Turning Antique Building Materials Into Living History

The Slide show above shows how the floor joists turnes into a decorative shelf

Demolition day is exciting and can get a little messy, but there can be treasures found on demo day with ELM.

It is not just the millennial hipsters recycling old wood, doors, and copper piping to decorate homes. This restored style in today’s homes encourages recycling those old wood boards into something spectacular.

Here are some ideas:

• Old pipes for a towel rack

• Antique doors as a breakfast or dining table

• Scrap hardwood flooring into picture frames

In one of Elm’s most recent projects we took some old floor joists from the late 1920s in a guesthouse and gave them a makeover.  After some delicate sanding, the ELM crew put pieces of the original floor joists on the wall as a decorative shelf.

ELM has gotten a few of these requests to take pieces of an old house and repurpose the beauty of aged materials into another use.

If you are not ready for a remodel anytime soon, or do not have an older house with a treasure trove of old materials, that is not a problem.

Elm is not encouraging dumpster diving, we are encouraging recycling and getting creative to put some living history into a home.

Yard sales, asking about that junk on the side of the road from a neighbor, or finding materials online can be great ways to create an original piece in your home with a little bit of effort, sandpaper, tools, stain, or paint.

If you have a remodel in mind and have some older pieces you would like to keep in the house for another use, give ELM a call and we can talk about that in an estimate.

If you need some ideas on restoring old materials, check back with us and we will post more of our creative projects.