Community Creatives – West County’s artist underground | Bohemian

By Mark Fernquest

It is a brilliant and cloudy spring day in West County. I’m waiting for my neighbor, Marc Lepp, 68, to decide me up. He life just down the highway. He has a sawmill set up close by and wishes to give me a tour.

I’m intrigued to locate out about this venture with which he and two of his good friends are included. Lepp pulls up in a ’91 Toyota minivan, which has the unique vibe of a effectively-made use of utility car, and we set off. Initial cease, his home, to hook up a tailored, multipurpose trailer that is greatly laden with numerous huge logs. Then we move on down the road.

As a baby, Lepp lived in various components of the place before attending college or university in Washington and ending up in Sonoma County in 1979. Now he’s a retired standard contractor with mechanical aptitude and a resourceful urge. He purchased his gasoline sawmill two many years ago and commenced milling scavenged wood with it, together the way including two companions to the strictly-for-pleasurable undertaking. Now it’s a job the 3 of them have interaction in all through their spare time.

The lumber is utilized in numerous ways by Lepp. “I began earning benches, wood chairs and picnic tables from the get-go, with the wooden that can cope with it—redwood, doug fir,” he states. “I am also a welder and a mechanic, and I have designed ‘rocking wooden benches,’ utilizing leaf springs from pickup trucks as legs. I have crafted saunas, and I make nearly all my buildable lumber.”

He just lately made an arrangement with the owner at the Concealed Forest Nursery in Sebastopol, and his “rocking wood benches” and slicing boards are for sale there.

We generate for a couple of minutes down Sebastopol’s rural again roads, then pull down a extended, shaded grime driveway and park. Eric Spillman, 62, is waiting around for us at the mill alone. In truth, it’s his land. Immediately after a transient introduction, the two guys get to do the job supplying me a demonstration.

The mill is portable—small by professional benchmarks. In reality, the mill and Lepp’s trailer are each 10 ft 3 inches extensive, limiting all logs to that duration. The milling system is created as simple as feasible by advantage of the point that Lepp’s tailor made trailer and parking location make it possible for the two males to just about effortlessly roll weighty logs up more than the lip of the trailer bed utilizing cant hooks and then roll them down the hill, specifically onto the mill. They then placement every single log in accordance to its sizing and shape, slash its sides off and lower unique boards to the preferred thickness.

They end up with stunning slabs of wooden, as effectively as fully milled lumber, together with 2x4s and 2x6s. Drying lumber from trees of all kinds is stacked about us in carefully laid-out piles. Wooden sticks, identified as “stickers,” act as spacers concerning the planks, which are coated and still left to dry for a person yr for each inch of thickness.

Originally from Oregon, Spillman is now a 30-calendar year resident of Sonoma County, exactly where he runs a regional branding and style and design company called Sevenfold Resourceful. In his spare time, he enjoys coming up with and making leisure/enjoyment regions like saunas, sleeping quarters and furnishings, making use of the lumber he and Lepp mill. “The natural beauty of a cellular mill,” he states, “is that you can reverse-engineer matters, making use of what you have obtain to to produce things, as properly as say goodbye to standard lumber dimensions.”

We say farewell as he and Lepp drop plywood sides onto the lumber trailer so that Lepp can pick up a load of manure from a local chicken farmer later. Then Lepp drives residence, dropping me off along the way.

The 3rd “partner” in the enterprise, Ryan Dauss, 42, is yet another neighbor of mine. I prevent by his location to say hello there as I make my way down the very long driveway on which we equally stay. A Hoosier by birth, Dauss arrived in Sonoma County in 2010 while driving to Oregon, and hardly ever left. A builder by trade, he at times scouts and hauls wood with Lepp. The planks they mill become oiled tabletops and bar tops adorning his expansive deck and backyard, making for magnificent dinners with loved ones and friends—dinners his spouse, Mckenzie, cooks up.

My interest in this grass-roots milling challenge starts with my very own imaginative upcycling procedure, which consists of riveting rusty bits of scavenged metal onto 50-year-outdated leather-based ammunition pouches and classic welding jackets, turning them into Mad Max-model costume pieces. I also have interaction in a person-off creative projects, these types of as carving a pair of sandals out of a junked trailer tire, and emptying a classic transistor radio of its factors and providing it as a woman’s clutch. Recently, I designed numerous submit-apocalyptic fake-weapons out of rusty outdated barb-wire-wrapped  cultivator claws, employing hand-minimize sticks for handles. The kicker: They are nonetheless fully practical hand cultivators.

But beyond upcycling—that is, supplying everyday living to old components or downed logs—I am intrigued by how the inventive course of action for Lepp, Spillman, Dauss and me spreads wide, to encompass other components, other initiatives, other persons and places, and how it weaves alone into the bigger neighborhood, generally in the shadow of “commerce.” Lepp salvages fallen wooden from individuals who need to have it hauled absent, and he, Spillman and Dauss mill it and repurpose it into lumber to build with, but there is a lot more.

Take Spillman. Two little houses are parked on his land. When I inquired about them, he told me, “I’ve normally fantasized about ducking out of fashionable lifestyle to are living remotely and create factors from what is accessible on-website. I’m now constructing an off-the-grid established of cellular cabins to ‘drag and drop’ in possibly rural Montana or Wyoming, with the plan of relocating just about every couple many years. The huge one for lounging, sleeping and having the scaled-down for bathing, bathroom and utilities. These fellas are wooden siding within and out.”

A guy just after my very own heart.

And Dauss is a learn gleaner and craftsman who plies Craigslist, flea marketplaces and roadsides for cost-free and low-cost resources with which to establish purposeful artwork. His two most up-to-date creations—“Betty,” a vardo small-property-on-wheels, and a strikingly artistic camper shell called “The Transformer” that sits on the again of his Toyota Tacoma—lay squarely in his driveway. Both campers are built principally out of scavenged elements.

Betty, sheathed in wooden, corrugated rusted metal and copper—and sporting a porthole and a fiberglass roof—has a nautical-steampunk appear. Her exquisite interior features a very small lavatory with composting bathroom and shower, a kitchen sink and propane stove, a backup wood-burning stove, a convertible dinette and a sleeping system with accompanying bay window.

The Transformer is more compact, and by some means extra eye-catching. Its exterior is composed of a dizzying array of supplies, such as copper and brass sheeting, brass portholes and fixtures, wooden with a Shou Sugi Ban complete, colored glass and a fake-grass rooftop deck. The beautiful skill with which Dauss hand-slice the unique materials—in mirror-graphic, for each sides as it were—is not shed on me. The levels of meticulously hand-formed wood and metal are mounted collectively with copper nails, hinges, screws, bolts, welds and rivets.

The Transformer, with fold-up sides and slide-out interior drawers, features as the two a camper and a perform truck. Men and women quit to question inquiries and consider shots anywhere Dauss drives it. What camper will he dream up subsequent?

And Lepp himself doesn’t just sell his milled-wooden wares he designed 30 slicing boards final Christmas and handed them out as gifts, investing in his pals, so to discuss. Then there’s his son, Isak, who recently reworked a vintage camping trailer into a moveable sauna up in Portland. Even my possess wasteland pouches get offered, traded or gifted to friends and strangers at write-up-apocalyptic festivals in the desert Southwest.

These silent undercurrents movement beneath the mainstream in a area in which trade typically replaces cash, creative imagination is the relocating pressure, and the place friendship is the basis for organic and natural community. So, exactly where does worth lie?

Marc Lepp 707.292.1575 [email protected]

Concealed Forest Nursery, 3970 Azalea Lane, Sebastopol. 707.823.6832. www.hiddenforestnursery.com

Eric Spillman [email protected], www.sevenfoldinc.com, www.beaver-bros.com

Ryan Dauss, Builder instagram.com/Wagontales_withbetty [email protected]