I thought we were just making bar tops....

But we were really making a couple of pieces of furniture.


After a awesome Widespread Panic show on friday night, we loaded up "Deep Cover" ( my new black truck) and headed to Columbia SC!

What started out as a great idea turned quickly into a "ohhh this is going to be tough to pull off" and eventually into "can you believe that this started out looking like that?"

The project was to create two bar tops out of some old wood that I have from the American Tobacco building in Durham NC. HERE is where it came from and what it started out as. Flooring. THIS is another link to what it looked like finished.

Jerry and I worked probably 16-19 hours to get it milled down using the table saw and planner. We thought that we were going to tackle it with the bandsaw but that just wasn't the case. This stuff was so "pitchy" and full of 130 year old sap that we just couldn't get more than 3 boards done before the blade went dull. With a little thinking ( thanks to the tasty snacks from Mamma Stover) we were able to figure out a way to get square cuts on some pretty warped stock.

The grain that we found in this old flooring was just awesome!



What you see is just the natural color and grain of the wood and the bookmatching of the grain of one heavy...heavy piece of wood. I won't get into all of details or go into depth about the great satisfaction that it brought by turning those old pieces of flooring into beautiful shapes. But it was really really cool!

I am sure that Jerry will post it all on his blog www.generalrepairs.com

There are lots of pictures of our work over on Flickr
( I don't like Flickr very much, I much prefer my Webshots over Flickr, but Jerrry posts on that site)