How BIGintheSKY was born.

My family enjoys woodworking, but the price of gorgeous, thick-cut, live-edge wood to use in the projects we dream of building has always held us back. Because the retail cost of really amazing wood is crazy expensive! So when a large red oak on our property was threatening to take out a power line, we decided to put the wood to good use. We invested in a Granberg Alaskan Chainsaw Mill -- and a really powerful chainsaw to run it -- then spent the next two months (working on the weekends) milling that tree into slabs. It was a slow process, but each new slab revealed color and pattern better than the one before it. We were hooked!

There was a steep learning curve; moving heavy logs without machinery, getting the mill set up correctly, and figuring out how to run a huge professional grade chainsaw were just the beginning of the challenges we faced. But the results we got from milling our own lumber were definitely worth the trouble because the slabs we got from our beautiful red oak were gorgeous!

While we were cutting and dreaming and making grand plans for what we'd do with our fresh-milled slabs, something unexpected happened. Our neighbors started stopping by to watch the process, and some of them would ask to buy the slabs -- as fast as we could cut them -- to make signs for their shops, their game rooms, and their gardens. Others asked if we could cut bigger pieces to use in building heavy rustic furniture, or in various aspects of home building. Fairly quickly, three truths became clear to us:

1. Craftsmen wanted to work with wood milled locally, from trees harvested locally.
2. We really enjoyed the milling process and wanted a way and means to keep doing it.
3. Our little Alaskan chainsaw mill was too slow and too limited in use to mill the larger pieces that people want to use in bigger projects like home building.

So we took a deep breath and made a big investment in our wood-milling plans by upgrading our equipment. We bought a Wood-Mizer LX25 band saw mill.

With our new band saw mill (and a few other key pieces of equipment) we can work faster, and the resulting slabs, beams, and cookies have a finer cut without the marks that are left behind by even the best chainsaw. Plus, a large, track-mounted cutting machine is a lot of fun to operate. But bigger, better equipment is expensive and has to find a way to pay for itself.

So, BIG in the Sky was born. And we were on our way.