LONG LOST LUMBER MILL FOOTAGE

I really thought we had lost these images, but they turned up this morning in the far reaches of my hard drive, so now's the time to post.  The Grandin Lumber Company was built around 1900, about 8 miles east of us in then-thriving Grandin, North Carolina.  It was damaged by flooding in the '30's and used as a barn until Hurricane Hugo knocked it to the ground in 1989.  When Edgar Howell took me to see it in 2009, it looked like a bonfire pile of slowly decaying lumber.  I bought all the yellow pine and oak timbers for $5000, hoping it would be enough for the house, which we still hadn't completely designed.  My friend Tony Moretz painstakingly denailed the timbers and cut them into slabs with a portable bandsaw mill, set up on-site.  

Still a lot of good lumber in that pile...

Our pile of usable timbers.  You can see some of the massive bolts still embedded in the timbers.

That's the grain that I was looking for - tight, even growth without too many knots.  This was a smaller timber and probably yielded very little finished lumber.  Maybe 3 or 4  5-inch wide decking boards.

Luckily, many of the other timbers were much larger, and we wound up with a nice stack of slabs like this:  1 3/4" thick by a full 12" wide.  It will finish out about 1 1/2" x 11.  But the grain and the color of that piece are incredible.