Millworker to turn old joists into t+g flooring?
Greetings, Can anyone recommend someone to turn old brownstone joists into usable flooring material at a resonable price? We are removing all our joists and would like to salvage the wood. Thanks!
lilireno
in Architectural Salvage 12 years and 7 months ago
5
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5 replies
daveinbedstuy | 12 years and 7 months ago
In PA, I bought from www.sylvanbrandt.com
Bond | 12 years and 7 months ago
M Fine Lumber buys old joists (718)381-5200\. They will also re-mill your lumber, but it is, in my opinion, very expensive last time I ask. Doesn’t hurt to ask though, maybe they’ve gotten better. The guy I buy re-milled flooring from is named Donny, he runs a small one man operation in Georgia, I’ll have to scrounge up an old invoice for the contact info, but he does advertise periodically on Craigslist. Usually he’ll try to work it so that he’s making two or three deliveries in the NY area at once to keep cost down. I’ve always had a good experience working with him.
Bond | 12 years and 7 months ago
PS- There is someone on this forum advertising some flooring for sale that’s ripped down old beams, they said they had it done in Queens, maybe they could turn you on to who did it for them? At $5.50 a square foot, it’s not a bad deal.
Bond | 12 years and 7 months ago
Are you wedded to having the old beams as your flooring, or do you just not them to go into a dumpster? The reason I ask is that a lot of saw mills won’t touch joists that were used in stick and frame building, there’s too great of a risk of hitting a nail and damaging a very expensive blade. Most of the re-sawn flooring that you see comes from beams used in older factories where they used mortise and tenon. So then you have to go with a smaller operation which means that there is a lot of labor involved and it’s not going to be cheap. Add on to that the fact that most beams in Brooklyn are Eastern white pine, which doesn’t wear very well and you’re talking a high cost for a relatively blah product. An alternative is to sell the beams to a furniture maker, who doesn’t mind working around the odd bit of metal in a beam, and use the money you get from that towards buying some antique heart pine flooring, which looks great, and wears very well. The other problem that you run into is that since all of the pine beams tend to have a lot of resins in them, the shaper cutters clog up pretty quickly, so unless you have a very good mill operator, you end up getting flooring that the tongue or the groove isn’t as deep as it should be and so it doesn’t fit together well and you end up with large cracks. That’s the reason I stopped using Old Good Things for flooring back when they were selling it (I think they may have stopped selling flooring all together). If you have your heart set on using these beams, there is a mill in upstate NY that advertises on Craigslist that will do it, I don’t know of any local yards that will. I use a mill out of Georgia that ends up costing me around $4.50 per square foot on a 1500 square foot order delivered for re-sawn 1×6 antique long leaf pine that looks gorgeous in a sensitive restoration. my two cents.
Erstwhile | 12 years and 7 months ago
Most lumberyards will do this.