Michael Cedoz.

Michael Cedoz has been turning wood for the better part of two decades, most of it alone, most of it after dark. Redbarn is the name on the door — a gambrel-roofed shop a few miles outside Mount Vernon, where the Kokosing cuts through Knox County and the oaks have opinions about weather.

The work begins where the tree ends. A neighbor calls about a windfall; a storm takes a limb off a fence-line cherry; a 100-year-old oak comes down for construction. What arrives on the trailer is rarely dimensional lumber. It's a log, with knots, with history, with a life it has already lived.

Everything that leaves the shop has been handled — milled, stacked, dried, re-stacked, planed, chiseled, sanded by the same pair of hands. There are no apprentices. There is no CNC. There is a kettle, a radio that mostly works, and two shop dogs — Kodiak and Lizzie — who supervise.

If you commission a piece, you'll know where the wood came from and, often, who last walked past the tree. That seems like the least a maker can do.

Most of the wood comes from right here in Knox County — fallen trees from storms, trees taken down for construction, logs that would otherwise end up as firewood. There's something satisfying about giving a 100-year-old oak a second life as a kitchen table.