Working with Your Heirlooms
For the custom pieces I create, some clients come with a blank slate; others come with a concrete design spec’d out, and yet others come only with an heirloom or an antique or some raw materials of special significance that they’d like to transform into something special.
Those heirloom projects can be the most fun, because they often provide both hard physical constraints, but also a great deal of flexibility (and occasionally, some engineering challenges as well). Having worked on a number of heirloom projects recently, I thought I’d use this post to share some of these projects.
If you have a unique project you’ve been considering, I’d love to hear from you!
Material Reuse
I made a pair of identical oak desks, transformed from the solid oak shelving, salvaged from the client’s law offices just prior to his retirement.
I fabricated this small end table for a client from ipe left over from his patio railing job, with a plank of maple thrown in for contrast.
Heirlooms & Antiques
Though refinishing is neither my forte nor passion, I’ve occasionally taken on a project for a friend or a repeat client; you can see the transformation in the pine legs as I’ve stripped down layers of finish and years of grime, compared to the rest of the body.
This barn door was meaningful to the client, who wanted it transformed into a dining room table in a way that preserved the surface and the original pencil marks from its fabrication. After giving it a light cleaning, I built a 4’ x 4’ solid maple shadowbox and table that would keep it protected yet front-and-center. Unfortunately, I did not get a finished picture because it was just too massive at over 100# with the glass to carefully assembly single-handedly in my workshop, but hopefully these pictures give a sense of the project.
For this project, the client picked up these antique metal legs from an old Singer sewing machine, in great condition, but without a table top. I built the walnut planter box, table top and shelf for her outdoor patio.
This is the original exclamation point of the main Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, that the client won at a charity auction; he wanted to display it (at the appropriate playful angle), lit with internal LEDs. Though the frame was made primarily of fairly-light sheet metal, it kept its form with a 1” thick piece of acrylic glued to the front making it difficult to balance. So I weighted the 3” thick base with 1-1/2” thick plate steel to move the center of mass low enough to avoid tipping over with a small bump.