The eastern red cedar here.

Here's a huge, huge problem getting bigger all the time.

They grow so prolifically that they're just taking over the state of Oklahoma.

These these trees are consuming an an excess of what?

We're removing them 300,000 acres a year.

And they're assuming that by the year 230, 2013, there will be roughly 12.6 million acres consumed with this.

These eastern red cedars.

There are several hazards to the cedar tree grow.

One of them is the grazing land that's disappearing.

The ranchers, they're their problem, right there.

Their problem with their grazing land is to raise their cattle.

They need more area, and a cedar tree will consume the way it grows out.

You know, 30 to 50ft of of area and it blocks of sunlight.

You can't get anything to grow underneath it.

And it just.

And that spot that the cedar tree sitting in is not grazing land anymore.

In the last 12 years, the allergens produced by these juniper trees has tripled.

So you've got you've got a lot of health problems.

You've got fire hazards, you've got the grazing lands are being destroyed.

We're taking the, we're taking the cedar trees that nobody really has any use for.

And we're taking those and turn those into a product.

What we'll do when we go out and remove the tree is we really don't cut a tree down.

We we more dismantle that to anything else.

We'll go in and we'll cut our way into where we can see the whole tree at first.

And then we'll map out what we're going to use, what we're not going to use.

And a section of it will come instantly as a lamp.

Some, there will be sections that'll work as like a pedestal for a table.

We'll see maybe 5 or 6 projects in a tree.

And that helps us a lot, because it takes longer, really, to look the tree over and figure out how you're going to disassemble it than it does to actually work the chainsaw.

Once we cut the tree down, we'll go in and we'll take the different pieces that we've got to keep the load those up in the trailer we’ll take it to the shop.

We'll set those off to the side.

And actually, what we do is the primary phase is nothing.

We do absolutely nothing.

We like to age them just a little bit, at least the character pieces that we're using, because there's a little worm that makes tunnels between the bark and the, sap ring of the tree, and it just looks fabulous.

So those are our very best employees.

Once we've came in from the field, we'll take the pieces that we're going to use for the furniture, for the for the legs and what have you.

And we'll take those and let them start to season.

And the bigger material, the bigger stalks, the major portion of the tree.

We'll take those to our sawmill, which is on the same property, there in Blanchard.

It's not like a standard sawmill where you just feed logs and out comes the lumber.

It's a it's a bandsaw machine.

And what it is, is it's powered by a 20 horsepower Honda engine, and it's self-contained, and it has.

And it's set up on a, on a chassis in that chassis that that the, self-contained cutting head with a band and the motor and all the, all the gizmos will pass through the log rather than the log passing through and through the blade.

The curve, which is the thickness of the, of the, cut that you're making, is so much less we'll we'll waste maybe a 16th of a cut.

16th of an inch is about what we'll waste whenever we make each pass through there.

We don't waste anything.

We we try to find a purpose for every piece of that tree, at least as much as humanly possible.

I get started in this business, so I got interested.

Actually, some of the influence came from growing up in, Pismo Beach, California.

I worked at a at a resort, and they had hot tubs outdoors and redwood decks and platforms and everything, and I built those for quite a while growing up.

And they're a cooperage style hot tub that was made out of wood, and it was made out of redwood because of its rot resistance.

And I started looking up on the internet and doing a little research on the cedar.

And it, as well as see as, Redwood is, a rot resistant for moisture.

So we got the idea that we'd take all these unwanted trees and we'd manufacture cooperage style, not, see where the end of this piece here is and, yeah, taper this kind of down just a little bit, and we can end the piece here.

We started just kind of playing with it.

And my boys had, needed a bed.

Their mattress and box springs was on a mattress.

So I built them a bed and they helped me.

We all worked out in the yard.

We we built them two single size, log beds out of the cedar limbs that we'd accumulated from the tree.

But I really enjoyed the process of building the beds for the boys and wanted to expand on it a little bit.

So we built a queen size bed, and we worked with some other products, and we dabbled with this and dabbled with that.

And I still haven't built my first hot tub yet.

We have a we didn't we everything took off towards the furniture and people just really enjoyed the designs.

And I just was I was really proud that the materials had came from here, here in local Oklahoma.

The piece I'm working on now was a bench from the very beginning.

As soon as we cut it off of the, as soon as we cut this particular slab off of the, off the log, on with our sawmill, it had so much character, we just naturally that that had to be a a top.

When we bring pieces in here, we see.

We see all the time.

We'll see something that just jumps out at us.

There's just got to be a lamp or it's just got to be this or or, you know, we'll see pieces that just just light us up and they're just a lot of character and they're really, really cool.

But we don't know what we're going to do with them yet.

And I've had some I've had some stock that I've had for a year and a half to three years.

And all of a sudden we have that project and a lot of times we'll pick a piece up and size it up for something that we're going to use it for.

And for some reason or another, it just doesn't look right.

So we'll set it back and we'll go back to it.

And there's been pieces that I've gone to 20 or 30 times that I just haven't found that right project.

But then will come something will come along and it just fits in with the rest of the pieces that we're doing, and it just comes together.

It's all been trial and error.

It has been more trial and probably more error than it has trial.

I would I would venture to say, we've made more mistakes than we've done anyway, you know, but that's but that was okay.

We found out what wouldn't work.

And sometimes it's more important to find out what doesn't work than what.

That's because that's the only thing eliminated.

Yeah.

So this is this piece this, these pieces are going to turn out perfect because it's always best if you can match up all four legs.

And if they can come out of the same tree, you've got that congruent visual.

So we want to try and keep it the same way.

And these canyon cedars they stay pretty pretty solid in diameter.

So they don't taper off a lot like the like the hillside cedars.

So this is going to be work out great.

And it looks like it looks like the little worms have been out here making some tunneling.

So we should have some nice character on these pieces to.

We do all of our own mill work.

We bring them all in.

We have, we, do all of our planing, sanding, jointing.

We do Barkham, we, we do bark part of the pieces.

Some of the, some customers order them with the bark remaining.

But for the most part we do bark everything with water pressure.

And what we like to do is we'll go out there and in the conventional, the conventional style of barking, a log is with a drawer knife, a big knife with two handles on the end of it, and you bring it across the surface of the wood and you cut the bark off.

But that also eliminates some of that natural curvature and some of the knots and the creases.

And the different things need to actually flatten the wood out.

And that's what we're not trying to accomplish.

We're trying to accomplish, to get that pure character of the wood, the way it was growing with just the bark removed.

There's nothing that we won't build.

We've done interiors, we do trim.

We'll take our our materials, we'll trim out log cabins.

We'll, anybody that wants any of this rustic style or cedar style log furniture, we can go in and basically do the whole house.

The cedar works so well with a log home that if you don't do it, you're out of whack here.

And everybody who comes in loves the trim.

Oh, it's it's been phenomenal.

Everybody comes in.

Just loves it.

They just my son and daughter who are not country people at all.

They was raised in the city.

First thing they said, oh, we love the trim.

It's just it's outstanding.

The slab on the the bar was a phenomenal piece.

Of course, I wanted him to case it out as though it were a window.

And then the frame around the, French doors to the back porch.

That was his concept, to come up with the half trees, on either side.

And then I told him I would like a shelf across the top.

I've had that before.

And I wanted, of course, to put stuff up there.

I had plenty of stuff, so he created that.

So he had a lot of original ideas, and we just we just let him kind of flow with that.

It just it just escalated from one thing to the next.

But we're not we would if we had to do it again, we would do it again.

He he does a great job.

He's very good on detail.

He and and he's very particular because he some of the stuff is an artwork.

I can't draw a straight line.

I'm not an artist.

And or at least I never seen myself as one because I'd always seen certain mediums as art, sculpture, painting, that kind of thing.

And I didn't realize that what we were doing here really was art.

And we get that all the time.

And I didn't really think this was an art, but the more I got involved in it, the more I appreciated other mediums of art and started realizing what goes into art.

And really, we do pretty much the same thing as you do with a sculpture or a painting.

We continuously work on this project until it's right, you know, stroke by stroke, sanding, the placement of the pieces.

We'll use all these aspects and we'll arrange them in a certain way that that evokes an emotion.

And that's what you want is you want to build something that attracts people, that evoke some kind of an emotion.

And then the next emotion that you want to hopefully capture is to encourage the people to walk over and touch it.

That's the next big thing, you know.

Company.

Love the company.

I get hold of a Hempfield.

The thing about this is this is really cool.

It looks it looks good.

It's the it's very, very durable.

It'll never it'll never rot.

But the character probably is what draws me to it the most.

That looks great.

Now all we need to do is just turn it upside down, put it on the sawmill, level our legs to where it says completely perfect.

We'll be all set.

We'll be ready to sand it down for the final time and add our polyurethane.

It's going to be a great project, and I like that a lot better.

That's what we needed.

I don't have a clue where this ability comes from, to be real honest with you.

I would say probably more than anything a wild imagination, vines, anything at all.