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I’ve been messing around with reclaimed wood for almost thirty years now. From the very beginning, the first challenge we encountered when trying to mill reclaimed wood was the %&*@?! metal. Yes, pretty much every piece of old wood that I have ever milled had to have some sort of metal fasteners removed from it. There were a lot of hard lessons.
It was 2010 in Indonesia. I had been chasing down and acquiring old wood in Southeast Asia for a decade. I had learned to follow up on rumors and hunches in search of forgotten and unknown old wooden buildings, bridges, railroads and other tropical hardwood relics of a bygone era. Sometimes the effort paid off, such as when we turned half a million old railroad ties into elegant hardwood flooring. Other times, not so much.
Many times I have heard people ask “Why is reclaimed wood more expensive than new wood”? It’s a fair question with some relatively simple answers…
One of our favorite uses for reclaimed Teak is for covering vertical surfaces. Teak is great as flooring and decking, but when it is used for covering walls – interior or exterior- it is much more noticeable and seems to get appreciated more than in horizontal applications. The natural beauty of the wood and the reclaimed character combine to create a timeless, enduring and authentic aesthetic.
I am living in a developing country. This means, among other things, that I don’t have access to many of the creature comforts and services that I am accustomed to in my home country. For example, I have a 5-gallon hot water heater so my showers are short. I can’t get my favorite organic chai, so I make do with local black tea and spices. Internet service is sometimes slow, spotty or non-existent.
Often, when I tell people I am in the reclaimed wood business, the response I get is, “Oh, you mean like barn wood? And then I have to explain. Which is why I am writing this. In the hope that someone who reads it will be one less person to whom I won't have to explain it to someday in the future…
All wood has a story to tell. Of course, it always starts with a tree. It could be a Douglas fir from Oregon, a Redwood from California, or a Teak from Burma, but every single stick of wood ever used for anything, started off as a tree. The best wood, such at that used for hardwood flooring, any clear grades, beams and timber and fine cabinetry, comes from trees are hundreds of years old when they are harvested. Thus, the beginning of the story of wood is actually the end of a very long story of an ancient, living tree.
Greetings. Richard McFarland-Dorworth here. After almost three decades in this now maturing, reclaimed wood industry that has grown up from the crumbling foundations of the traditional timber industry, I have a lot of material for this first blog post. For instance, I could write about salvaging the “bones of the dinosaurs” – the giant Douglas fir timbers from the sawmills of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990’s where we got our start or I could write about chasing vintners around the California wine country buying up the last of the old growth redwood wine tanks. I could write about the crazy enterprise that involved turning Thai railroad ties into hardwood flooring in the early part of this young century...
