Excerpt from "Rarity Among the Retailers"
Lumber  Co-operators, March 2003
In the lumber and building material industry there is a growing concept referred to as the “Green Earth Concept”, a recycling alternative which alleviates demand for new lumber. A Northeast retailer, Antique & Vintage Woods of America (AVW), implements this conservation approach by restoring and reselling reclaimed building materials that would otherwise occupy landfills or burn piles.

Quality materials are hand-selected from abandoned factories, barns and buildings over 100 years old. The result of collecting these salvaged materials is an extensive product line offered, that includes square edge and tongue and groove flooring, hand hewn and sawn beams, wainscoting or interior paneling, exterior siding wood slabs for counters or furniture and antique brick and stone.

Antique & Vintage Woods is dedicated to preserving the history and craftsmanship of these old structures and has built a niche providing consultative selling of restorative products for American and pre-colonial structures. President and founder, Dale Mitchell notes that to keep a restoration project in period, recommendations about the product are made to reflect the technology used at that time. Depending on the era in which a home was built, it will influence the type of milling recommended for a floor.

For example, if a home was built circa 1845, timbers would have typically been cut with a band saw, which makes tight horizontal lines across the face of the board, whereas post-Civil War mechanics employed circular saws to cut timbers en masse. That produced slight sweeping circular marks across the face of these boards. This attention to subtle detail makes a restoration project a success.

"Barn Raisers"
Chronogram, Art of Business, October 2005
The wood you see may have a past. That chopping block in your neighbor’s kitchen may have been made from a salvaged hunk of wood from an old bowling alley. The floor beneath you may have been made from the bedding in a dark aromatic mushroom growing facility. What about the tongue and groove paneling in your friend’s living room. Could it have been the beams of a factory built at the turn of the century?

Dale Mitchell  who started Antique & Vintage Woods of America in 1997 with his partner in life and business, Marilyn Miklau, said that they give a second life to the material they rescue. Rather than entering a landfill, these woods become a beautiful floor or piece of furniture.

True antique products are made from old barn beams that have been re-sawn. Reproduction old growth floors are made from Eastern White Pine with saw marks that give it a rustic look. Yet another kind of flooring is made from salvaged roadside or yard trees.

Mitchell states that at big sawmills, the logs are fed through a hopper, and everything is mechanized. At Antique & Vintage Woods, the craftsmen physically load a log onto a saw with a forklift.  AVW may spend two hours cutting the wood whereas it may take the mill 10 minutes. It’s labor intensive versus machine intensive. They can take a log and preserve the center cuts which can be three feet wide. A machine on the other hand, slabs off the top, bottom and sides before it is cut into boards. The mills waste wood that way, AVW doesn’t.

In June 2005, AVW opened their first off-site showroom in Pine Plains to teach people how they can use recycled wood in different parts of their home. There are five different rooms and each room displays one of their products on both the floor and also on the walls as wainscoting.

Mitchell has always been interested in preserving things and not destroying the environment. He is not against development. He’s interested in intelligent development. He feels that you can slap something together that will fall down in a few years or you can do something tasteful and with quality.

At the showroom Miklau cultivates design services within AVW. They hope to open showrooms throughout the Northeast over time.

Besides being a “green building material” old wood can be beautiful and unique, says Mitchell. Its quality, strength, and stability are often superior to wood that has recently been milled. Many customers are eager to use reclaimed and salvaged wood in their building projects because it has an intriguing history.

One such piece for sale in AVW’s collection is a high relief carving thought to be from the “Ming Dynasty”. The temple was brought to the US 20 years ago and it sat in a field uncovered, while the owners and attorneys argued over it. Once the argument was settled, they decided that the wood was so deteriorated that the temple could not be rebuilt. AVW was called in to salvage what remained. They used two 60-foot flatbed trucks to carry the wood and salvaged about 300 pieces and 30 beams.

At some point, they feel, a designer or architect will figure out how to use the temple wood in a new setting. For now, a few pieces can be glimpsed in either the warehouse or the showroom.