Revealing the Wood Beneath

About two weeks ago, our carpenters came by our house and removed all our door panels for restoration. After stacking them carefully on a truck, they whisked (okay, more like sputtered) them away to the wood shop.

Since that time, two guys have been appointed the task of restoring our doors. Not only have years of caked on paint been painstakingly stripped away by hand, but major cracks and chips have also been treated with new wooden implants.

Tomorrow, our doors will get three coats of primer, with a round of hand sanding in between. They will then be wrapped up and put in storage until we are ready and able to pick their ultimate paint color.

As standard residential-grade paints tend to wear very quickly in this climate, our doors will be painted with industrial automotive paint. In case you’re wondering, they won’t be new-car shiny. Instead, we are selecting a matte finish in keeping with the rest of the house.

Like Designers in a Candy Store

We are giddy today. We stopped by this morning to check out our first delivery of tzalam wood.

Stacked together, the wood looks almost deceptively like mahogany or even cedar. But put it through a planer, and this is what you get:

Note the beautiful dark grain and the nice chocolate tones. It is definitely in a class of its own. Now all we have to do is wait two months for the wood to be properly dried - a process that is frequently skipped among other carpenters with ensuing problems. Once dried, the production of our cabinetry, wood flooring and furniture can begin.

Working the World of Wood

While negotiating our way through the permitting process for our house, we’ve been spending a lot of time investigating wood.

Since our house will be painted white throughout, the primary source of color and texture will come from our garden as well as key pieces of wood furniture that we’re having custom made.

To that end, we are choosing our wood based on a few key criteria:

1. The wood must be able to withstand the heat and humidity;
2. It must be able to resist wood-destroying pests, like termites;
3. It must play well with our other key materials including steel, terracotta and limestone; and
4. It must be beautiful to look at and complement other second-hand pieces we’ve acquired.

Finding a pest-resistant wood that works well in the climate typically means choosing a hardwood, preferably one available in the region. Choices here include cedar (often used to make colonial doors), pucte (a hardwood from South America that is yellowish in color), American poplar, tzalam, and a few others.

The above image shows a box made from Ziricote and a plank of American poplar sitting on a mahogany table.

Ziricote is an incredibly hard local wood. Popular for making small items, such as the box above, it’s too rare and expensive to use in our house. Poplar on the other hand is cheaper but ruled out because it’s too pale.

Amazingly, our wood guy says that mahogany is technically a soft wood, but due to its natural resistance to termites and other pests, it also works exceedingly well in this climate. It’s a popular choice for cabinetry here in the Yucatan. We are ruling it out, however, as it’s a bit too red for our tastes. 

This image shows pucte (the lighter wood) and a reddish hardwood whose name we can’t recall that is similar in color to mahogany. We really like pucte and would love to use it in our house. Used primarily in boat building, it’s not a common choice for cabinetry. We love it because of how well it goes with our terracotta and crema maya tiles (shown above).

Unfortunately, our wood guy had a tough time sourcing pucte, and suggested another wood instead called tzalam. Similar to pucte, we love the grain and feel its varied yellow-to-brown tones will keep our house feeling warm without feeling overly hot (something we find happens when there’s too much mahogany around). The dark chocolate grains will also complement the dark steel that will be used for accents and structural support.

Tzalam, our choice for wood.

With our choice made, its time to put some money down and get some in our hands. Although we won’t start building our furniture for months, it’s important to get it now so that it has sufficient time to dry and shrink before our furniture guy starts cutting.

A Teak Affair

Our lofty ambition is to buy second-hand hardwood furniture for our house as our renovation happens. To assist us in this, a new store importing antique furniture from India has opened in town called Puerta al Este (calle 60 between 45 & 47).

Much of the store is filled with pared-down simple teak furniture (durable and termite proof). There are no painted elephants, sacred cows or statues of Vishnu - just stuff that fits well with the colonial aesthetic of Mérida.  A good example is the set of drawers pictured above that will serve as a small credenza in our dining room.

To say this place is a godsend is an understatement. We have been in and out of the store over the last two weeks buying up a storm. Every time we go in we say “no more”, but end up walking away with something in hand.

Our best find (so far) is a three-meter-long bench made of solid teak that seems destined for our eat-in kitchen (incredibly, we were stressing over whether we would find or manufacture said bench just last week). Right now, it is working as a makeshift closet.

Also pictured above, in case you were wondering, is an antique rat trap that has received some very puzzled expressions when viewed by our friends.