The usual suspects, weathered fence boards, are nowhere to be seen on this project because I've finally run out of that wooden gold. However, except for a few inside pieces of plywood, nothing but reclaimed wood constitutes all my distressed furniture, and this piece, a wood-burning stove chest for holding stove accessories, is no different. The lineup includes wormy chestnut and beautiful quarter-sawn oak....
The next shot looks like I'm doing some sawing, but actually, the circular saw is only in place for counter-balancing while gluing up a repair. This repair was on the outside edge and effectively added just about an eighth of an inch to the usable width, but having that extra eighth of an inch was mission critical.
Like a few other pieces of furniture I've done, the end result has no nails or glue in it, so everything is serviceable should a part become damaged.
For maximum protection of the relatively softer wormy chestnut, all outside corners consist of denser oak.
The finished product in its final resting place....
The finished product in its final resting place....
The chest portion holds a firewood bag and a little wood, while the drawer holds 2 pairs of welding gloves, matches, a lighter, and kindling.
I'd wanted to incorporate the original red finish of the reclaimed oak into the chest, but that finish was only on one side of each piece of wood. Subsequently, I chose not to take the time to match that finish on the cut sides in order to incorporate a "signature flaw" into the completed piece. (As a matter of fact, all of my distressed furniture pieces, except one, have a "signature flaw" visible from the outside.) Thus, the entire chest has 3 color tones, perhaps considered by some to be too busy, but considered acceptable by me, who sees beauty in functionality and who can look past the busy-ness of color to read the beauty of other things...like inherent figure. Notice the rays of the quarter-sawn oak from the left wavily "flowing" into the tangential grain pattern of the wormy chestnut and back into the rays of the oak on the right.
