Kerf: free WordPress FSE theme for furniture rescue and resale

A kerf is the width of material a saw blade removes in a single cut, material genuinely lost in the act of making something. Kerf the theme takes its name from the same idea run in reverse: it’s built for the practitioner who rescues solid wood furniture headed for the curb, refinishes it to the standard of paid commercial work, and sells it to fund a cause rather than to grow a business.

The front page is a signature layout, not a generic post index: a review-style trust badge, a rounded three-photo before/after/after collage, a workshop-photo mission panel, and, the part no stock furniture-shop theme would think to include, a plain transparency ledger titled “Where it went,” stating exactly what a piece raised and where the money went. No adjectives, no thermometer graphic, just the number and the outcome.

Baloo 2 carries headlines with real warmth and rounded character; Mulish sets body copy; IBM Plex Mono handles the ledger’s own figures, chosen specifically so a dollar amount reads with the same clarity a rate sheet needs. All three are self-hosted, and the palette leans warm and rounded rather than the cold, catalogue-grid look most resale themes default to.

Kerf carries the same CORE/SKIN architecture as every theme in this collection. The accessibility scaffolding, WooCommerce compatibility, and onboarding flow are shared infrastructure, while the palette, type pairing, and the before/after/ledger patterns are entirely this theme’s own.

Closest sibling: Halyard for teaching-first sailing and community education. Every theme in the collection is free and shares the same accessible core.

What it does well

• A plain transparency ledger, “Where it went,” stating exactly what a piece raised and where the money went
• A rounded three-photo before/after/after collage built into the front page, not left to a generic gallery block
• A workshop-photo mission panel and a review-style trust badge for a cause-funded practice’s actual story
• Baloo 2 and Mulish for a warm, rounded voice; IBM Plex Mono for the ledger’s own figures
• Baseline WooCommerce support for a resale operation ready to sell online
• Self-hosted fonts, zero front-end JavaScript, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility scaffolding

Preview

Download

Kerf is free and open source under the GPLv2 license. Download the zip from GitHub and install it manually, or install from the WordPress theme directory once the review is complete.

License: GPL v2 or later · Requires WordPress 6.7+