Reclaimed hardwood flooring is made from lumber that used to be in old barns, factories, and houses. From an environmental standpoint, saving wood that would be thrown away during demolition is a commendable act. However, to dismiss reclaimed hardwood flooring as another green material would be a mistake: the beauty and quality of the wood to make this flooring is unparallel.

To make reclaimed flooring, wood is dried and remilled into tongue and groove or traditional flooring.


      Here's a video featuring Master Carpenter Norm Abram of This Old House as he explains how to choose reclaimed wood flooring.


This wood can easily be 75 years old, with slow growth patterns and at widths that cannot often be found in the current building marketplace. The density and stability of the wood also makes it highly attractive to designers.

Every home (and most businesses) in the United States use light bulbs. Most homeowners use incandescent bulbs but a growing number use fluorescent lights, including compact fluorescent (CFL), or high intensity discharge (HID) light bulbs, while the majority of office buildings and warehouses use fluorescent bulbs. We need to know what to do with them after they've served their purpose.

Don't throw away those old shop lights! Recycle them! Proper disposal of mercury-containing light bulbs, like fluorescent shop lights, helps our environment in more ways than one. The glass from the spent bulbs is remanufactured into other glass products and the mercury is reclaimed and reused in new fluorescent light bulbs and other mercury-containing devices. They even recycle the metal end-caps and phosphor powder.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that over 670 million mercury-containing light bulbs are discarded annually. That's a lot of light bulbs to deal with. Where do they all go? Most of them end up in the landfill but a growing percentage of bulbs are recycled through lamp reclamation programs thanks, in part, to stricter federal and state regulations. That's the good news.

If you want to make the responsible choice of properly disposing of your spent mercury-containing lamps, home or business, then I can help you out.

Reclaimed antique terra cotta roof tiles from Europe have been masterfully installed on this English cottage-style home. It's just one unique feature and/or material after another for this English cottage-style home. I stated in my introductory post that the materials being used to construct it would BLOW...YOU...AWAY! Well...I don't think it has disappointed.

General contractor, Rhett Bonner, and builder/developer of The Retreat, Jerry Bonner, closely guard their materials sources so I was unable to get a vendor name from which he obtained the antique reclaimed terra cotta roof tiles from but he did tell me how his supplier does it. Basically, his source buys reclaimed roof tiles from all over France (and probably most of Europe), ships them over in a container via ocean freight and voilà! They just happen to have gotten their hands on antique terracotta roof tiles. A rare find, indeed!

pssst...I'm not 100% certain but I think one of his sources may be Origines: Architectural Antiques in Paris.