Craftsman’s Tear-Down Style: Classic Furniture From Old Wood

It started with the old bartering system. Word got out in the town of Mount Vernon, Ohio, that J.T. Keiderling and a buddy had exchanged labor, tearing down a barn, for material.

Keiderling just wanted the antique wood to make a dining room table for his family--wife Christy and their daughter--who had relocated to a farm in Mount Vernon from their house in Redlands, Calif., when he retired from the insurance business.

He didn’t have time to get to the project.

“We got finished with that one,” Keiderling recalled of the first barn he tore down, in 1993. “And a neighbor of ours said, ‘I have one to take down.’ And then another and another and ....” Before anyone could yell “Timber,” much less craft a table, the Keiderlings had a family business recycling salvaged wood into flooring, Hardwoods of YesterYear. Orders first started coming in for planking, where beams are milled into usable lumber. An East Coast company bought the salvaged wood by the truckload. That angle paid the bills early on and accounts for about 10% to 15% of the business today.

Building a Business From the Floor Up

From the very beginning, the Keiderlings aimed to interest custom home builders who did restoration work, as well as architects, in salvaged wood. It worked. Flooring and custom milling--the molding and trim work--make up nearly half of the business. Flooring led to custom-made furniture, from outdoor benches to sideboards, which is what Keiderling wanted to do from the get-go. He wanted to make furniture the old-fashioned way--all mortise and tenon and dowels and few to no metal fasteners. An old-English style garden bench takes about 50 hours to make and is priced at $1,725. An 8-foot table takes 80 hours to make, and chairs about 10 hours each; a table with 10 chairs can run around $11,000. The antique wood, which is available in plain-sawn, quarter-sawn and rift-sawn styles, includes chestnut, oak, ash, beech and maple.

Once customers see the floorboards, they often want furniture from the same wood, Keiderling says. Sometimes the family whose generations-old barn is being torn down ask him to fashion a piece of furniture, maybe a chest--what he calls a “tangible memory”--out of the salvaged lumber.

“The first one that really stands out was a local project, restoring an 1830s house. We did the flooring; that was quarter-sawn white oak, and we got to talking and ended up doing at least four doors for them, the fireplace mantle in the dining room and a dining room suite of a table, 10 chairs and a sideboard. That was the homeowner’s ideas.”

Cabinetmaking has always been Keiderling’s first focus, starting with that family dining room table. “I’m from a Midwest family, so if you need something, go out and do it yourself,” he said about how he learned his craft. “What we do is duplicate the techniques at the turn of the century. Well over half of making the furniture is done by hand: hand-planed, hand-scraped in lieu of sanding. All the joinery is cut by hand. We use very little, almost no mechanical fasteners like screws, nuts, bolts.”

‘The Way God Intended Them to Grow’

The wood pulled from old structures may be as much as 300 years old and is never newer than 1910. “In order to pull the size beams that they did, they had to use a colossal tree,” Keiderling said. “The grain is much tighter than what is available right now. Tight grain gives a much nicer appearance and is more stable. These trees were allowed to grow the way God intended them to grow. You get tremendous variance in figuring and coloring and tremendously tight grain. It is just more beautiful, plain and simple.”

The business finds antique wood from barns, warehouses and grist mills in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, northern Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Keiderling figures this is a business with a finite resource, with perhaps 20 years left. Maybe after that he’ll get around to that dining room table.

Hardwoods of YesterYear, 11540 Airport Road, Mount Vernon, Ohio; (740) 397-5888, https://www.hardwoodsofyesteryear.com.

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Candace Wedlan can be reached at candace.wedlan@latimes.com.