What It Takes to Reclaim Wood

When I was younger, there were several outbuildings alongside my parents' driveway. One of them was a corn crib for hogs that became where we stored my horse Cutter's hay and grain. One of them was a hog shed that became Cutter's barn and my tack room. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still smell the inside of those buildings. They've since been torn down as they outlived their useful lives, but my father kept the wood.

I don't remember how it came up, but Pa offered to let Beloved and I have this wood if we would come help plane it down. Chateau Travolta's deck has a large footprint, and the wood appears to be near original. We patched it a little last summer, but it's getting really rotted. We're going to use the corn crib cypress wood to resurface the deck next spring. 

Here's what the wood looked like before we started.

It's pretty rough and still has a little bit of old white paint clinging to it.

Pa bought a secondhand planer and we bought some blades for it. Pa and Beloved gave me permission to use this pic of them and the planer. I was the catcher, so to speak. I would grab the boards as they came though the business end of the planer and help them through. Sometimes this was just holding and sometimes this meant leaning with all my strength when they got kind of ... stuck.

Each board took a minimum of one and usually more like two or three passes. 

First pass.

Second pass.

Getting closer.

You could tell things were rocking when the big shavings started to come out. 

So pretty!

I lost track of how many boards we did. I would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty. Then I bagged up all the sawdust shavings. I think we had around seven 55-gallon bags of shavings, which Pa is going to add diesel to before using them for sweeping compound, whatever that means. He did push a little pile of the wood shavings outside the Morton building. When I asked him what he was going to do with them, he said, "I'm going to pour some diesel fuel on them and set them on fire, because that's the kind of guy I am."

I've got to use that in a novel somehow.

So he did, and that is how I learned how to control a fire without any boundary. I got to put it out.

It took all day. It was satisfying. I can't wait for spring.

Live on, wood. Good job.