Houzz Tour: Reclaimed Wood Fills a Third-Generation Craftsman’s Home

Raun Meyn comes from a long line of craftsmen. His grandfather was an architect and a cabinetmaker; his father a welder and gearhead who restored old cars. “I was always right there next to my dad grabbing tools,” Meyn says. His dad would also hoard old sheet metal and rusty angle iron behind their garage for a project that might come along. Meyn picked up on the habit, but instead of steel he scrounges, collects and traffics in reclaimed wood. Lots of it.

Meyn’s Chicago woodshop, housed in an artists’ incubator space called Bridgeport Art Center, is filled with old barn wood, beadboard and 100-year-old structural beams. He uses the material to make custom frames for art and mirrors, as well as custom furniture and feature walls for local homes and restaurants.

The Chicago home in which he lives with wife Morgan Lord, a journalist, an actor and an improvisationalist, is also filled with the results of his tinkering — custom framed art, a console made from Douglas fir, a feature wall covered in old siding, a birch and beadboard bunk bed and more. In his eyes, the older and grittier the wood, the better. “I’m drawn to decay and the wear and tear of stuff,” Meyn says. “A building halfway falling down covered in graffiti is beautiful to me.”

Houzz at a Glance
Location: Logan Square, Chicago
Who lives here: Raun Meyn, a custom framer and woodworker, and Morgan Lord, a journalist, an actor and an improvisationalist
Size: 1,000 square feet (92.9 square meters); 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom

Meyn and Lord’s home was a typical 1990s remodel with run-of-the-mill cabinetry and basic finishes. They thought about moving, but with the market value of homes in the Logan Square community increasing as new coffee shops and restaurants popped up around them, they decided to stay put and make it their home.

Meyn made many of the furnishings in the living room. He framed the mirrors on the wall in mosaic scrap pieces of old trim, floorboard and molding. The mirrors hang over a record console that he built from reclaimed Douglas fir that sits on rusted cast iron legs from an old stove. On top of the console sit vintage Appalachian clay whiskey jugs.

For the coffee table, he added a wood panel from the inside of an old door to an old metal pedestal topped with glass.

The couple’s dog, Huckleberry, named for Huckleberry Finn, sits on a chair the couple found at an antiques mall in Aurora, Illinois.



For the side table next to the multicolored chair, Meyn cut an old telephone pole to size, then sanded and sealed it. Below the window sits an antique milking stool from North Carolina covered in paint and milk. “It’s very old and rickety and perfect,” Meyn says.

He added the bluish-gray pine siding panels from an old house to the window frames. The porcelain pull-chain sconces are from the 1920s. The blue chair to the right is one of Meyn’s favorite pieces of furniture. He and Lord found it at a local thrift store.


Above the electric fireplace hangs a large 5-by-5 beam that once was a porch support for an old house. It shows layers of five or six different colors of paint added to it over decades.

On the far left of the mantel sits a family heirloom sculpture depicting a hollowed-out tree trunk that Meyn’s father made from a piece of iron. The painting is a paint-by-numbers piece on felt that Meyn bought at Woolly Mammoth and framed in redwood from an old Chicago water tower.

To the right is an old set of Russian nesting dolls with most of the paint and lacquer peeled off. “It’s the perfect combo of dilapidation and bright color,” Meyn says. Al, the couple’s cat with 11 claws, loves to knock them over.



Meyn fashioned the dining table from an old workbench that someone used while fixing up an old motorcycle. He trimmed the legs to get it down to table height and added a piece of blue trim around the bottom. He then cleaned, sanded and sealed it in Polycrylic. “I could make something that looks like it with old wood, but it’s cool that it was actually used,” he says.

The lamp is a miniature potbelly cast iron stove the couple had in a retail store they once operated. It sat in their store for two years. “It was meant to be in our home,” he says. “The stuff we loved in our shop stuck around for some reason and eventually came home with us.”

The lighter grayish-blue pieces on the reclaimed-wood feature wall came from the same house siding as the window panels, and are mixed with sun-bleached pieces from an old barn. When creating a feature wall, Meyn often draws on the studies for his degree in graphic design to play with the layout, color and symmetry.

He says he never glues boards to walls, preferring thin finishing nails. Since his reclaimed-wood boards don’t come from a manufacturer, but rather from old homes and barns, Meyn removes all the nails himself, then runs them through a planer before squaring them with a jigsaw.

The chairs are vintage school chairs.





Meyn built the record stand from old-growth Douglas fir, leaving its unstained natural chocolatey-brown color. The unit, which holds the couple’s extensive collection of classic rock, punk, dub, country and psychedelic rock records, serves as a separator between the kitchen area and the front entryway.

The wooden head on the shelf is an old milliner’s form from a 1920s or ’30s Chicago hat shop.






Meyn framed a large hallway mirror in wood from an old door he had lying around. He and Lord call this their dog wall, because the boxes that Meyn built hold little dog-themed trinkets and sculptures.

You can see a snippet of the kitchen to the left of the mirror. The couple is in the process of replacing the cabinets. Lord’s mother gave them the butcher block island. It was cracked and splitting, and the legs weren’t attached, but Meyn brought it back to life in his woodshop.


What Meyn calls a feather board hangs above the couple’s bed. He made it by piecing together panels taken from the interiors of old doors.

Feather pillow: Target





A bunk bed built by Meyn from reclaimed birch and blue beadboard has turned the other bedroom into a guest room, an office for Lord and a soon-to-be nursery. Meyn made the custom frames for the art pieces. The desk is an old drafting table; the chair is a bent-plywood model given to Meyn by a friend.


Here’s Meyn in his Chicago workshop. “I have always been into building and making stuff, and have had a fondness for old junk,” he says.

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