Rose Gum stairs

After milling our Rose Gum into flooring, (see our last post) as well as wall paneling, posts and beams, and slabs, (we’ll blog about these later) it may have seemed there was little more to be got from it.

There were only the smaller limbs left (for a seemingly endless supply of firewood!) and the flitches – the curved outside edges of the logs- which are mostly discarded. These seemed too good to waste.  

I’d seen this picture of a staircase using flitches as treads,

so we decided we could use our flitches for the stair treads in the new cabin. One of the smaller Rose Gum branches was installed as a support at the end of the stairwell. We ordered a steel stringer with three winder steps at the top from Uprite Steel. 

Russell then carefully cut, leveled, sanded and fitted the flitches to the steel tread supports. This is the result. 

The recycling continues, as some other smaller bits of the Rose Gum will be incorporated into the railings.

Recycling - timber and slate

Before we built our house and new cabin we had to fell some of the huge Rose Gums near the edge of the forest. These trees had been planted some 40 years ago as plantation timber, and we wanted to reuse as much of the timber as possible.

We had the trees milled onsite by a mobile Lucas Mill, then sent away for kiln drying and profiling into T&G wall linings and flooring. We planned to use the flooring in our new cottage.

Then last  year we bought a little rental house (and future holiday cottage) in Mount Glorious. Hidden in the garden we found a large quantity of old slate tiles. They didn’t look too great, but we found that it wasn’t hard to clean them up, and beneath the dirt was a lovely range of colours. We thought they would be an excellent choice for the entry and the hearth in the new cottage. 

Rose Gum Cottage now has its Rose Gum floors and slate tiles, and we're pretty pleased with the result.

While the actual economic viability of milling your own timber is debatable, we're now planning all sorts of other uses for the Rose Gum. But both these subjects are for later posts!