Our Story
Built on the Rock is a premier source for driftwood furniture, home and landscape décor, and driftwood sculpture.
I’m the very fortunate husband of 34 years to Jean. She is loving and caring, has an incredible sense of justice, is a wonderful wife, mother, and grandmother, and is the most beautiful woman I have ever known. I married up!
I’m the proud father to three amazing daughters - Katie, Cristen, and Allie. They have become awesome, independent women in their own right. Each have married and I enjoy three great sons in law - Dusty, Grant, and Sawyer.
Here’s the best part about my growing family. I now have five perfect angelic grandchildren - Charlotte, Ben, Sam, Desmond, and Harbor. They absolutely light up my life, and each one helps me see everything in new and wonderful ways.
My brother and I were raised by my incredible mom - she always demonstrated the importance of a faith relationship with God. She taught me how to work hard, to be resilient, and how to serve others.
I grew up in a three generation household, enjoying all things “farm life”. (Although, I didn’t know at the time that I should be “enjoying” myself - chores came first!) But I, with my brother and cousins, swam in the creek, explored the woods, built tree houses, and was generally outside all the time. Growing up I learned to care for animals, stack hay, and mend fences. My uncle took me coon hunting, I fished the creek, and I ran a trap line in the winter.
After high school I proudly joined the US Marines, serving four years. I then began pursuing a career as a carpenter. I spent many years learning and mastering the trade. Eventually, I started my own contracting business, focusing on home repair and remodeling.
Built on the Rock, Driftwood Decor came to life as a way to explore my creative side. I now blend my extensive carpentry experience with artistic vision using driftwood recovered along the rivers here in middle America.
The vision at Built on the Rock is “A premier source for driftwood furniture, home and landscape decor, and driftwood sculpture”. The vision is governed by 6 core values: Integrity, Originality, Craftsmanship, Excellence in Service, Creativity, and Environmental Consciousness.
Built on the Rock operates out of a small shop in Nashville, Tennessee. (At this point, I can now say, “we”, instead of “I”.) We love to give new life and purpose to the driftwood we recover, finding ways to showcase the beauty of nature. We market our work through our website, by participating in vendor fairs in and around Nashville, and by welcoming anyone to come and visit our workshop. Over several years we have shipped and personally delivered our work to customers in 15 different states here in the U.S. Our work is proudly represented in Australia, Japan, and in several European countries.
Created with true passion and craftsmanship. We love what we do and we believe it shows in each unique piece of furniture and home decor that we create.
We put our vast experience in carpentry to work in order to create pieces that are aesthetically attractive and structurally sound.
Every piece is individually designed. We strive to work in harmony with the character of the driftwood we recover. No two pieces are ever the same.
Mile 777 Ohio River at Newburgh, Indiana.
Every Spring the rivers of middle America offer up some incredible materials for us to work with. The saying around here is “The River Provides.”
“THE RIVER PROVIDES” By Rinker Buck - April 17, 2019
Living for a month on one of America’s largest rivers is a lesson in hydrology and the natural cleansing power of water. The Ohio, which flows 991 miles from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, is the largest single contributor to the volume of the Mississippi. It’s drainage covers 15 states, and the river annually sweeps millions of board feet of fallen timber from a vast mosaic of forests upriver. The detritus of huge trees is everywhere and the largest job every spring at riverside farms, campgrounds and marinas is the clearing of log jams that have accumulated all winter, when the river rises as much as 30 feet above its summer banks.
Curtis Wasmer lives for this. A small contractor from Newburgh, Indiana, Wasmer spends most of his free time plying the river for massive chunks of driftwood, which he fashions into artful, visually intriguing coffee tables, chairs and benches. I have seen my share of “driftwood craftsmen” over the years, but few who work on the massive scale and attention to natural beauty as Wasmer.
Wasmer, 51, began plying the local banks of the Ohio when he moved to Indiana from Maryland five years ago so that he and his wife could be closer to their grandchildren. Friends he had made in Indiana took him out in their boats to see the river and Wasmer was staggered by the size and twisted beauty of the oaks, cedar and locust jams along the shore. The artistic yearning that many carpenters feel drew him again and again to the river, and he began skidding out huge root balls and tree crowns with his pickup and trailer.
“Oh wow, I thought,” Wasmer says. “Here is a resource free for the taking that I would love to tap. I’ve always searched for a way to express the creative side of the carpentry work I do. This was it.”
Wasmer carefully sorts among the wealth of driftwood along the shore for unique formations created by river erosion after a log has spent several years being tossed around and burnished into striking patinas. He looks for solid, relatively cured pieces formed by the natural process of water erosion and then bleaching by the sun once the piece has been trapped on the banks. Black walnut, cedar, locust and oak are exceptionally hard and durable species which best endure the immersion then drying process.
His shop in a small industrial park in Newburgh is a feast for the eyes–oak so perfectly fissured by water erosion that it looks like cut marble, red cedar richly died purple and yellow, and black walnut so hard and basalt-colored that it reminds me of the fossilized stumps in the Petrified National Forest in northern Arizona.
“I’m looking for something that so obviously suggests a use that you almost can use it as is,” Wasmer says. “You look at a stump on the banks and can instantly visualize it as a coffee table base. Other samples I may bring back to the shop and look at for months before I decide what to do with it. Old root balls are particularly challenging because they are so three-dimensional.”
Wasmer has been increasingly successful with pieces he has sold to private collectors and buyers–a coffee table sold to a New Yorker, a patio bench that now graces a garden in Florida. His largest project so far is a wondrously massive and attractive set of 17 pathway benches that will line a walking trail in a community park in nearby Warrick County.
Samples of his work can be found on Wasmer’s Built on the Rock Facebook page.
But there is one other quality about Wasmer that I like quite a lot. The Ohio River Valley is a region of loud and dogmatic conservative Christians. They deliberately act out whenever a Yankee is near, rarely bothering to inquire about his views first. It’s tiring. It’s redundant. The chapters in the New Testament when Jesus confronts the Pharisees or the money-lenders in the temple have, seemingly, been redacted for local consumption. But Wasmer, a member of the Church of Christ, is modest and understated. He’s a devout Christian, but he doesn’t feel the need to apply a ball-peen to my skull to express his beliefs.
“The river provides,” he says, sweeping his hand around his shop at his driftwood treasures. “When I walk the banks and find the perfectly eroded tree, I am so thankful. I feel at one with nature and universal bounty. I am so blessed. The river always provides.”
–RINKER BUCK