Pickets & Kindling

While Glen has been enjoying some much deserved R&R, Tony has been finalizing preparations for the privacy enclosure behind the carriage barn.

Woodworking, especially repurposing rough or recycled material into finish grade lumber, has proven to be a well matched and rewarding undertaking for Tony over the last year and a half. Again and again his mindfulness and his discipline transform unrefined building materials into finish carpentry ready wood.

Grading, sorting, and dimensioning as he methodically readies these ingredients for fence building, his conscientious efforts will pay dividends in the coming weeks as Rosslyn’s homegrown, onsite milled, and onsite finished lumber metamorphoses into a handsome screen concealing the generator, compressor, propane tank, etc.

Pickets & Kindling, Poem

Evergreen hedge, overgrown,
towering, top heavy,
root bound, wind tipped,
and finally felled 
sixteen years ago.
A bearded sawyer
who, wary of ingrown wires
and embedded hardware,
mulched limbs, greens, bark slabs, 
and milled logs into lumber
with surgical precision. 
The aromatic boards
were stickered and stacked
in our carriage barn stalls
to dry a year or two 
(or, alas, sweet sixteen),
curing, stabilizing,
awaiting application. 
Some became fence gates,
a weathered weave of
rails, braces, and pickets,
as handsome as functional
when hung paired between posts. 
Some of the wider boards
were jointed and planed smooth
then reborn as flooring
and decking in the boathouse,
now well worn and familiar
beneath our bare feet. 
Half, however, of the
hedge-historied lumber
remained unused, buried
beneath a decade’s dust
but perfectly preserved,
ready for squaring, smoothing,
and reimagining. 
Now this once upon a time 
evergreen privacy screen 
will return to service,
a homegrown picket fence
shrouding unsightlies and
completing the courtyard
where a firepit and grill
will be kindled to life
with tiny tinder offcuts,
the enduring legacy
of an overgrown hedge. 

Waste Not

In keeping with our commitment to circular/regenerative systems, nothing goes to waste. All byproducts in this hedge-to-lumber process are used either as mulch or as kindling.

And so the final phase for Tony once he finished milling all of the cedar lumber was to chop up the leftovers lumber offcuts (ie. wane) into short pieces es that we can use for kindling for summer grilling and fire pits.