Wondering where the reclaimed wood comes from that I use in my products?
The old house we bought that the reclaimed wood comes from. It doesn’t look too bad from this picture because the vinyl siding hid a lot of problems. Read on below for more…
If you have wondered where I source the wood for my reclaimed wood pieces, have I got a story to tell you. Several years ago we purchased the land around our current home to give our kids some woods to roam in and to keep from having very close neighbors. We live in rural upstate New York and enjoy having our space. Along with the land came an old farm house which at first we considered fixing up. Unfortunately it was a bit of a hoarders paradise so we decided to clean out the house and the plot of land immediately surrounding the house to get a better idea of what we might be able to do with our little parcel. Little did we know what we were getting into…
I began with the outside yard around the house and after a few days decided that I needed a very large dumpster. It was amazing to me that all the little piles with weeds growing around them were actually pits once all the garbage had been removed. I found everything from a large fishing boat made of fiberglass cut up into pieces, toilets, bathtub surrounds, paint cans left to rust away, and sooo much broken glass, not to mention tires. There was one pile that had a truck liner piled high with panes of glass, as I worked on that you couldn’t help but notice the crunching all around it, glass panes buried along with windshields. I kept track of how many windshields I pulled out of the yard until I got to around 20, there were more after that but I was far too overwhelmed by that point to keep track.
Once I had the yard pretty much under control (this took most of one spring and summer) I started on the house. This was rather short lived however because I found that it was very easy to have your leg just go straight through the floor. You would think there would be a warning sign or a creaking of wood but no. Just standing in one place and then sitting on the floor with your one leg completely stuck in the floor, wondering if you move wether you will cause the floor to let loose the rest of the way so you end up in the unknowns of the basement.
By the time this first through the floor experience had happened I did have a chance to remove a bit of stuff from the front room of the house but not really enough to put a dent in all of the things we would inevitably find in the house over time. Basically the front room was packed about 4 foot deep with everything from car parts, sheet rock pieces, old lottery tickets, old clothes, gutter pieces, and buckets of bolts and other metal items. It was really not surprising that the floor would have some issues under the weight of all that plus leaking roof, windows, and places in walls where the rain could get in, I had been aware that I should be careful and tried to stay on solid footing but it was no help and then I was banned from clearing out the house alone and had to always have someone around incase I went through again. This seriously slowed me down because by then it was fall and my kids had school during the day.
The next item we worked on was the back door which my husband had wanted to open and hopefully find a stairway to the basement to assess the foundation to see if the house was even salvageable after the difficulties I had found with the floor. As fate would have it when he opened the door, the stairs were no where to be found. The back door opened into a small back room that then had a doorway to the kitchen which the floor had given out in and was a slide into the basement. We could see from this vantage point great cracks in the walls of the basement so it was decided with this new information that we would begin the process of removing siding, windows, and what ever we could retrieve from the window openings safely, and then devise a plan to take down the house.
First off we took down the chimney:
Next after finishing up removing the siding and windows and many things that we tried to salvage we hooked onto the back room with our tractor and old plow truck (please excuse my finger over the lens):
There was a lot of ship lap style and siding style wood that was salvageable from the back room which I have made many signs from. In this back room I also found an old well with a rotten wooden cover that I thought was just part of the floor. I realized something was up as I was clearing out stuff and kept hearing this odd plinking and splashing noise. I was literally working inches from the well, talk about feeling like someone is looking out for you!
In the end the old house was a fighter and didn’t really want to go down. It probably would have been easier if we had had a bigger tractor but we were using what we had. We were able to recycle/reuse a lot of what we stripped off the place helping out various family members and friends. The floor joists were terrible though, some of the old beams were huge but you could grab ahold of them and they would crumble to saw dust in your hands… We still have the basement to cave in fully and I am still working on the last few wood piles left over from the house pieces that were pulled into the yard to see if anything is salvageable. It has been a very long project but hopefully this coming summer of 2023 will mark the end of it.
Some of the highlights of the house removal project:
7 30 yard dumpsters full of items that could not be recycled/reused in any way
20+ windshields
250+ tires removed
9 toilets removed
1 fishing boat in 9 pieces removed
to many piles of metal salvage removed and recycled to keep count of.
I found out later that the place had been used as a literal dump, which at that point was not surprising.
If you find this story interesting and want to hear about the continuation of this project let me know through the Contact page!