Artist and entrepreneur Michael Veneziano has worked with wood in one way or another since the early 1980s.

Ponderosa Millworks is an urban lumber mill in Oakland. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group) 

The Berkeley native and certified arborist ran a tree company whose crew spent their days removing plants or climbing into a tree’s uppermost reaches, trimming or cutting away dead branches to improve the tree’s health and beauty.

Since retiring from the company, Veneziano has been running Ponderosa Millworks in West Oakland, where he salvages rough logs from urban trees around the Bay Area and works with the aesthetics of their natural color and grain to transform them into distinctive furniture, housewares and sculpture.

“As an artist, I work in any and every medium: ceramics, metal and painting,” Veneziano says. “Just whatever seems interesting. But wood is gorgeous. Nature takes care of it.”

Running a millworks means he has a lot of wood slabs of all shapes and sizes lying around, which he says, can form the basis of easy-to-make holiday gifts — cutting boards. As Veneziano explains it, you don’t need to be an arborist, artist or carpenter with decades of experience. All you need is the wood, a sander and mineral oil — and the patience to sand the wood until the surface is velvety soft and totally smooth.

Easy Cutting Boards

Materials

Slab of wood of any size or type, but hardwoods are preferable

Sander and sandpaper with different levels of coarseness, starting with 80 grit and then increasingly finer,  from 120 to 150, 180 and 220 grit.

Food-grade mineral oil or another colorless, odorless, flavorless oil specially blended for cutting boards

Directions 

Take a slab of wood and sand it on both sides and the edges, starting with the 80-grit sandpaper and using increasingly fine sandpaper to take the wood from rough to super smooth.

Coat the slab with mineral oil on both sides and the edges and let it sink in, recoating it as needed until the wood stops absorbing it. Let it dry overnight.

— Michael Veneziano