Oak City Customs – From Tree to Table
Transforming Locally, Urban Sourced Lumber into Heirloom Quality Custom Furnishings
From Dining tables to full Bar build-outs, Oak City Customs has done it all. View their Portfolio Here or View Their Custom Furnishings Here. They also offer services such as Wood Surfacing, CNC Wook and Meta, Welding and Fabrication, and Kiln Drying! Learn more about their Services Here.
The Full Story
Our story started back in 2015 in a home shop in Southeast Raleigh! During this time, we discovered that there was a huge need to repurpose material that was regularly headed to the landfill, recycling centers & often, the burn pile. Large trees were being taken down for a variety of reasons every day and being scrapped due to the lack of someone to collect & process them into usable material. This realization was the beginning of a huge endeavor, & our mission to take this material ‘From Tree to Table’.
In late 2015 we acquired a small sawmill & began slabbing logs in the backyard. We spent meticulous time cutting & stacking material to air dry while researching the ins & outs of the entire lumber making process. There is a lot to know! We had success locating quality material & building relationships with local tree services. Over the next year we upgraded our sawmill by driving to the West Coast to acquire a specialty wide capacity slabbing mill. We fabricated a highly specialized log trailer that allowed us to obtain logs on-site that were too big for tree services to move in one piece.
In 2016 we really picked up steam working on residential & commercial projects in the wood & metal working arena, allowing us to fully outfit the small home shop. Business kept picking up & before long we were two people working full time! By the Spring of 2017, it was clear that to follow our ‘From Tree to Table’ mission, we were going to need a lot more space & help, so we decided to make the leap!
By Fall 2017, we had moved our workshop, amidst a very busy season, to a much larger facility, in Zebulon, North Carolina. Oak City Customs now had a permanent sawmill setup & the space to efficiently air-dry lumber outdoors with use of a forklift, whew! Over the next 2 years (2018 & 2019), we expanded the shop further to a total indoor space of 14,000 sqft. We built dedicated metal fabrication shop space, wood shop space, paint & finishing areas, a lumberyard equipped with two kilns, & really focused in on our product offerings.
Our team grew again & the work flow in our shop began to really make sense. From 2019, through today, we have been able to add several major machines to our facility including two 52″ wide belt sanders, three CNC machines, a huge panel clamp rack, central dust collection, a CNC press brake machine, & the largest wood planer on the East Coast!
As of 2023, we are equipped with a design team, production team, & installation team that is dedicated to producing heirloom quality furnishings! Currently, we produce a very high percentage of our projects utilizing material that we produce ‘From Tree to Table’!
