Barn wood

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Here's some overall comments about using barn wood. First, is has been subject to years of being outside and wet from rain water and possibly from having dirt and manure close to it. This is a big invitation to bugs that you don't want in your house. Having the wood heated in a kiln to 140 degrees through the whole pile or stacking it in a barn where you have a lot of control so you can be sure that the stacked and stickered can be heated up to about 136 degrees for a couple of hours a day for a week or so is necessary.

Second, it would seem to me that the patina on the barn wood is the attractive element. By turning it into moldings and similar use, you will have to be cutting most of the patina away. You would be as well off to buy or make planed and routed or shaped moldings from new wood and chemically add the patina if that's the look you want.

Another part of this is that often barn wood comes right off the sawmill. It has not been planed for thickness. If this is the case, making moldings starting from stock that is all over the map on size variation will give you problems if you don't make it all the same size first.

Planing and jointing, or any other milling operation on barn wood, can get real expensive if you find any metal with your tooling. Missed nails, slugs or birdshot or other tramp metal in the wood can make your inexpensive wood pretty dear if you find them with your planer blades. You can get around this by checking any "found" wood well with a metal detector before it gets to any cutting or milling operations in your shop.

Old barn wood is great for what it is. I'm not telling you not to use it. But these comments are just to alert you to some of the problems that can make free or cheap wood real expensive.

Henry in MI