Full Circle

Lathe are strips of wood that are nailed to studs when building a wall. Before drywall was invented, plaster and lathe were how walls were put up in houses. My house had all plaster and lathe walls on the first floor. Here is a picture of the back of a plaster and lathe wall, as I was gutting the room that is currently my bedroom.

While gutting, I broke up all the plaster and then tried to save all the lathe to use later. Well, it is later and I’ve been doing some work with the lathe. The first step was to either plane or sand the lathe clean and cut all the edges. This would make it easier to glue the pieces together to make a board. This picture shows some sanded lathe in the back and lathe that still needs to be sanded in the front.

Next I glued a bunch of pieces together to make a board.

I then cut the edges of the boards and planed them to around 1″ thickness. Here I’m testing a few different stains on the boards to see how they would look.

And this is the first piece of furniture that I made with my lathe. My intention is for it to be a stand for my tv. However, I’m not sure that it’s going to be wide enough. So it might just be a bookshelf. Interestingly, I used two stains on it. The shelves were done with the stain espresso, which I had tested previously. The sides were done with provincial, which I ended up liking when I was at the store. I think I may use provincial more, though I may decide to not use any stain on my next project.

It won’t win any design contests, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. I very much like the idea of taking garbage and making something useful out of it.

And here it is, in my living room with a tv on it.