Reclaimed Wood

Reclaimed wood is a specialty area of flooring that we've been getting involved with in the past few years. I love historical buildings, styles, and materials, and there is a mystique about the stupendous timbers available to the early settlers. Some of first European explorers reported seeing huge savannahs of walnut, oak, and longleaf pine, each one six feet or more in diameter and a hundred feet tall. And you can find details in Old Salem of large, colonial-era table tops made of a single slab of wood.


Although it's a little trendy right now, the concept of reclaimed wood has been around since the original forests started disappearing, and because of its authenticity and heritage, I think a tasteful use of reclaimed wood is a style with a lot of staying power--not merely a fad that will shortly go the way of pickled-white floors and fingerblock parquet.

Here are pictures of a few reclaimed flooring projects we've done in the past year. Each project's wood came from a different source, and each one has a story to go along with it.

 

The photo above is of old oak salvaged from Appalachian barns and threshing floors. The homeowner created a tasteful, barn-style room for his private office and study. The natural oil finish on these boards shows the warm, luminous patina that you can only find with old-growth wood.



 
The second picture (left) is of a new house floored with long leaf heart pine planks that came out of the old Harriett & Henderson cotton mills in Henderson, NC. Some of the neat features of this floor include "rivers" of whale oil running through the soft grain of certain boards, left over from a time when the mill machinery was lubricated with sperm whale oil. Occasional boards also showed slices of wood-threaded pegs that originally held the beams together inside the mill building. 120 years after harvesting, the wood is in great shape and living a second life in this new home.

The final photo shows more heart pine. In this case the wood was carefully removed from an old farmhouse in Sampson County, the ancestral home of the family who had this house built. The planks were nearly an inch and a quarter thick and anywhere from four to eight inches wide--truly magnificent wood dimensions that shows how these old farmhouses were able to stand for centuries through termites, hurricanes, humidity, war, poverty, and finally abandonment. (I'm sure there were good times in there too.) On the ceiling you can also see a couple of the immense framing timbers incorporated into the structure of the new home much as they served in the old.

In the past few years I've been fortunate to establish relationships with quite a number of suppliers, salvage companies, and reclaimed mills around North Carolina and the Southeast. Chances are pretty good we can locate any type of old-growth, rustic, or extinct species you might be interested in for your own home. These projects offer a kind of satisfaction for both contractor and homeowner that go well beyond simple economic transaction--the satisfaction of tasteful design, local heritage, and the intrinsic value of fine wood.

Kent Will

Old Town Wood Floors

336-575-0219

www.oldtownwoodfloors.com