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A 14-foot-tall U.S. marshal stands in a cloud of sawdust in a massive yard off Highway 92 in Half Moon Bay. In his past life, this officer was a solid, 20-foot-long block of redwood.
“It’s an artistic rendering of an existing statue,” said Firewood Farms owner James Olsen about this unique creation, extrapolated from a 2-foot-high fiberglass model that a client wanted to replicate in wood.
Custom carvings such as this one are among the core products on offer at Olsen’s lumber yard, which he and his wife Caroline have been running since 2014.
The Olsens, who live in the Santa Cruz Mountains, are the third custodians of the place. It was created as a basic firewood business called Al’s Firewood back in 1976. Around 1981, Magnus Sandbloom took over, and it was during his 33-year tenancy that the business expanded to chainsaw carvings.
Then around a decade ago, the Olsens bought the business.
“We saw an underutilized yard, you could barely drive into this place when we took over; it was literally a massive pile of logs and debris and piles of firewood here and there,” said Olsen, who now runs the business from two locations — a 1.5-acre yard in Half Moon Bay and a sprawling 39-acre yard in San Gregorio.
“This whole yard is less than 5% of my wood collection,” he said, speaking in his Half Moon Bay lumber yard.
They expanded the product line from firewood and chainsaw sculptures to urban salvage recovery, which is their main area of focus.
“We interject into the waste stream and stop logs from going into the landfill,” he said. “Every product that we make is 100% recycled; it’s got a really, really low carbon emission footprint, less than 0.1% of national industry average.”
Finished products include all manner of solid wood products, including flooring, trims, siding, furniture, and customized items. Species of wood they work with include redwood, cedar, oak, pine, fir, sequoia, walnut, cyprus, elm and acacia.
The product line, which includes over 400 items, covers a broad price spectrum — from firewood for $20 to a dining table worth $2,000 to a conference room table that can cost up to $50,000, typically purchased by large, global companies.
Olsen considers Firewood Farms “a small, seasonal business.” Currently, he has a lean team of six full-time employees, a far cry from his headcount of 26 around three years ago.
“We’re still kind of seeing residual ripple effects from COVID, to be honest,” he said. The pandemic dampened the need for luxury wood-carved items, but the demand for wood as essential fuel saw them through some rough times. They continue to supply firewood to homes and restaurants.
He ramps up his staff depending on demand, recruiting world-class talent in the process. His lead carver, Steffen Merla, is on the German national carving team and recently won a world championship in carving in Germany, where he is based. Merla, who runs Kreativ Holz Art back home, visits California once or twice a year for a few weeks at a time to work with Olsen.
“We’ve helped develop each other’s business on both sides of the Atlantic for the last 10 years,” Olsen said.
Unlike his lead carver, Olsen’s raw material doesn’t come in from far away. They source urban “wood waste” from within a 30-mile radius. Dimensional lumber comes from old buildings that they help take down.
“We will deconstruct a building gently, by hand, de-nail everything and retain the wood, versus the typical MO (modus operandi), which is a demolition whereby they come in with an excavator and crunch the whole building up and throw it in the can and take it to the landfill,” he said. “So we try to wedge ourselves in the middle there to prevent good usable lumber from heading to the waste stream.”
Premium firewood comes from trees in the Central Valley that are done living their best lives.
“The firewood that we have in stock right now is from almond orchards that have reached their life expectancy,” he said. “Every 20-25 years the almond orchards — or walnut orchards for that matter — have to be replanted; they start to decline in nut production. So the landowners will turn over the orchard and discard all the older trees…that’s where we come in.”
Once the wood arrives at the yard it is cut, dried — a slow process that can take up to five years — and, with a little help from “one of the million apparatus,” transformed into pretty much anything. Carvings of animals and the female body are among the most difficult to create as they involve “dozens and dozens of hours” of work.
The job is laborsome, no doubt. “It’s a little dusty, it’s a little dirty, and I would describe it as a young man’s game,” said the 45-year-old Olsen. But to him, the most troublesome aspect of the work has little to do with heavy lifting. His calloused palms don’t bother him as much as pesky people do.
“Dealing with the public is pretty tricky, that’s probably the hardest part for me,” he said. “A lot of people in this area feel very entitled, a lot of people feel the customer is always correct; unfortunately I don’t believe that 100% of the time. Just trying to explain the different technical elements of what we do to a layperson becomes quite tedious.”
But the work itself keeps him going. How many people get to talk about carving a statue for the U.S. Department of Defense as just another day at the office?
“We just replaced the mascot for the 80th fighter squadron based in New Mexico,” Olsen said. “These are dogfighters with F-22 fighter jets. We were dealing directly with the commander to replace one of their very loved wooden statues that travels country to country with the fighter pilots. It became quite dilapidated, so we created a brand new carving.” Serendipitously enough, the mascot is called Woody.
While the idea is to recover logs from the environment, rework them and sell them back into the same community, Firewood Farms also ships its wares, especially chainsaw carvings made of California native wood, to around 14 countries. Local wood, he finds, is perceived as “exotic” and therefore highly valuable beyond American shores. The United Arab Emirates is on his wish list for 2025.
Before taking over Firewood Farms, Olsen, who is originally from England, worked as a stone mason and plastering contractor in Burlingame. He pivoted to wood processing out of sheer interest — it’s not a family business.
“I’m the only one who kicks dirt for a living,” he said. But, he added, “The checks don’t usually bounce and the money’s green.”
Firewood Farms, 551 San Mateo Road (Highway 92), Half Moon Bay. Open Monday-Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Instagram: @firewood_farms.
