I Turned a Piece of Reclaimed Lumber Into a Flower Vase and Didn’t Expect It to Look Like This
I did not plan to make décor. I had a short piece of reclaimed lumber left from another project and no clear use for it. The wood was solid, squared, and heavy, with visible wear from its previous life.
It stayed on the workbench longer than it should have.
At some point, drilling into it seemed easier than storing it again.
Why I Used Reclaimed Lumber
New lumber is uniform. Straight edges. Even color. It disappears once it is finished.
This piece did not. The surface was rough in places and smooth in others. The color shifted from dark to warm depending on the angle. One end showed deeper wear than the rest.
I did not try to correct any of that. I worked around it.
What I Made From It
I drilled a straight row of holes along the top and placed glass test tubes inside. No shaping. No trimming. Just enough work to hold the glass upright.
Once the tubes were in place, the block stopped looking like leftover material.
It started reading as an object.
What the Result Actually Looks Like
The combination of thick wood and clear glass pushes the piece firmly into farmhouse territory.
Not modern. Not minimal. Rustic, but controlled.
The wood dominates visually. The glass recedes. Even with flowers in place, the stems do not distract from the block itself.
On a table or shelf, it reads as:
- heavy
- grounded
- handmade
Single stems make it look older rather than decorative. The piece looks better slightly imperfect than fully filled.
How a Single Piece of Lumber Turns Farmhouse-Rustic
This started as a plain block of reclaimed lumber and required very little work, but once the holes were drilled and the glass added, it stopped reading as leftover wood and began to read as farmhouse-rustic. The weight, the aged grain, and the unrefined edges do most of the work on their own, turning a simple piece of lumber into something that looks established rather than handmade, which was not what I expected from such a small project.