Reclaimed Wood

Lately I’ve been spending both airport and sky time devouring whatever design mags catch my eye at the terminal. The Dec/Jan issue of House Beautiful has a photo of what I’ve had in mind for framing out all of the doors and windows.

(photo credit: housebeautiful.com)

Our friends have a stack of old railroad ties that they’ve said we can have. Perhaps those can be used for the doors and windows, or for state park-like steps and planting beds in the Lower Garden & Orchard.

We still have to get stairs going down there. I saw this on Apartment Therapy Chicago.

(photo credit: apartmenttherapy.com)

We’ll be reclaiming a lot of redwood from the house itself when we gut. HGTV’s Beyond the Box featured a Connecticut Victorian that owner and architect David Strong renovated. He demoed all of the interior plaster and lath walls and reused the wood lath to create custom cabinetry throughout the whole house. This clever move saved him $20,000. In his footsteps, we shall follow!

Here are some screencaps:

Look at all that beautiful wood. We’ll use everything that we pull out of the house. Hopefully we’ll have enough for all of the living room, dining room, and kitchen built-ins, built-in closets for the bedrooms, bathroom vanity and linen built-in, and perhaps doors for the built-in storage on the bar in the Upper Yard. Maybe we’ll even have enough for the Guesthouse built-ins and Murphy bed enclosures.

Imagine the late day sun streaming through the windows and hitting all of that natural wood. So warm. Ah!