This hot weather has been leaving the EWCrew in Seattle needing a little time on a beach. We’ve also been itching to build a project since we have such great weather. All of this is perfect given Earthwise’s newest reclaimed wood product: beachwood. If you haven’t been in the stores lately, you may have missed this product’s arrival but have no fear – there’s lots to go around!
So, what is this “beachwood,” I’m talking about? The EWBeachwood is vintage scaffolding from sunny California that has been lime washed to give it a beautiful, white, cream, and gray coloring to it. But if you look at it from the side you see it has a secret… It has the most beautiful teal, blue, and purple stripes on the side. The colored edges tell a story! Part of this material’s history goes that this scaffolding was used by a painting company with multiple teams. To differentiate one teams tools from the the others, each complete scaffolding system had a color assignment to match that team. This way the painting teams would know whose scaffolding was whose (personally I would have wanted to be on the purple team but all colors are great).
This material is 1-3/4″ thick by 9-1/2″ wide and pretty much as long as you want it so its great for benches, tables, shelves (since it has the great colored side detail), headboards – you name it! It is also available in a 5/8″ milled version, perfect for maximizing the square footage each piece can cover – plus this materials is reversible! This is great for texture walls, furring out a beam, using as veneer, or as a back splash.
Since this material has come in, all the staff has been drooling over it and creatively thinking about what WE could use it for. We finally got a chance to do a weekend project and play with this great material when the Seattle EWCrew built a new texture wall for the front display! We wanted to showcase all of our favorite aspects of it: the lime-washed fronts, the vibrant colored sides, and the cool, almost spalted looking reverse of the milled boards. The question was HOW does one showcase all the great aspects of it in one easy to see application?
A texture wall of course! The bottom of the wall is straight 8′ pieces which run vertically (perfect if you wanted to add interest to a wall or room). At 36″ from the ground, we added a chair rail made from the colored strips and other strips of the inside which show that the material is actually of ply-like construction. Everybody had to pick their favorite piece, of course, so the colors are in varying thicknesses and lengths, which only adds to the variety, diverse colors and interest this material has to offer. Last but not least, we installed staggered pieces displaying both the front and back of this material above the chair rail. Since the scaffolding is not a solid beam, but many layers glued together to create a very heavy, very sturdy piece of lumber the crosscut shows all the details of the wood.
We also played around with sanding the wood as that is a question we need to have the answers for! Sanding the wood too much removes the lime-washed gray finish but since you still need a smooth surface (especially if it will be in a high traffic area), we suggest using a steel or wire brush to remove the loose debris and then sealing it with a flat varnish preserving the finish and character of this unique materials but also saving you from splinters! <–No one wants those!
The bottom line? Its great that we have so much of the material because it can be used for almost anything AND gets the EWCrew stamp-of-approval. And, as always if you share your beachwood project photos (or any project photo for that matter) we will send you a 15% coupon! Come in and get inspired. What will you use it for?
