboard ends to allow for enough trimming to clean up the ends of the boards. That all seemed fine. Our backlog when we took this order was six months or so long. The waiting time became an incubation period of creative thinking and conversations about just how to ensure that this project lived up to expectations, made the best use of space in the dining room, and showcased the character of this material while remaining faithful to the history these rugged planks held.
Laying out the top from the best board in the pile.
We had many conversations about finishing challenges with old oil spills in the wood and how rustic we wanted the surface vs. the ease of cleaning and dusting. Another question we went back and forth on was, how do two separate tables elegantly provide seating for one group of guests? We eventually settled on a single table 12’ long with a breadboard in the center to allow the use of the short boards to make a long span.
We built a poplar torsion box core to ensure stability and sliced the wood into thick laminae for a controlled surface. This allowed us to get all the long top boards from a single plank and use the deep cracks and mirrored nail remnants to create a balanced surface design. We only partially filled the defects, letting them be what they are, mostly, while allowing a damp rag to wipe the top clean with ease.
Going with a top 12’ long vs. the two smaller tables also meant we needed to thicken up the top for visual balance as well as rigidity. To achieve that, we didn’t just need to make the main edge laminae wider, but we would have to use two pieces that look like one to build up the end grain of the breadboards.
Using this old wood as bandsawn laminae solved several problems but created some new ones as well. Sawing through nails while controlling the thickness of the laminae meant slower feed rates than usual. Slow feed takes more time, of course, but the big concern with this was avoiding burning the wood with a slow feed and a blade that got duller with every nail bite. Once sawn into ¼” laminae, this old cracked wood became quite fragile and needed very careful handling.
Only one board in the whole pile provided good enough material to follow our plan for the top surface, but we only needed one. The central six laminae provided just the look we were going after. Plenty of defects to play with and enough solidity to hold together through a carefully tended process.
The surfaces looked like new wood because we exposed “new” wood by re-sawing the planks. We needed to make them look like the antique boards that they were. What look was right, of course, was up to the Barkocys. Mailing them a pile of samples for color and texture allowed us to talk specifically about what felt right. A powered abrasive brush to wear out the grain gave us the control needed to give the surface character without causing cleaning problems.
A couple of rounds of customized dye stains got us to a happy place and made the table look like the surface might have been weathered and beaten with shocks of wheat for a few generations.
The finished table looked great in our shop, but the proof of the pudding needed to be judged by looking at the table in its home. Seeing the photos an ecstatic client shared with us of the table in situ gave us the satisfaction that we got the job done.
We generally showcase the beauty of woods hand-selected to be the perfect color and character for the project. In this case, our clients provided the perfect material for this project. While the wood gave us plenty of challenges, there was no material better suited to support entertaining in this 200-year-old barn home.
Gallery of some of the other Timber Frame tables made over the last 4 years.
We have built about 10 of these tables. Some with a live edge, others that are rectangular ranging from 8′ to 12′. An interesting coincidence is that until the Barkocy’s table, they have all been made out of walnut. However, the next one on our production schedule will be made out of cherry and we have a couple that are still undecided. We also have a round version of this design.
One in the shop waiting to get crated and shipped.
In its forever home in Eagle, Co.
Close up of the base on a table here in Asheville, NC.
