Reclaimed – yesiwood.be

Grandfather clause

Jo — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 12:44:12 +0000

My grandparents owned a drugstore (chemist’s shop). It was close to our childhood home, so that leaves me many memories. Like the smell of the dozens of chamois skins piled up in the corner of the store. So soft. So spicy. Mmm. The shop had countless drawers with pigments for paints and other products. Such as boxes with “Panama Wood”, the predecessor of the Ariel washing powder.

Those drawers would have a life of their own. In 1982 the shop made way for an apartment building, and Anne and Jan, who did flea markets, came to help clean things up. Those wooden drawers came in handy for them to store all kinds of ‘junk’. Thirty years later, Anne comes to visit us in France, with a whole regiment of bastards in her camping car. The shop drawers of Pepé and Memé. I am speechless. Since then they have been incorporated into a showpiece of my own hand to store the junk in my workshop. From shop to workshop, indeed.

Tree Story

Jo — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 16:42:33 +0000

Kahlil Gibran once wrote” And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”.

I don’t know if he was as good a gardner as a poet, but in our case, he was right. In our garden, we had a red oak and a mediterranean stone pine (or umbrella pine) planted ages ago far too close to each other, and in the end the oak lost.

We first spotted fungi blossom at it’s roots, and one summer, the ground was covered with acorns and seedlings, a desperate attempt at survival. Next spring, the leafs sprouted, but that was the final sign of life. In barely a month time, all the leafs had shrivelled, and we were left with memories only. Enter JeanDo our gardner, who expertly and carefully felled the giant in no time.

After that, the challenge was what to do with the trunk. A piece that is two meter long, and 50 cm of diameter represents easily 500 kilos, so better treat it with respect. Our neighbour Jean-Pierre luckily had a tractor on hand, so he could load the beast onto my trailer, heading for Christophe Truche’s sawmill in the village next door.

Two months later, I could pick up the pieces, beautiful wide planks, which made me a lot of friends at the AOB community workshop in Gaillac with whom I shared my beauties

The top slabs were interesting, so I thought to make something out of it. It ended up as a large turned bowl with an intriguing pattern of vertical rays and growth rings. Have a look for yourself, and try to figure out how it fitted into the trunk before.

Arabesque Door

Jo — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 16:39:15 +0000

Panelak

Jo — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 08:53:45 +0000

My grandparents’ living room walls were covered with oak panels from end to end, dating from the early 1920’s. With the renovation of the in 1980, the panels were removed, and stored for the better part of 25 years by my collectionnist father. Finally, they received a new destination in our French home. The challenge was to fit and trim the panels to the exact new dimensions of the available walls, in such a way that the uninformed viewer would think they had always been there. Been there, done that.

Sculpture stand

Jo — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 09:37:54 +0000

I made a series of these sculpture stands for an exhibition. The legs are in oak, the tops in reclaimed pastel-painted attic wood, and the joints are 3D joints. For a long time, I thought I had invented the technique, but if you now look on Pinterest, you will find thousands of examples. If you want to know more about the technique, look at my separate post on 3D joints

Green House

Jo — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 17:05:48 +0000

This story started a long time ago. My grandfather purchased a villa in Westende, a seaside resort on the Belgian coast, in 1936. By the 1960’s, the wooden front of the house was completely rotten, as it was exposed to the harsh marine environment. So, my father decided to replace the front of the building. However, as he was an avid collectionner, he could not let go a lot, and kept the most acceptable in storage,” because they would serve one day”. Forty years later, he passed away, having not found the time to put them to use. I took up the heritage, and moved the stuff to the South of France.

I had never exploited a vegetable garden before in my life, so I thought the best place to start for a woodworker would be to build his own greenhouse. I drew my inspiration from two sources : one, a roof structure of a restaurant in New Zealand ( sometimes, you have to look far for good ideas) and the second one, the old factory buildings of Mr Alfred Nobel’s dynamite plant in Les Paulilles, in Southern France next to the Spanish Border.

That resulted in the following design:

And from there, the whole process was (±) ” straightforward” :