The Kitchen Built From Grandpa’s Barn

Eleven loads

Owen and I hauled eleven trailer loads home over the next two weeks. I have a sixteen foot flatbed trailer I pull behind my pickup, and we loaded it every evening after school until the light went.

It was hard work, and dirty, and I would not let Owen near the parts of the pile that were still hung up.

We pulled what came loose, stacked it on the trailer, strapped it down, and drove it home two miles at about fifteen miles an hour.

The best boards came from the inside of the barn. The siding had taken seventy years of weather.

But the horse stalls and the granary had been out of the sun and rain, and the oak and fir in there was hard and tight and beautiful.

Every board had nails in it. Square cut nails in the old parts, wire nails in the repairs. Some of them were bent over on the back side and had rusted solid into the grain.

You cannot just run that kind of wood through a planer.

One buried nail, one bit of fence staple a cow pushed into a board in 1960, and you have chipped every knife in the machine and maybe thrown a piece of steel across the shop.

So we denailed every board by hand. I have a nail kicker, which drives the nail back out from the point side, and a pair of end nippers, and a cat’s paw.

Owen learned to use all three by the first weekend in June.

Then I went over every single board with a handheld metal detector, the kind they use at ballparks, that I had bought for forty dollars. Front side, back side, both edges.

If it beeped, we dug. We found a hinge pin. We found one old rifle bullet.

When school let out for summer, I loaded the best of it back on the trailer and drove it to a sawmill outside Anamosa that has a small kiln.

Old barn wood is full of things that eat wood, powder post beetles mostly, and the surest way to kill them is heat.

The man at the mill ran it through the kiln for a few days and charged me two hundred and forty dollars.

Then I brought it home and stacked it in the shop on stickers, with little strips between every layer so the air could move, and let it sit for a month to settle to the inside air.

You have to let wood get used to where it is going to live.

If you build with it too soon, it moves after it is in, and doors twist and drawers stick and joints open up. Every one of my students hears me say that at least twice a semester.

While it sat, I changed the plan. The solid oak I had priced in January was out. The doors, face frames and drawer fronts would all be Merle Hollis’s barn.

That took close to two thousand dollars off what I had told Megan, which turned out to matter later, when the counters cost more than I had figured.