| The PEAS Farm: Building a Toolshed with Reclaimed Wood |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |
| Thursday, 13 March 2008 | |
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Our new tool shed has beautiful old-growth larch boards in the walls, huge timbers for the floor joists, and an expansive hardwood floor. Of course, the best part is that all these materials were reclaimed. Ethan Smith is the Assistant Manager here at the PEAS Farm, and his vision was that the tool shed should contain no new wood. So he pulled up and hauled tongue-and-groove flooring from an old fertilizer factory, collected floor joists from an abandoned engine workshop, coaxed the local grocery store to donate plywood from their expansion, hewed off the roof of a farmer’s retired hayshed, and meticulously cut pieces of 60 year old crib stacking from the walls of the closed Champion Mill.
It’s been our job to put these materials together with him – from washing floorboards with caked-on fertilizer and pulling off holey asphalt and moldy shingles to notching half-century old wood flooring to fit around half-century old solid wood posts.
The process is creative, collaborative, and experimental. None of us have built a wooden building before (though Ethan learned much through his experiences with demolition) but we have a group of willing workers with creative minds each day on the farm. It’s inspiring to see what can be accomplished with just that.
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