Reclaiming wood from discarded furniture

Hardwood is really a lovely material to make things from. Warm to touch, tough, fragrant when cutting. Lovely. Here's some. mmm...

Of course, it is not cheap though.

If you want to make stuff from lovely hardwood, the expensive option would be to buy baulks of it.

However, even now, it is possible to find furniture that has surprisingly large amounts of hardwood in it. All the above was reclaimed from stuff found in the street

Typically it tends to be in any furniture where the wood is the feature (yes, Sherlock, really). You certainly won't find decent wood in any upholstered modern furniture like sofas. Most of them luxury sofas you see on telly are actually chipboard under the leather/cloth.

So while walking Betty pug recently I came across a knackered section of what I think used to be an outdoor garden bench. It looks fucked, but actually it is made of really sound and very good dense hardwood. Something like teak (possibly even real teak, but it's hard to say)

I deconstructed it...

thus...

This was easy as largely it was held together with screws...
These were reclaimed too. This looks like some giant hand from above

Anyway, it yielded all this wood..

Here is another abandoned piece of old furniture I spotted while tootling down to Tescos for some exercise. 

To be honest, it is not an especially nice design, but it did have some 1.8m lengths of hardwood in it...

I really only wanted the long bits, but there was a load of other pieces...

After putting these through the planer, they magically transform into beautiful timber
Here is before and after (actually after and before if you are looking left to right) of the bench planks

 The long ones in the middle are the long pieces from the sofa frame

Close up. The wood looked dark because it was stained. It is actually quite light once planed