Reviving the old

Several weeks ago, I was on the phone sharing with my dad our hunt for cool stuff in salvage yards. He responded with, "...we used to call them junk yards." I chuckled and excitedly began to tell him all about the items we'd found that were part of our new home plan.

"We discovered some pieces of bowling alley floor at this great place in Berkeley called Ohmega Salvage," I said. "We're going to use them in our kitchen. But John's got some work to do to refinish them before transforming them into our countertop."

"We also spied several boxes of tiles that will be just enough to cover both bathrooms...well, almost enough...we'll be covering one wall with river rock."

"Then when we were in Sonoma we stopped at Artefact Design & Salvage and found this incredible copper door for our guest room/office. We've got to clean it up a bit, fill in the open panels with some artwork and then John's going to put it on a track to use for privacy in our second room."

"On our way home, we stopped at Heritage Salvage in Petaluma and spotted a few other sweet things including some depression era prune racks and old wooden spools that might be turned into shelving."

"...oh, and we found a wonderful old set of school lockers that we'll use somewhere...after I scrape off all the nasty wads of gum and wash it down. We really found some treasures!"

Having shared all our finds with Dad, he offered up a little secret to me. Seems one day when we were kids, Mom returned home from some errands and shared with Dad that she'd seen some lumber scraps that she thought he might find useful. Not missing a beat, he headed out to recover the goods and turned them into shelves in our basement. Apparently finding ways to reuse materials runs in the family!