Wood, Craigslist, and Train Stations

My quest for siding has taken a new twist.  As the building evolves, I'm developing the irrational need to infuse it with character.  And that seems to be evolving into materials with stories.  This continues.  I've been trolling Craigslist for siding and came across a post that included the image to the right. The cost was 100 dollars.  It turns out this really nice person was cleaning out a small barn in order to put a house on the market, but I arrived too late. There was a woman there who seemed to be involved in great camp renovation who had already offered him 300 dollars to assure the sale.  I hunted around and with great disappointment, and asked the owner to give me a call if there was anything left over.  Two days later, I got the call.  She bailed. He offered it to me for the original price.

 His storage barn was moved to its current site in the last 1950's.  It was an outbuilding for the original Lake Clear train station constructed circa 1891.  The wood inside?  It was reclaimed from the main station that was torn down at the same time. The picture does little justice to the volume of wood. It is stacked 20 feet long.  The bulk of it (perhaps 1500 square feet) is clear douglas fir, pulled from the floor of the building, but there is also wainscoting, trim wood, siding etc.  It will take 6-8 pickup loads to move it.  I am stacking and stickering the wood in my barn. The fir will be set aside for flooring in our new house when it is built.  I'm thrilled by a few things here.  One is that the flooring in my future house was milled in the 1890's. Two is that the flooring in my new house cost 100 dollars. Three, the various pieces of siding and wainscoting will give me the opportunity to get back to the process of siding my little beast of a building before the snow flies.

Lastly, the nicest thing about the whole process was meeting yet another friendly, interesting person. I'm heading over this weekend to pick up more wood, and to help the gentleman and his wife move some heavier things out of the upstairs of a garage.  People are amazing.

The train station, I believe, is in the top of this image.  I imagine the fir trees of this era were quite impressive. 

This is roughly one and a half truck loads. The longer pieces are stored in the rafters.  I haven't made a dent in the original pile at this point.