Old Rotten Cedar?!

The cedar we picked up yesterday was, without a doubt, rough looking on the outside.  Indeed, each and every long piece has a section approximately 10 inches long two feet from one end that is completely rotted through.  Since all the wood came from old water towers, my guess is that the rot line was right at the surface of the water where whatever foreign elements were in the water (bacteria, moss, scum, soap, whatever) tended to float.

But, to be honest, the surface of the full length of pretty much every board looks a little porous and dead.  I suppose that isn't altogether surprising for boards more than 20 years old.  It looks like this (top and bottom of a piece of a slice of board shown):

But lo and behold, look at the cross-section of the same piece of wood (click to enlarge):

What appear from the surface to be deep cracks in the wood end barely a millimeter below the surface.  And not only that, but this stuff smells like heaven inside.  The fresh cedar smell is positively addictive.  I'm sniffing this board so much, I'm becoming a cedar huffer.
Anyway, I suppose this comes as no surprise to some people, but I had never messed around with cedar before.

Oh, and for anyone who doesn't know already, the dark arc line curving from just left of top center to lower right is just a saw mark where the saw blade got hot and left a little burn mark on the wood.

So, all in all, I'm pretty happy about this score.  Thank you Craigslist!

Day in the Country!

Here are some pictures V took around the house yesterday.  You can see that the upper deck has been repaired. The lower deck (seen at the bottom of this pic) is still awaiting much love.

V discovered that there is some sort of beautiful flowering vine all over the deck. Crazy.  No idea what it is, but we like it.

The view is so nice.  We can't wait to be able to spend a whole day and have a meal and a drink and enjoy the view.

The walkway leading to the house has also been partially repaired.

Lumber Van - Part II

We got a 12 ft cargo van yesterday morning (same van they gave me 2 weeks ago) and V and I loaded up all the maple flooring I collected over the past two weeks from a nearby dumpster (looks to be about 300 sq ft).  We didn't get a pic of the wood in the back of the van, but this is the wood after we moved it into the house - it is stacked on the upper landing outside the main floor.  To give you a sense of scale, the stack is about six feet long end to end and is four rows deep.  So it's a lot of wood!

Then we drove over to Jersey City to pick up the reclaimed cedar water tower staves I found on Craigslist. These are mostly 2"x5"s and there are are about 44 10ft lengths - but those have some rot about two feet from the end, so they are probably going to end up yielding about 6-7 feet of usable decking after cutting and planing.  We also got about 50 4 foot lengths which will lose about a foot each in the clean-up process.

Note that way way back in the load, just behind the seats, you can see some tin ceiling tiles that I picked up cheap on Craigslist this week in the neighborhood.

Finally, we picked up a table I bought on ebay 2 months ago.  The seller was in Ohio, but the guy who sold me the cedar hooked me up with someone who was driving back from Ohio on Thursday so, for a reasonable price, he picked it up in Ohio and dropped it off in Jersey City.  Note that the table top isn't pictured here - it is cast iron and weighs a ton so we left it outside - we're going to put some sort of custom (i.e., made by us!) wood table-top on this anyway.

And that was how we spent our day yesterday - loading all this stuff in and then out.

Reclaimed Water Tower Cedar - Decking?

Turns out that decking wood is incredibly expensive.  2"x6" cedar decking costs $2.06 per linear foot (i.e., $4.12 per square foot).  And that hurts!
I've seen old water tower staves for sale at BIG NYC for $2 per linear foot in the 5" width and $3 per linear foot in 6" width and up in price from there.  They appear to be lovely on the inside after just a little planing.  But the price is still prohibitive.  So, anyway, I found a guy across the river on Craigslist and he will sell me 6'-10' lengths of yellow cedar from water towers in widths ranging from 5" to 9" for under $1.50 per linear foot.
He has both red and yellow cedar and it is all over 20 years old so it seems likely it is older growth than what we get now and may be tighter and a better quality.
Here is a pic of a nice planed piece of the red and a chip of the yellow.

I am probably going to take all his 9 and 10 foot lengths, which add up to about 265 square feet.  And that should be enough to re-do the lower deck so that we can roll the hot tub down and hook it up.

Oh, how I long for the hot tub to be bubbling.