The Really Rustic Furniture Story

It would be nice to be able to spin a yarn of a young unknown artist’s struggle for recognition against a sea of dissent; his latent artistic ability finally bubbling to the surface as the correct medium was discovered.  Unfortunately the truth is a little more mundane; ultimately it boils down to a Bed and Breakfast owner, and his inability to throw away anything that ‘might come in useful.’

As readers of this web-site might already know, our B&B is fuelled by a fairly swish wood-fired boiler and accumulator tank system. The system consumes a fair cubic meterage of wood each year, and visitors to Coed Cae will have seen that the splitting and stacking of logs is an integral component of life here.

As part of our ongoing quest to find wood to process for the boiler, we ended up buying a wagon load of saw-mill off-cuts to keep us going.  Unfortunately that’s when the problems began.  It was immediately obvious that the timber, sawn flat on one surface, half-rounded with bark on the other, and tens of feet long, was full of potential and possibilities.  ‘That’s too good to burn’ said one neighbour who had a short section to redo a garden bench, and ‘Postie’ had a pretty much identical conversation before he headed off with the new top for his barbeque table.  A third neighbour fancied his chances at building a new cattle pen, but I managed to head him off at the pass.

There was no getting around it, though; there really were some really useful bits of timber in the stack. It was about this time that we visited Woodfest, a fair celebrating all things wood, from chainsaw carving, through traditional woodland crafts, and on to lumberjack competitions.  On one of the stalls, we spotted some fairly basic garden benches, and on another we saw a plank-chair. “I could make one of those” went up the oh-so familiar call, and the rest is history.

We played around with the designs a little, coming up with a few styles we liked, though no two are ever really the same. The tables were a later addition, initially in response for our need for a small outdoor one at the B&B.

Some Really Rustic items are available in Grug Studio in Dolgellau town centre and we generally have a few of each design in stock at Coed Cae so that visitors have a choice if they fancy one. We keep them in one of the empty log-sheds…….Ahh, I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing!