Bar top, Red Pine - Live edge, wormy and blue.
This red pine was removed along a fence line behind a client’s home and given new life as a custom bar top. The logs were milled into slabs, then carefully dried over several months to reach the right moisture content. Once fully dried, the slabs were hand-finished into a two-inch-thick custom bar countertop. This piece was solid, durable, and built to be the centerpiece of a basement bar for decades to come.
A fun bit of biology: This particular log had gorgeous "wormy blue" character running through it. It manifests as streaks of blue-gray color and fine tunneling patterns in the grain. That look comes from bark beetles that had taken up residence in the log, introducing a symbiotic fungus as they burrowed and laid eggs. As the beetles moved through the wood, fungal spores spread through the sapwood, staining it that signature bluish-gray to blue-black color. It's a completely natural process, and purely cosmetic. The blue staining doesn't affect the strength or structural integrity of the wood at all, which meant I could let this character shine rather than mill it away.