Purchasing old furniture as source of wood

[Brian Deakin]

I live in the Uk and I have used e bay as a source of wood

I purchased an old oak table with Barley twist legs for $5 and I have also purchased hardwood doors as a source of timber

Do members in the USA use old furniture and doors in this way

regards Brian

[Bruce Page]

I have bought a few pieces I spotted at yard sales to reclaim the wood.

[Mike Henderson]

Around here, too much of the furniture is particle board with veneer on it so you'd have to be very careful what you're getting. But even if the wood is solid, it often has various screws, and maybe holes, on the underside which will limit how you can use the wood. Additionally, the wood is often pretty short. Even a dining table is often cut in the center for one or more leaves.

I've never acquired furniture for the wood, but I expect if you got it for the right price and the wood will work for your project, it would be a good acquisition.

Mike

[Brian Henderson]

I had someone give me a table once, specifically so I could use the wood top for a project. The legs were ruined and he didn't want to waste time putting new ones on. I found out that, even though he said it was solid wood, it was actually veneered and therefore useless for my purposes.

[Reinis Kanders]

I have found some good stuff on a curb during trash pickup days. Some old pine, maple, oak, etc. Old dressers and desks can also yield good hardware. Just recently found a dresser with six mortised campaign style pulls, that was a good score.

[Mike Cutler]

About 15 years ago I found a solid mahogany table in an "antique store". The table was in pretty rough shape.
It Didn't take me long to realize that the price per board foot of new lumber exceeded the asking price of this table. Included in this were four 12" x 5' long table extensions. I asked them if they had any more table extenders,a nd they showed me a whole pile of them. Most were veneer, but a couple others were solid. I bought the table and all of the solid extenders.
Long story short was that when they asked if I was going to re-finish the table and I told them that no, I meant to take it apart for the mahogany, they were a little upset. The lady didn't want to sell it too me.
To balance out the karma though, it turns out I'm allergic to mahogany. The front portion of my face, nose and mouth, go numb along with my tongue, if I get around mahogany dust. No other wood does it.
Next time I'll be pickier about the species.;)

[Peter Quinn]

Its not unheard of to use reclaimed wood from various sources here, furniture, old architectural items, beams, barn timbers. Its the "green" thing to do, pretty hot among a certain set of designers these days. But luckily we here in North American still have large stands of deciduous hardwood forests, so new lumber is readily available and not for the most part terribly expensive. Its my understanding that the timber situation is somewhat diminished in Europe and UK due to centuries of over harvest and heavy population density? Im curious if its reached a point where reclaimed items are cheaper all effort included than fresh lumber?

I wouldn't hesitate to use wood from any source I found appropriate, and therein lies some judgement. Would I sacrifice a hard worn old piece of simple furniture to repurpose its contents? I have. The workbench in my shop is a maple top from a trestle table purchased in a thrift store. Would I deconstruct a decent and workable piece of furniture because do to economics its contents had become less expensive than purchasing similar quantity of fresh timber? There I might hesitate as the opportunity cost of the labor that went into construction has to be factored. If I were to cut up a table then spend 40 hours making a new table did I really save anything? In any event it seems a far better thing to deconstruct and rebuild from an item than to see its contents burned or buried in a land fill.

[steven c newman]

Well, from these two items that were thrown out
302832302833
Used to be an old bed. Well dug through this stuff for the solid wood, and
302834302835
BTW, the workbench behind it came from an old waterbed frame. Just the two long sides of the old bed. Added a little 1x6 scrap, and some over leftovers to make a small shop bench.

[glenn bradley]

When lucky enough to come across items that are made of good material, I will acquire them. I did a series of mahogany picture frames for someone made from someone else's old sleigh bed. It was typically finished commercial-style with so much tint and topcoat you couldn't tell that there was mahogany underneath. I gave one of the frames back to the person who supplied the bed and they were quite surprised by what I made out of their old hand-me-down.

[Barry Richardson]

Someone recently gave me an old dresser, at least 100 years old I reckon, all hand made with a few square nails here and there, all solid wood, walnut, cherry, and poplar as secondary, but it was pretty beat up and too much work to restore. I got some amazing curly cherry boards out of it, aged a beautiful red throughout, and some nice walnut boards as well, plus all the drawer bottoms were 18"wide poplar boards 1/2" thick.... I keep my eye out for old cabinet doors too, if the panels are solid wood, I take em...

[Ted Calver]

Once, at a defense property disposal site in Alaska many, many years ago I came upon a pile of old furniture from various major base renovation projects. It was a good 30' tall and 100' around. The furniture was mostly mahogany and maple and included desks, beds, dressers, tables etc., some veneer and some solid wood. It was selling for 50¢ a pick up load. A friend and I spent a week shuttling back and forth to fill up our basements with reclaimed material--maple drawer sides. mahogany table tops and extensions, you name it. The next week when we went back for more the entire pile had been burned!

[Larry Edgerton]

I bought an old piano for the keys.

Thats about it. Every time a customer makes me recycle it costs him more than if I started fresh. Planer and jointer knives do not grow on trees....

[Jim Becker]

Repurposing wood from any source is a nice way to gain material for projects as well as save some money in the process. Sometimes you find some really extraordinary wood, too. The biggest challenges with repurposing old furniture will be material size and ascertaining before-hand if it's actually solid wood. Here in 2014, almost 2015...there is a lot of "old" furniture that's not actually all that old and if mass-produced, it can be made of veneer over a substrate once you dig into things.

I personally have not technically repurposed old furniture for material outside of rebuilding a bow-front mahogany dresser where I reused the internal parts of the carcass and drawers, made new sides and top and re-veneered the drawer fronts and then added new raised stringing. I have, however, used material removed from our home during home improvement tasks to make new items. In fact, this weekend, I am completing some picture frames made from the last of the material that the previous owner used for some heavy (and IMHO, ugly...) bookshelves. :)

Here are the completed frames ready for painting (black to match others already in our home). It's very tight grained fir as much as I can determine.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v646/a-j-adopt/Woodworking/IMG_3871_zps3fd0b760.jpg

[Bill Ryall]

I'm always on the lookout for wood. I'm not proud- I'll scrounge it from anywhere. Right now my shop is full of reclaimed DF and pine- locally cut and milled 2x4 thru 2x12 (I know the history) from a building we just renovated. Clear with thighs rings. Beautiful stuff. I do as much as possible with salvage and reclaimed materials. Better than seeing it fill a landfill, and a lot of my clients like the idea.

[Larry Browning]

I have access to a very old piano with a broken sound board that has some interesting looking wood in it. It was left in the garage of my rent house. (it's still there) It is too heavy for me to move it anywhere. I have been thinking about trying to reclaim some of the wood. A little research has me worried about the strings being a danger unless I can relieve the tension on them prior to cutting it up. Plus, I know that much of the wood panels are veneer and I am also afraid that there will be many metal fasteners embedded it the wood. I am thinking that it would probably be more trouble than it is worth to get even a little usable wood out of it.

[Frank Drew]

My bench top is mostly maple from boards that were once high school locker room benches (I had to knock off all the accumulated chewing gum on the bottom sides).

A local antique dealer once paid me to remove the Cuban mahogany backing board from a piece of wide, thick and very nice rosewood veneer; the panel had warped no doubt due to the unbalanced construction (veneer on only one face), and it was a bear of a job mostly due to the warping and especially the hardness and toughness of the mahogany, all the while having to preserve the veneer.

Not from furniture, but reclaimed lumber mostly from old buildings is used a lot in this country.

[Tom Walz]

Again - beware of hidden hardware. Not good on tools and flying metal is no fun in a shop.