Building handmade custom furniture has always been my dream.  Back in 1983 I established Mount Cheam Woodworking and soon realized dried hardwoods  were  expensive to buy.  A few years later I began to gather local English brown oak, maple and walnut logs which were sawn and air-dried for one year per inch thick.

By using a bandsaw mill I was able to increase the volume and value of the wood, giving it a smoother finish, custom sizes and far less sawdust than a dimensional sawmill can produce.  For oversized or unusually shaped logs, I used an Alaskan mill powered by chainsaws and two husky sawyers.

Being located in the Fraser Valley we enjoy a high relative humidity.  This unfortunately makes it difficult to air-dry wood to the desired moisture content for furniture building.  Using vacuum kiln technology, I can now dry and condition, sawn hardwood of most dimensions to the desired 6% moisture content, with almost no degradation.

During the late 1990s, I sold and delivered curly, spalted and quilted maple to some of the best woodworkers on the West Coast – from Vancouver, BC to Bisbee, AZ, with many stops along the way.  This was when the desire to create fine home furnishings was born in me, and using my specialty lumber I created various pieces, some of which I entered in the Design in Wood show hosted by the San Diego Woodworkers Guild.

Remarkedly, the wood barn now contains about 105,000 board feet of dried BC hardwoods.  My rescue efforts of local hardwoods slowed down a little, but I was always on the lookout for logs with pistol grip curves, or oversized logs for one-piece dining and conference table tops.  Now I’m spending less time salvaging and sawing logs and more time designing and creating handmade home and office solid hardwood furniture out of some of the most unique precious wood that has been hiding in the back of the wood barn.