trash to treasure

I really love the challenge to create furniture from trash. In the current day and age household items and furniture are barely valued at all and often are left on the streets. One can find a plethora of useful materials from multiplex panels to solid woods like oak and beech and from bed slats to brass piano hinges. I use those materials often for back panels, drawer bottoms or other invisible parts of a piece of furniture. But sometimes they become the main design element of the piece, some more information on some example pieces is detailed below.

A wordplay on the German word Bankrott, which is quite a matching description for society's current approach to furniture. I built the bench completely from scrap bed slats, made out of birch wood. I use a supersurfacer, which is an automated oversized hand plane, to remove the lacquer finish from the slats and then sand the edges for them to be used in furniture. This bench reuses the slat nature as an optical effect and leverages the interlocking joinery for strength. The slatted bench is finished with natural beeswax.

One board of oak turned into a bench, with repairs for the bad parts of the board. For a maximal usage of the board I intentionally kept the sapwood. The top and the legs are joined using a reinforced miter joint and further strength is added using a mortised-in stretcher. For this bench I used pieces of brass trash that I melted and then cast into dovetail keys. These are then meticulously worked into the miter joint for additional reinforcement. On top of that they provide a visual highlight for this rather simple aesthetic.

A small table with a thick top carved from a piece of oak I found on the street. Its edges are faceted, and the four splayed legs are faceted along their whole length to match. The legs are ebonized with iron acetate and tannin, which turns the wood deep black, and are joined to the top with tenons. The table is finished with hardwax oil.