Elementalbuilding

Houses of 100 years ago were built with plaster and lathe board.  Eventually plaster, ‘ wet walls’ were replaced with Dry Wall.  During the demo of the 1610 home, literally tons of plaster and lathe are removed from the home.  The plaster is worthless- even as back fill- it’s basically like sand once it breaks down.  99.99999999% of people would say the same about the lathe board.  Though some might grind it into saw dust for animal bedding or others might use it for kindling.  Most however send it to a land-fill.  We however, we chose the path less taken.  We decided to take the very arduous task of turning the lath into laminated lumber.  Despite the exhaustive work, we are quite happy with the results and hope you are too!

Plaster hanging to pieces of Lathe, mid demo

Once the lathe is removed, it’s piled high in the garage:

The pile begins

Mike McGowan assesses the growing mountain

Painstakenly each nail is pounded out of the lathe:

Dan Rusk finding his zen moment

Nate Rusk, after a hard day of pulling nails

Pegger, planing the lathe.

Once planed, the lathe is glued into 6 inch wide, 9 ft long planks.

Then the planks are planed once again.

Katers, hand planing the planks

And after a final pass through the electric planer, we have the final product:

Finished Planks

And somehow after many hours of manual labor, and electricity generated from the sun,

This,

Lathe on the wall

Becomes this:

Finished Book Shelves

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.