"Brewing" New Opportunities in Material Reuse

by Sarah White

The concept of reuse and recycling has existed for quite some time and Whit McLeod is profiting even as he conserves natural resources. McLeod has formed a business designing and constructing arts and crafts style furniture from reused and recycled materials. He makes a variety of furniture, including redwood furniture, and has a patent on constructing folding chairs from oak wine barrels. McLeod’s lines of furniture incorporate an old style of design with Frank Lloyd Wright influence.

Aside from working in the furniture business, McLeod has several other projects on his plate. One initiative that McLeod recently completed was designing and constructing a bar for a brewery in Crescent City almost completely out of salvaged lumber and wood scraps. He used mostly Douglas Fir lumber, 3"x10"x 20’ long. McLeod constructed the entire second floor decking with boards 2 ¼" thick x 8" wide with caulking in between. He built the furniture, chairs, barstools, front, side and interior doors of the bar, as well.

Between 5,000 and 6,000 board feet of salvaged lumber was used to make the entire bar. McLeod states that there is very little wood waste that remains from his projects. The leftover pieces that do accumulate, however, are put to good use, as well. The scraps remaining from the construction of the bar were put into a grinder and made into particleboard. The particleboard was then used for panels in the bar and booths. Other leftover wood pieces were cut into blocks (1"x 2 ¼" x 8 ½" "bricks") and incorporated into an ingrain block flooring pattern. It took McLeod about five months to complete the project of constructing the bar.

Not only does McLeod use salvaged materials for the construction of furniture and buildings, but also for the design of them. He states that he especially enjoys this aspect of his work. For the bar, he used the old nails taken out of the wood to decorate the chairs by forming a vertical pattern in the backs of the chairs. McLeod also straightened the spikes in the wood and used them for designing the front doors.

While McLeod sometimes gets the salvaged materials from brokers, he mostly receives the materials direct. Except for the Douglas Fir, McLeod is charged for most of the salvaged wood that he receives. According to McLeod, preparing the lumber for any type of construction requires an involved processis labor intensive. First, he must remove the nails from the lumber, then dry it and run it through a cleaner, and finally, surface the paint off of the wood.

McLeod began the woodworking business in the early 1980s and began incorporating used materials into his line of woodworking products in 1986-7. He was led to this business because he was a biologist for the forestry service in the 1980s and was disturbed by the fact that there were not many Douglas Firs remaining. He is currently constructing a set of kitchen island tables from Douglas Fir scraps and one of his future projects is to take down a winery and use the materials he salvages for additional furniture. McLeod states that he has been getting a pretty good response from his target market and gets a great deal of satisfaction from his business, realizing that he is playing an important part in conserving our natural resources.

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Last updated: August 01, 2008