If the rest of our lumber is $4.50 a board foot, cherry would be $7.50 a board foot.” Black cherry we buy at a premium and sell at a premium. “In Nova Scotia we get a ton of yellow birch, red maple and sugar maple, so we’re always milling and selling those species. Lisa Pavelak, co-owner of The Hardwood Tree, uses a jointer at her Cooks Brook operation on Tuesday, Nov. So, it’s a really local network of businesses.
#Cooks sawmill drivers#
“They manage woodlots for farmers, so it’s a nice cycle of the farmers getting money for their wood, then we’re paying Conform…and the truck drivers are local as well. “They’re ecologically sustainable, they don’t clear-cut just because someone wants them to,” Shapleigh said. in Middle Musquodoboit, because it’s close and because the two companies share business values. Most of the logs The Hardwood Tree adds value to are bought from Conform Ltd. That pays our bills, this stuff in (the woodworking shop) is bonus.” “I get a few hobbyists that come in for a few pieces of wood, but I get contractors who come in for a truck full, it might be $3,000 worth.
But our hardwood starts at $4.50 a board foot,” said Pavelak. “This summer we could sell softwood for $1.50 a board foot so it was worth it for us to do. Now the business is focused on hardwood, which is more profitable and demands less volume. “We started out to do woodworking and we became a production mill, which wasn’t what we wanted,” Shapleigh said. That business became so busy so fast they had to hire a bunch of people, and Pavelak found herself in human resources and payroll, not her idea of a relaxing retirement project. “Say if you wanted something different…you were restoring an old farmhouse and the boards are two and a quarter inches thick,” Pavelak said. They started milling softwood, making things like studs and deck boards, and became “incredibly busy” providing custom cuts unlike what than the big box stores sold. Add a kiln and “it turned out to be a lot bigger than I expected.” They also agreed it would be even better to mill their own lumber, and then make things out of that lumber. “He said that would be a fun retirement thing for us to do and I said I’d love that, even though I didn’t know anything about building. “I didn’t know he had any skill in woodworking,” she said. The original plan for the business was woodworking only, a plan born when Pineo build a desk for his Halifax law office that Pavelak thought was much nicer than an expensive dining room table they’d just bought. James Shapleigh, sawyer at the Hardwood Tree, uses a Wood-Mizer LT50 bandsaw at his family's sawmill in Cooks Brook on Tuesday, Nov. The Wood-Mizer lets Pavelak and Shapleigh take what they consider to be an artisanal approach to turning eight-foot logs into rough-sawn kiln-dried lumber.
#Cooks sawmill portable#
A lot of people who have mills, they’re portable and they’ll bring them on a trailer to your place. And we wanted to work year-round, so that’s why we built the building around it. “A lot of portable mills are gas powered and we didn’t want that. “We wanted it indoors, not outdoors,” Pavelak said. The star of the electric mill is the Wood-Mizer LT50, apparently the Cadillac of bandsaws. The pasture land exists because trees were cut down to keep hunters from coming too close to the shop (see above: ‘world away from downtown’). The family started putting up the buildings here in 2014. If not for the fact it holds horses, goats and chickens it could be rented out as a jail. Made from lumber harvested on the property, this barn is square, true, solid and tight. On land that was granted to Pineo’s great-great-great-grandfather for serving with the British army in the American revolution sits a retail shop, a work shop, the building that houses the mill, a turkey pen, horse pasture and the barn that existed for decades only in Pineo’s mind. Husband and wife Rob Pineo and Lisa Pavelak own the business, which also employs son James Shapleigh.
The Hardwood Tree is a sawmill and woodworking shop in Cooks Brook, an hour and a world away from downtown Halifax. The barn doesn’t really have anything to do with the business, except for how it represents a commitment to a way of doing things.
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