RECLAIMED FLOORING: by VINTAGE LUMBER

Vintage Lumber offers a proprietary line of antique reclaimed flooring (The Vintage Collection) that is precisely remilled from old boards and beams in the largest variety of species, grades, and sizes you will find anywhere. Unfortunately, there are those within the flooring industry that try and sell flooring, manufactured from new lumber, which has been hand distressed or color enhanced under the tag line of antique flooring. To go one step further, there are at least five companies that use the term Vintage in their company name that have never seen the inside of a dismantled building.

THE CONFUSION: Simply put, we remill reclaimed/antique lumber from dismantled buildings into tongue and groove plank flooring. We established our grading guidelines many years ago, and have tenaciously hung on to them. We have clearly written grade specifications, a brochure with color photographs of nearly every variety, representative samples of all species and grades, and exceptional customer service.

THE SOURCE: As the most reliable source of antique lumber of all types, we have stayed with our original focus; the reclamation of old wood from barns and other farm buildings. There are still many buildings in dilapidated, unneeded and unwanted condition. Many of these buildings were built with larger dimension lumber and commonly yield more useable wood. They also provide a more interesting array of woods in a wider variety of sizes and conditions. By virtue of our buying volume, we are able to blend materials from all over to produce a functionally & aesthetically consistent product year after year.

THE PROCESS: The lumber most frequently reaches us via “pickers”, individuals who scour the countryside searching for derelict buildings. Delivered or picked up in everything from pick-up trucks to tractor-trailers, the lumber ranges in dimension from 1”x 4” to 12”x12” and can be of any conceivable eastern domestic species in a condition from sublime to ridiculous. It is stacked according to size and variety (as best we can tell) awaiting processing.

Metal detection and removal is the first step in the process. This is labor intensive but crucial for the survival of our machinery. After this step, old beams are sawn into 1” thick boards and together with old boards are trimmed and stacked into uniform sized bundles with sticks between the layers, ready for the kiln. After kiln drying, the boards are unstacked, metal detected again, restacked without the sticks, and stored indoors.

Brought into our mill in 10-15,000 board foot quantities, the boards are planed flat, laser straight-lined, trimmed of end and edge waste (up to 40% is lost here). Then, it is milled into tongue and groove flooring on a high-speed molding machine. The finished flooring is then stored in our temperature-controlled warehouse, until being counted out into orders, wrapped and shipped.

THE PRODUCT: The Vintage Collection is offered in many different sizes and grades in order to preserve this diminishing resource as well as give our customers as much choice as possible. We have found that random widths make the most efficient use of the material, that boards sawn from beams are lighter in color but might be wormy, and that old boards generally yield a deeper color and more character. Knowing this, we devised a species and grade specification that we could hang our hat on. Simply put, our Vintage Collection is a true antique/reclaimed flooring option.