Cork: The Trivet

I love wine. Living in semi-close proximity to the Napa Valley (if a 6 hour drive can be considered semi-close proximity) and extremely close proximity to Santa Barbara (think Sideways), my wife and I are frequent wine country visitors and daily wine consumers.

Blame the French and the Italians, who we had to emulate during our trips to their respective countries. Wine is served with every meal, so long as its followed by a long and leisurely stroll to nowhere in particular. When in Rome...

Anyway, we've got a plethora of corks and a similar plethora of cork trivets. My first trivets were created about 12 years ago and they've served me well over the years. Now I've made more and want to share in the corkiness.

These are made with 100% real wine corks made from actual cork. As in, from a cork tree. Note that there are no plastic or artificially created cork products in these trivets since they tend to melt when exposed to high heat. It's a trivet after all and its purpose is to protect a surface from a hot pan! I've seen many a mangled plastic cork from my earlier attempts at cork trivet creations.

This is just a peek into the world of The Cork Project. I'm trying my hand at furniture/vase/lamp building out of corks, so stay tuned for those.

I know, it's not retro modern furniture per se, but we'll file it under accessories for modern living. Recycled. Reclaimed. Repurposed.

Two sizes available.
Price: $20 per pair for the smaller size
Price: $30 per pair for the larger size

To arrange purchase, send an email to craigwoodworks@gmail.com

The End Table

A buddy of mine recently did up his garage. Floors, insulation, drywall, lighting, a new door, air, new electrical, a pop-down attic ladder, a sink, etc. A new baby can do that to a garage, especially if there're only two bedrooms in the house. This is not to say that the baby can do construction work, but that the baby causes the need to do the construction work. The 2nd bedroom becomes the baby room and the old office moves to the garage.

We went over to visit this new fangled garage office/den and I discovered two trash cans full of wood scraps. Cut up pieces, all about a foot long and a foot wide, that came from the old interior of the garage. Apparently they were long and wide planks running horizontally where stuff could be screwed or nailed to like lawn equipment, shelving or other miscellaneous garage junk.

I picked out a few choice pieces, planed 'em down, and thought to myself, "Self, what should I built out of this?"

(If anyone can tell me what kind of wood is/was used as random garage wood in the 1950's, then please feel free to email. It's a softish kinda wood, probably pine? Or doug fir? They're all 3/4" thick with widths varying from 6" to a full foot. Hmmm...)

The result is another entry in The Reclamation Project:

The End Table

The reclaimed garage wood was used for the leg structure only. The table top came from an old side table I built 10 years ago that no longer had a home in the house. It used to be a rectangle, but I oblonged it so it fit more with the look of the legs.

I didn't want to bother with a router roundover bit, so all edge easing was done with a spokeshave. There's something about that little tool that just does it for me.

Inspiration for this piece is the Bradshaw line of tables from Room&Board.

Here are my dimensions:

Length of table top: 23"
Width of table top: 17 1/2"
Height: 22 1/2"

Top is made of repurposed pine. Legs are made of reclaimed garage wood. Could be pine? Could be douglas fir (like 2x4 wood, but thinner and from the 1950's)?

Price: $150

To arrange purchase, send an email to craigwoodworks at gmail dot com

Nelson: Project Echo

The military alphabet thing started after watching the first episode of the Hit TV Show On Fox! Dollhouse! Yes, I know, why do I watch that show? Did I really fall for Fox's scheming and conniving in their attempt to attract viewers with scantily clad women? On a Friday night? Right after that Terminator show with the scantily clad girl terminator?

Anyway, Eliza Dushku's character is named Echo. And the mysterious bad guy's name is Alfa. And the other girl's name is Sierra. And I had to explain to the wife why they were named such. And it became a little thing of ours that we had to know every letter of that alphabet. Because it's always a thing of mine to know everything about everything. Because I am officially in Jeopardy! training as of last week. (More on that in another post.)

So here we are at letter E, the fifth in the Nelson Bench series, or Project Echo. I have some reclaimed red oak that I wanted to use for something- the problem being that most of the pieces were smallish or shortish or thinnish. Read more on The Reclamation Project.

Project Echo is therefore a crossover event: Like when ABC mixed up the casts of Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice. It's a member of both The George Nelson Bench Project and The Reclamation Project. Only without the blood, the witty banter, the wispy music that's better suited to the CW network, or the doctors.

During the cutting-up-the-old-red-oak process, I discovered lots of worminess in the wood. At this time I'd like to officially rename the term worminess to character. All the little trails and divots impart lots of character into this piece. Yeah.

The legs are skinny, tapered and rounded by hand (with the spokeshave again), and are stained a dark chocolate brown. One of these days I'll use the spokeshave for the purpose by which it is named: making a wheel with spokes.

Project Echo's name? The Plant Stand.

It was supposed to be some sort of end table or side table, but since it's so light and airy and delicate and small and has skinny legs, then it had to be demoted to a Plant Stand. Of course you can put whatever you want on it. Just don't sit on it.

Dimensions are as follows:

Table top: 14 1/4" x 13 1/2"
Height: 25"

Construction is of repurposed red oak, with ash end pieces (the toothed parts), and ash legs.

Price: No longer available. Given to my mother for Mother's Day.

To arrange purchase, send an email to craigwoodworks@gmail.com

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Current items within the Reclamation Project:

The End Table
The Plant Stand* (aka Nelson Project Echo)
The Cork Trivet
The Spindled Bench* (aka Nelson Project Foxtrot)

*The Plant Stand and The Spindled Bench are crossover events with The George Nelson Bench Project. They both utilize reclaimed/repurposed/reused/recycled wood and are also constructed in the slats tradition of the George Nelson Bench.

What is The Reclamation Project? Read on...

There used to be a room attached to the back of our garage. It was old and creaky and smelly and leaning slightly to the left. I once had visions of using it as a workshop or an office-- until the insurance people said that it wasn't to code, it was built too close to the property line, and it looked like it was gonna cave in on itself and maim somebody.

So we tore it down. And by "we" I mean a group of four of us did it and we didn't hire a crew of demolitioners. At the base of this so-called room, we found that the brilliant constructioners built it up on top of sheets of plywood nailed to some 2x4's laid flat on the ground. No concrete foundation, no pressure treated lumber, no vapor barrier, no nothing. Good stuff, yo.

The result of the demolitioning was a truckload of lumber. 2x4s, 2x6s, 2x8s, lots of plywood.

Now to the point: Why throw it all away? Why get a big phat dumpster and send all of it into a landfill? That was my thinking at the time. Too bad I didn't act on it right away.

The lumber sat in a large pile outside the garage for years before I decided to build myself a dining table. I picked out the choicest of the 2x8's, cut 'em so they were 8 feet long, got some 4x4's from another demolition of a wood fence surrounding our property, built some legs and a stretcher structure. Say that 10 times fast- stretcher structure.

The cool part was getting a bucket of chocolate brown oops paint from Lowes ($5!) and slathering it on my gigantic dining table. I think the final dimensions were 4 feet wide by 8 feet long- all with the intention of being able to seat eight people at a time for dinner. There was an additional bench project that went along with this dining table, but it didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to so it never served its purpose as seating for this table.

Above is the only picture I could find of the table. Ignore the shopvac and the miscellaneous junk surrounding it. Below that is the bench with glasses. Not a bench that has a vision problem, but a bench used as a wine glass staging area for a dinner party (with lots and lots of wine; 'cause why else would I set out 24 wine glasses?).

The table was dismantled a year later and the dining room was turned into a living room. The top of the table is still intact and I'll probably reuse it soon. The base was repurposed for use as the base of my woodshop assembly table/planer stand. The bench is now an outdoor seat in our breezeway.

Similarly, I built another dining table 10 years ago that was purpose-built for a small space in our old house. Since it had no place to go in our new house, it was relegated to the backyard and used as a gardening/planting table. Exposed to the severe weather of Southern California, it slowly deteriorated into a table-not-so-much. But it was oak! Solid red oak!

So I cut it up, picked out the good parts, planed down the tore up surfaces, and now most of the oak is definitely useable.

Keyword Number One: Reduce. By not buying wood, I am reducing my impact on new wood use and ancillary costs of transporting that wood to the end user.

Keyword Number Two: Reuse. We tore down an old structure and I am using the doug fir for other purposes. I built a table 10 years ago that subsequently deteriorated and would have ended up in a landfill if I had not cut it up and replaned it.

Keyword Number Three: Recycle. Same as keyword number two. Other words that fit: repurpose, reclaim, reinvigorate, restore.