Tell Your Grandkids Someday: Making Custom Pieces to Last

Ask us what our favorite part of the job is and we’ll tell you all the unique custom projects we get to do. There’s something rewarding about taking a functional item and making it a talking piece with a carefully crafted aesthetic and an interesting backstory to tell. Take, for instance, a rustic wooden door.

One of the rustic cottages on the property.

Repurposing Old Wood

Our partners at J Thompson Builders have been working on a big project up in the Driftless Area for the past decade. A gorgeous property with lots of small buildings scattered throughout, it’s provided us with some fantastic opportunities to play with log cabin furniture and décor.

This property has two large wooden doors that we’re especially proud of. Both doors are made out of 200+-year-old reclaimed Douglas fir wood, and we trust that they’ll be good for at least another 200 years. While the property is meant to be an outdoor recreationalist playground, the 2¼ inch thick wood offers protection from the elements when the weather gets rough.

The raw wood of the barn door before it received its “natural” finish.

Both doors are 100% custom made in shop, giving us the flexibility to adapt the style of each door to fit the rest of the rustic cabin décor. One door opens into the barn and has a natural finish to blend with the rustic barn motif. It has a rustic but distinct look thanks to its wood patterning and rustic bronze hardware.

The finished barn door has a fun “speakeasy” feature.

What’s the password?

The other door offers an entrance to the cottage off of a screened-in porch. For this piece, we decided to add a splash of color to pop against the otherwise grey cabin. Starting with the same base wood, we opted to use a distressed red paint and glaze finish on it, giving it an authentic-looking worn look while keeping the wood in lasting condition. We also opted to use bronze true hardware for this door.

The distressed red really helps this door to pop while keeping it in line with the outdoor log cabin feel.

These doors have been swinging open to the sunshine and barred shut against hardy snows for five or so years now and still look as good as the day they were installed. We love that one day, future generations will be able to come to the property and talk about the history of something as simple as a door.

Get Vain with Your Vanities: Creating a Unique Version of a Popular Look

We created two unique vanity pieces for this property, one larger piece to help with storage around laundry, and one more traditionally sized one next to the shower (because if you’re going to play in the mud, you need a lot of soap and a lot of towels).

You won’t even be able to tell if a little mud hits this custom made vanity.

Much like worn jeans, distressed paint is a popular look for homeowners trying to capture a log cabin home décor. We added our own touch to the process by creating a chip crackle distress paint. It involves three aspects of chipping the paint, crackling the paint, and distressing the paint by sanding, but when all is said and done, there are eight steps to the whole process. While the process can be expensive and tedious—especially if you try to apply it to many pieces—it’s a great way to make pieces stand out with a little something extra.

You can tell the difference in depth of detail here between the chip crackle distress paint compared to the distressed paint of the cottage door.

The final look once installed in the home.

Both vanities are also made from reclaimed lumber, with new oak being used for the legs. In style with the doors, they also incorporate bronze hardware, lending to a seamless and connected log cabin home theme.

For other examples of custom home design projects, check out our other projects!