The Barnwood Chandelier

Old wood, new light

What is it?

This is one of the early “decorative” pieces we made back in 2017 for a breakfast nook. It leverages a support beam from a 125 year old barn, steel rail used for the barn’s sliding doors, and some lights we picked up at the local Big Green hardware store. The finish is polycrilic to give it a solid, but natural feel.

What did we learn?

This was a tricky project because about 25% of the outer shell of the beam was either rotted or damaged by fire. But that was what gave this piece of wood so much depth and character, so we wanted to keep that. In hindsight, there are a dozen , more effective ways we could have approached working with this wood. What we did at the time was to saturate the wood with layer after layer of polycrilic and ensure the steel on top, and long screws for the lights, were bearing all of the weight.

In Closing…

In the end, it was a beautiful piece that received a lot of compliments. It was passed on to future owners and, to this day, we are not sure if it is still a part of that house. God often provides us resources from surprising places. In this case, it was a collapsed barn. We did make several products from the materials of this barn, including a table.