Kindness&Humility

Congrats Facebook, you’re office is much more interesting than your website.

Over the course of our renovation, we tackled quite a few projects without having a clear idea of how we were going to accomplish them, but none more so than our firewood walls. They turned out to be far more time consuming than we anticipated, and they took three times more wood than we estimated, but no other part of the office gets as much attention. We regularly get uninvited visitors who get a peak of the walls through our entryway and decide to pop on in for a tour and a 30-minute Q & A.

Take my word for it, watching this time-lapse video will leave your computer far cleaner than witnessing the actual build. (Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m talking about sawdust, you creep.)

Of all the woodwork that was carried out for our office renovation, none was as detailed as our little kitchenette. We did some rough math and figure that the entire kitchenette is made of more than 600 individual pieces of wood, each of which had to be planed, joined, sanded, assembled and finished. It was worth it though — it’s a real workhorse and it turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the renovation.

Photo: Lincoln Barbour

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The Wood

Apart from the doors, which are made from old crates, the entire kitchenette is made of fir that we got from a 1904 barn from Wenatchee, via the ReBuilding Center. No plywood. Nothing from Home Depot. Just 103-year-old fir.

The dark wood on the left is what the fir looked like when we picked it up. The pile on the right has been milled down. We did this for every piece of wood used in the office — it was extremely time consuming.

I read once that no office could ever enjoy success without a work table constructed from a pizza oven and street signs, so I felt obligated to buy one. I turns out that they are very difficult to find. Luckily, I know a guy who knows this other guy who said that he could make one. This is how it went down…

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STEP ONE: Find a pizza oven and take the base. We found ours in the basement of Rose’s Equipment and Supply down on SE Clay. If you haven’t had a scary-back-alley-illegal-bloodsport-tournament type of experience then head down to Rose’s basement. Keep your eyes peeled, bring a friend, and expect to find some crazy stuff.