Helping Wood Reclaim Its Former Glory

5:01 PM in Aqua, former, glory, helping, its, reclaim, wood

Some weekends, The Lab is a little bit like a firehouse.  We wake up on a Saturday morning, lounge around the kitchen making crepes or putting extra raisins on our oatmeal (because, hey, its Saturday!).  Then all of a sudden, the call will come in.  Not a call call, but an e-mail from IFTTT that reads something like Free wood!  60 feet of weathered cedar fencing, stacked in driveway at [address two miles away].  Will take down posting when gone.

The kitchen erupts with activity.  Pancakes and oatmeal start flying around; some even lands in our mouths if were lucky.  We throw the crosscut saw, drill, hatchet, and crowbar in the station wagon, make sure the ratchet straps are still in there from last time, and peel out of the driveway prepared to do battle with enormous fence sections and other zealots of the Craigslist free section.  (Its close to, but not quite, the level of activity that ensues when Katie finds a large spider in a cupboard.)

The only catch is that the wood usually looks like an 85-year-old former boxer.  Jagged, beat up, dirty, limbs falling off...you get the idea.  And who would want to make a shelf or a table out of an 85-year-old former boxer?  Well, we would!  All it takes is a little elbow grease and/or some specific tools, and that old wood will be back in shape in no time.  It might even have some extra character scars to serve as an artistic reminder of its former life.

In case you have the same vehicle for hauling reclaimed wood as we do, 60 feet of dismantled cedar fencing is about the maximum that a Saturn SW2 can hold.

Our first step is to dismantle the wood down to the raw boards.  Pull nails, remove screws, toss scraps into the burn pile.  The bent, rusty nails and screws will add up quickly, but can be taken to a scrapyard to recover some of the cost of your effort if theyre not reusable.  Other folks say that burying them around fruit trees will help replenish iron in the soil, but beware of anything thats not rusty-looking, since it probably has some kind of corrosion inhibitor added, such as a zinc- or polymer-based coating (or both), which will keep the iron from getting into the soil while adding toxic (zinc) or plastic junk to your dirt.

Then, the boards.  Occasionally, a board will be fit for use as-is.  If its not too splintery or dirty and the intended application isnt too cuddly, the board can go directly to any number of reclaimed wood projects.  But what if we need a closet shelf that wont snag sweaters, a nightstand that doesnt go bump in the night, or counter top to use as a kitchen workspace?

Enter the bench top planer.  (It works just as well on a garage floor or in an apartment living room as on a bench top.)  We got it for $50 on Craigslist, and its the key to getting the wood from something someone would leave in their driveway for free to something Katie would allow in the house.  This particular planer can handle boards up to 5" thick.  For boards that are thicker than that (e.g., a 1 x >5), we set up our router table to be a jointer or just use a hand plane.

Usually a single pass will take off all the surface splinters and dirt.  A second or third pass takes out most of the remaining dings, leaving just a few artistic nail holes.  (Top = before, bottom = after.)  Its important to measure the new dimensions of the boards once they look nice, since the planer can remove anywhere from 1/32" up to 1/8" per pass.  Projects dont fit together nearly as nicely with an extra 1/8" on the end of every board, even if you do cut the wood square!

For Jakes projects, everything at this point gets screwed, glued, and called done!   The shelf boards in this closet shelf are sections of old cedar fence planks that are probably too thin for almost any other application. (Maybe shimming door jambs would be ok.)

For Katies projects there are a few extra steps like sanding and/or staining.

This is Katies end table before sanding.  What a beaut!

2 x 4s seem to be the most readily available form of free wood, which is great if you want to build a butcher block-style counter top or something similarly sturdy.  This thing will be heavy as heck, but able to withstand plenty of pounding!   In the background, a pile of unusable wood is visible.  Those are boards that are too warped, too short (i.e., scraps), or occasionally, too punky.  But for us, its a beneficial side effect of collecting free boards because it provides a continuous supply of bone-dry firewood for heating the workspace.

What steps do you take when working with abandoned wood?  What are your favorite reclaimed wood projects?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Katie Made Hummus! And its pretty good!

4:53 PM in and, Aqua, good, hummus, its, katie, made, pretty

Guess what!  Katies learning to be a magician.  Her first trick involved dried chickpeas!  Now we have a tasty dip for all our veggies!  Check it out:

She started with some regular ol dried chickpeas.

Then soaked them overnight in the crockpot. The next day, she turned the crockpot on and cooked them for another 12 hours or so until they looked like this.  She saved some of the liquid to alter the consistency of the hummus if necessary.

Then she added about two cups to the food processor thing, along with three cloves of garlic.  One clove she crunched in the garlic press, then she realized that it was going to get chopped up in the food processor anyway, so using a hard-to-clean tool was silly.

Then she chopped up everything in the food processor until it looked like this, adding a couple tablespoons of chickpea water to get the consistency she wanted.

Then she added the rest of the ingredients: salt (~1 teaspoon), pepper (~0.5 teaspoon), hot sauce (4 squirts), and olive oil (3-4 tablespoons).  Not pictured: lemon juice (2-3 tablespoons).  Go easy on the lemon juice at first, because it can easily overpower everything and make the hummus not taste right.

Then she added about a third of a cup of sunflower flour.  Last time she ground up the sunflower seeds with a mortar and pestle.  This time she used a coffee grinder.  Most recipes call for tahini (sesame seed paste) since the hummus is actually short for hummus bi tahina, or chickpeas with tahini in Arabic.  We had sunflower seeds and not sesame seeds, so consider this hummus bi abed-i-shems.

Taste testing is an integral part of this process.  First she tasted the isolated hummus using a model vegetable.

Then she tested with a real vegetable.  It passed both tests.

Then she put it in a jar and set it in the fridge.  Shes not sure how long it keeps because weve always outcompeted the bacteria for it!

The Recipe:
2 cups cooked chickpeas
3 cloves garlic
0.5 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
4 squirts hot sauce
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
1/3 cup ground sunflower meats
1 finger for testing
1 vegetable stick for testing

Soak overnight, then cook chickpeas, reserving water.  In food processor, puree chickpeas and garlic, then blend in remaining ingredients except finger and vegetable stick.  Use finger to test flavor and consistency, adjust as necessary by adding water or more chickpeas.  When hummus passes finger test, use vegetable stick for further testing.  When flavor is satisfactory on both accounts, transfer hummus to canning jar and store in fridge.


Do you make your own hummus?  Whats your recipe?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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