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Walter Keener (left) and his father, Robert Keener, of Oswego stand beside a new cedar bench they were test fitting wood pieces for on Thursday. Behind them is the first bench they made, fashioned from a cottonwood tree they cut down to allow the sun to hit their solar panels. In the last few months the father/son duo have made about 12 benches from different woods as word has spread of their work.

Colleen Williamson/Sun photo

Keeners’ new creations use wood with a story to share

By Colleen Williamson cwilliamson@parsonssun.com

OSWEGO — Robert Keener was not allowed to live with his wife in assisted living and he wasn’t allowed to live by himself, so he had to pick who he was going to live with. 

He chose his son and daughter-in-law in Oswego, Walter and Beverly Keener.

“Whenever he came to live with us, he was using a walker and taking a handful of pills, and he was real skinny then,” Walter said.

Two years later, the senior Keener, who is getting ready to turn 89, is taking only a couple of medications, is walker free and has helped his son with a house remodel. Robert is also working with Walter in a hobby through which they are selling the creations to help the cover costs.

Robert is a retired truck driver. Walter is three years retired from working in human relations at Power Flame, so they are both wide open to what the days can bring them.

“This is the bench that started it all, right there,” Walter said, pointing to one sitting against the house, facing the south in the morning sun, its wood planks a light golden blonde.

“This was a cottonwood tree growing over there,” he said, pointing to the east side of his home. “When we put solar on our house, the cottonwood blocked it, so I cut it down. I just hated to throw the wood away, so I built that, and people fell in love with it, and that’s what started it all.”

It wasn’t long before a few more cottonwoods and a cedar were felled. They built a greenhouse from the wood and a playhouse for the grandchildren.

“It wasn’t that they just said they were going to start building benches, but they built one, the kind that changes from a bench into a picnic table, and he decided he was going to post it and see if anybody would take it,” Beverly said.

Walter said that the company that makes the structural rosin for the legs he used for the first bench he built also made a table bench.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to try that, too,’ because back 40 years ago I had made one out of wood that we had for 30 years. That was a bench and table both,” Walter said.

Shortly after they finished it, Robert prodded Walter into posting the bench online.

“He and I were out on a trip and we were sitting in the van doing nothing and he said, ‘Why don’t you sell that bench?’ I said, ‘Oh, nobody will buy it.’ He bet they would. Then I said, ‘OK, I will put too high of a price and put it on Facebook.’ And how long did it take to sell? Ten or 15 minutes,” Walter recalled. “It was sold.

“And more than one person wanted it, and he had to say, ‘Sorry. It’s already sold,’” Beverly added.

The two men decided they should make more benches to sell, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit and they could not get the rosin parts they needed. By the time the rosin parts were available, it was only a few weeks until Oswegofest. Having decided to show them at the festival, Walter and his father went about building close to a dozen benches of different kinds of wood. 

At first they used a chainsaw to cut wooden planks for the benches, and then they invested in a small mill. They also invested in a small CNC machine to etch words and pictures into the boards, enabling them to customize benches with everything from wedding dates to scripture. As they use everything from cottonwood to walnut, they use spar urethane, which is a marine coating, to protect the wood, giving the benches a longer life because they will likely be outdoors and exposed to ultraviolet rays.

Their efforts to assemble what benches they could resulted in two bench sales and two special orders placed the day of the festival. Since then, other orders have come in as word has spread.

Opportunities continue to reuse/recycle wood from other things, such as church pews. With churches moving to chairs, pews are readily available. Walter said they can use some of the wood from the pews to make benches, but the inability to use some of that wood for those projects served to inspire him to come up with other projects.

He pulled out a pile of wooden trivets he has made. Each trivet has its own picture etched on the top, some with words. The small piece of converted pew could easily provide church goers a piece of their church’s history without trying to find a location for a 20 foot pew in their house.

“We’re trying to repurpose the pews,” Walter said. “I also want to make dining room tables out of church pews.”

Outside on a trailer was a stack of lightweight metal legs he designed and had welded. He will do the touch up work on them, then have them powder coated for a quality finish.

“I’m really excited to have the legs made, to be able to start making the tables,” Walter said.

Essentially, he said, it is just repurposing things that would get thrown away, which is something he has done through the years on a smaller scale.

Walter slipped away from the dining room table, disappeared through a doorway and in seconds returned holding a framed object.

He laid it on the table, revealing a 3-dimensional clock created around 30 years ago using several keys from an old piano. Pages from an old hymnal made up the collaged background.

“This piano was in our house that our kids played on for many years, and it could not be repaired any more so I tore it down,” he said.

“He made a clock like that for each one of the kids for Christmas,” Beverly said. “The kids love theirs because it is from a piano they used to practice on all while they were growing up. I love it, too, because it’s just unusual. You just don’t see anything like that.”

They gestured toward a clock on the dining room made from pieces of tile, and Robert said he had made it for them about 35 or 40 years ago.

A few minutes later Robert got up from the table and disappeared through the same doorway Walter had. He returned moments later with another clock, this one with the clock face made of worn, tooled, black leather. Walter said it was made from a bowling bag he had made for his father when he was 14 years old. His father had used it until it was worn and falling apart. With the memories tied to it, they decided to give the bag another life.

Several other items around the house were the result of repurposing through ingenuity. A piece of furniture remade into a secretary that converts to an armoire, and what was once a desk was repurposed into a small chest of drawers. Each item was reminiscent of a part of their lives.

Considering the price of wood right now, repurposing wood helps them cut down on costs for their projects while keeping things from heading to the landfill when they can serve a new purpose with a little imagination.

Given these new creations are made from items tied to memories of those who used them in accordance with their original purpose and design, Walter decided that he wanted the name for their hobby business to reflect that. He settled on Reminiscent Woods.

“Like we made these benches out of church pews, or a tree growing out of our yard, and they have some sort of memory, some sort of reminiscent feel to them, because they’ve got a history,” Walter said.

This week, Walter is working to get their webpage set up, remwoods.com.

“I’m excited,” Walter said. “You’ve got something you can’t get anywhere else.”

Just then his phone dinged. A message came through with a picture for another special order for a bench. 

“This is going to be cool!” Walter said, holding up the design so his wife could view what the customer had drawn out by hand. “I will take this and put it on the computer, blow it up and work on it and then put it on the CNC machine to engrave it into the wood.”

Making the benches is a fairly long process when it is done from freshly cut trees, given the planks, once cut, have to dry, or season, which takes about six months. Considering potential demand for their products, Walter said he is thinking about building a solar kiln.

“The kiln would not only serve to protect the wood, but the sun can dry it in 30 to 45 days. Then I will be able to take all this wood I’ve got and get it into production,” Walter said. “And, it doesn’t have any cost, because the sun does all the work.”

He doesn’t know what the future holds or what new products they may create next. He and his father are basically going with the flow, however God leads.

“I was an executive living behind a desk most of my life, so this is a beautiful world,” Walter said.