Claiming Reclaimed Wood

Weathered wood. Barn wood. Reclaimed wood. It's beautiful no matter what you call it. 

I found the sides of an old, red grain truck in a friend's barn and quickly claimed the reclaimed wood!

Heavy. Oh, my, they were heavy but Juan Hauls-It-All helped me lug them home. My idea was to turn this room...

...into this room...

So I separated the boards, scrubbed them clean of dirt and bugs, and started planning the best way to use the limited supply of long boards.

The wall is 13 feet across with windows five and a half feet apart. The boards were 16 feel long. To make the boards go as far as possible with the smallest amount of seaming, I decided to rip some boards that were in almost unusable condition and use them to trim around the window. The trim work cut the between window width to five feet exactly, letting me get three boards from each 16 foot board.

To help wedge together the tongue and groove boards Juan showed me how to use a small jack and a long board. Every time I put a new board up, I also had to chop off five inches of the long board. I ended up with a very short board!

With that system in place, it was just a matter of working down the wall until I got under the windows. At that point I started working up from the bottom. I knew I would have to piece together one row of board and I didn't want it to be the bottom one. A whole board would make the bottom edge even and make working on the electrical boxes easier.

 

At Lowe's they sell a little blue see-through box called an outlet extension for a whole $1.39.

As its name implies, the box extends the original outlet box to make the outlet cover flush with the new wall surface. BE SURE TO TURN OFF THE ELECTRICITY AT THE FUSE BOX (or whatever they call those boxes nowadays) BEFORE PUTTING IN THESE EXTENDERS!  I figure if you're handy enough to be redoing wall surfaces, you'll easily be able to add these extenders!

Perfect is good enough!