Kintsugi-ish

 

Pictured are the sorry remains of the [now wood-]shed door, held on the bench by my refurbished wood-vice [both projects covered in blog posts passim]. As you can see, it wears the scars of my neglect rather sadly and obviously on its sleeve, so to speak. I was planning to build a new door altogether: I have made a fair number of doors over the years, so apart from the cost of the timber, the doing of it wouldn't have been any particular problem, and I rather enjoy the process, anyway. However, I've got a soft spot for the poor old thing: me and my mate built this shed over twenty years ago, one afternoon. Sadly, the shed outlived him, unfortunately, so I'm going to include as much of the original door in the repair as possible.

It will also reflect my general sense of the aesthetic qualities of the old and worn, the travelled, and the well-lived. At my age that's as much a statement of intent as anything else, I guess. As you can see, I've removed the very worst of the rotted boards from the latch side [top], which I'm going to replace with a single piece of [rather too chunky, but it was all I could find] pressure-treated rough-sawn, six-inch board, which will be the anchor for the rest of the repair. On the hinge side I need a fillet of about two to three inches of the same. As to the remaining rot, I'm drying the whole thing out on the bench, after which I'll stabilise and fill the worst gaps, so that the new bits can fixed in place. As to the finish, I'll take a view on how agricultural I leave it when I've made it stable.

The Japanese have a thing called Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold: emphasising and celebrating the faults repaired. I've always loved this idea, and although there won't be any gold in this repair - or indeed much in the way of ceramics - I hope that some of the spirit of the life of the shed can be captured for a while; at least until the place meets its final end...