We try to stay in contact with tree surgeons and ask them to let us know if they have any particularly large trees which are coming down. In this particular case this elm was adjacent to the road and some of the branches had started to die back and the council had ordered it down. We arranged to buy the tree and have it collected by a lorry with a suitably large Hiab to lift the log. It was then taken to a sawmill and milled to our specification.
We have since received the boards back from the sawmill and now the time has come to load them into the kiln to be dried slowly.