Beams from Bon

the old kitchen beams

We spent our Saturday shopping. Our main stop besides the obligatory Bricorama trip, was to go to the mountain village of Bon-en-Chablais to visit our wood guy, Messier Mumble. Messier Mumble is the raspy voiced sawmill owner, thin and very bent over for his 60 something years. We really aren't quite sure what he's saying half the time because he "talks into his mustache" as the French expression goes (love that expression... so colorful), and so we just go along with him nodding our heads up and down like dashboard doggies. We always lean in and bend our ears really hard for the PRICE QUOTE, which is usually surprisingly good, although we can never be sure if we've heard the mumble correctly. But, he has always supplied us with wood in the past at decent prices, so we often imagine the price is what we thought we heard. Usually it is.

It's not a real professional operation. He employs perhaps three guys, maybe four. There's always some species of cross breed dog running around in the mud, ready to play. And, the mill is cluttered with rusted tractor parts, huge tree trunks, and a mysterious, bright yellow machine which I presume does obscene things to innocent trees, it's very menacing. It's a scary little place actually which might make for a good crime scene in a murder mystery story. There are lots of large trap-door style holes all over the place covered in sawdust and leading to a sort of mysterious underground sawmill sub-pit. On our first visit to the sawmill last year, I almost fell into one of these traps. Messier Mumble seeing me stumble, turned quickly and said with a concerned look "GrumMMmm MummBReer Muunnnh Grummba" and pointed vaguely to the floors. I took this to mean "Oh madame do watch out for the randomly placed GIANT HOLES in the floors covered in sawdust. That particular one there is a doozie!" Or something like that. So now I'm a bit paranoid when we go there. I forbid Seb to walk around there with Baby S and I usually stay in the car myself when visiting now. I just have to look at Messier Mumble's posture to confirm my suspicion that even he himself has fallen into those traps a few times. Is it really so difficult to put a board over those things!

Sadly, we went to Bon to order the new beams for our kitchen. They are so lovely and old, but as you an see in the above photo they will require hours of sanding to remove the lead paint and grime. We normally don't mind doing this for the preservation of the house, but in this case they are structurally unstable in parts (see bumpy holes) and a little too "soft" when doing the screwdriver test (it goes pretty much through over half of the beams). So we decided on 10 new pine beams which we will somehow try to age a bit. This is a rather urgent project so we haven't got time to conduct a real elaborate aging technique. We aren't out to fool anyone anyway. We'd just like them to blend in with the house better than they will if they are newly milled. Since the kitchen will be open to the living area in the future, we want them to match the beams in the living room (pictured below) as much as possible.

We pick up our new beams next Saturday. Big progress is on the horizon! It's electrifying the air!!


seb did such a nice a nice job on these living room beams