Getting into the salvage game

June 20, 2011 by Jeff Erkelens

I’ve wanted to incorporate salvaged and reclaimed material into our houses for a while now, as I think it adds so much intrigue and texture. However, I’ve always come across a few roadblocks. Namely: price and a place to store it. I can’t really say we have solved the storage issue, as we have completely filled up our basement and now have to build around all the stuff, but the price was right.

We got two giant truck loads from Pennsylvania from Provenance, an architectural salvage shop in Philadelphia. We had wandered up to Philly a few weeks back to visit friends. We brought our truck thinking we might pick up a few odd items to incorporate into our house. I didn’t really plan on buying 3000 linear feet of 1x12s and 3200 square feet of maple flooring, but things happen. Luckily, they deliver.

So, we got a boat load of 2-1/4″ maple flooring from one of those giant high-schools that were built in the fifties to handle four or five thousand kids. The school was recently demolished and I think Provenance pulled up almost 20,000 square feet. They had been slowly selling it off, but were really looking to move the last bit and make room for new inventory.

What I love most about it is that every so often there are these 2″ wide stripes of red, yellow, green and black that were the line markings for the basketball court. I don’t think we will go to the trouble of trying to puzzle it back into the shape of a basketball court, but these random bits of color will be something really unique. We are going to install it in the basement of our house and work it into some select locations of our next couple houses.

The other big item we got was a whole bunch of various lengths of 1x oak boards, which were about 1/3 to 1/2 the price of what I’ve seem for other reclaimed woods. I think they were somewhat affordable as they didn’t come out of an old building, but were actually old 2″ thick scaffolding boards that had worn out their working life. Provenance was able to mill them in half to 3/4″ thick and double the yield. What we are left with is one side that has this great, rich oxidized look and another more blonde, virgin side. Lots of possibilities. Anyway, we are definitely excited to take a break from all the ponderosa and plywood wall cladding.

 

 

Project: 6th Street SW · Tags: , , · 1 Comment

Sock Hop

April 28, 2009 by Jeff Erkelens

That’s Tom putting down the first coat of polyurethane on the maple hardwood flooring. We have since finished putting all the coats on and it looks great.

We like use a narrower width floor board (2 1/4″) than you see in a lot of new houses as I think it’s more of a classic look.  I also use a “tavern grade” board, meaning there are a lot of short pieces and defects. We cull out all the defect pieces and post “free firewood” on craigslist. What the leaves us with is a floor with a lot of contrast and variation that reveals more of itself the more you look at it.

Project: Rockland Avenue · Tags: , · Leave a comment

Mixing it up

March 26, 2009 by Jeff Erkelens

The priority for us right now is completing all the siding, but because of the rain we were mostly forced indoors.

Tom and Jesse started laying the slate tile floor in the two upstairs bathrooms. We get 12″ square tiles and rip them in half as I think a more rectangular shape is pleasing to the eye. Jesse also had the bright idea to rip them again to get all the lengths exactly equal.

The slate is actually not all uniform, so it has made the gridded pattern we like to do difficult in the past. It doesn’t look like much right now as it is covered in slate dust, but should look cool once it is cleaned up and we grout it with grey grout. It should really come together once we got the wall finishes up in the bathrooms (a mixture of galvanized metal wainscoting, yellow pine horizontal paneling and mosaic tile).

We’ve also started using Denshield brand tile backer instead of a cement board like Durock or Hardi. While the cement board won’t rot out it just seems like if moisture were to get behind the tile, the cement board would act like a sponge and soak it up, which could transfer to the wood studs and allow mold to grow. If you follow the instructions with the Denshield you are basically creating a barrier.

In general, I feel like we aren’t sourcing that many local materials because of cost and could definitely do more. But, where we do, it feels great. It’s satisfying to drive on down the road to Buckingham county and pick up the slate in person from the quarry and then install it the next day

I worked outside mixing concrete into sonotubes to be porch posts (we formed and poured footers for the posts an earlier day). Kind of a muddy mess. Anyway, not exactly rocket science, but we are really striving not to have wood come in contact with the ground and not just stick pressure treated 6×6′s in the ground. Sure, it will last a long time, but eventually that will rot out.

If you’re wondering why we are pouring piers up against the house too it’s because we don’t actually have a first floor system (that’s a whole other story), so we wouldn’t be able to tie the porch ledger into the house band. We could have epoxyied in bolts into the foundation, but that seemed like it could have potentially broken the foundation seal.

Insulation guys are coming tomorrow to start spraying the closed cell foam.

Project: Rockland Avenue · Tags: , , · Leave a comment