It’s not every day you stumble across a piece of desert ironwood (Olneya tesota) of such striking size and complexity. I couldn’t turn down the offer from a coworker to take home this ironwood section and find some use for it.  It took four people to load it into my car; it took one person, now with back pain, to offload it. Ironwood is a desert wood notorious for being one of the hardest and heaviest woods in the world and is also known to be not so friendly to your carbide tips. Ironwood’s heartwood is rich in toxic chemicals that make it extremely rot-resistant — that’s right, non-biodegradeable wood! (Well, persisting up to 1,600 years.)

I’m still undecided on how to repurpose this — chair or table or something else? But whatever it becomes, “It will be on wheels,” says…my lower back.