How we make recycled timber furniture
Here’s a little sneak peek into our Preston warehouse, where we make all of our furniture by hand.
We use recycled structural beams to make unique furniture full of character and history.
Sourcing Your Timber
As the landscape of our city changes and old buildings make way for new, we look to these older buildings to source our timbers. Older buildings around Victoria often have ceiling and floor joists made from native Australian hardwoods. Some timbers we have recycled have been over 100 years old.
These large pieces are so full of history and character, which make each of our pieces unique. These large support beams are ideal because they allow for wide panels on table tops for example, with a lot of grain and feature.
In addition we believe there’s something special about saving timbers from sites around Melbourne and Victoria which allow our customers to have a small slice of history from the place we call home.
Preparation for Machining
Before we start to work out what the timber can be used for, it’s important to remove all nails (or other odds and ends we find!) and ensure the timber has a suitable grain to it, to create beautiful looking furniture.
We get pretty old school here using metal detectors to find and remove each nail by hand so that the timber can be processed by our machinery.
Enhancing the gum vein...
After we have de-nailed, processed and sanded each piece of timber and we know what we’re making with it, it’s time to bring out that gorgeous character. We apply clear and coloured resins to large knots, gum vein and borer bug marks in order to enhance and highlight the unique characteristics.
Now it's ready to use!
And then we are ready to build the furniture and apply our eco-friendly hardwax finish.
Okay – That sounds pretty easy, but it is a time-consuming and fiddly process to get gorgeous character-rich pieces from recycled timber!
Here’s Peter discussing the timber process in our Preston workshop.