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PRESERVATION NOT RESTORATION

I build furniture and embellish houses with architectural elements. From completely salvaged materials down to every part of it is going to be salvaged. Most of my architecturals are 120 years old or older, which makes it fun. So if I make tables that are pegged, and they have nails in them, but the nails are just as old as the boards, I'll make the pegs from old wood and use old nails to put the wood together just so the piece has a good feel to it. I don't paint or decorate stuff and I don't do restoration. It's more of a repair or taking found objects that have no use and reusing them.

WHERE HE FINDS HIS MATERIALS

It's basically across the board. Like someone might have their grandfather's barn and house that was going to be sold and torn down, and the property was going to be renovated. We will go up to the property and salvage boards and tin. Across the street, when the Green Bean was going to be renovated, they called us and said we could have their ceiling tin.

Now there's Architectural Salvage downtown that we keep our eye on. Mary Wells at Rhyne's Corner Cupboard, I just bought some nice tin from there, and some antique bed parts that are going to be converted into mirrors. She had this Chinese bed that was imported, and the pieces had been separated, and after a year went by, she cut the whole bed up and sold it in fragments. I basically bought all the flat boards, no pretty fragments, but all the actual bedrails, sides and boards, which are handmade wood.

We go to Atlanta to the antique show, and there are a lot of architectural dealers there. We went to Liberty, North Carolina, to a show, it's been two years ago, but a dealer came from Pennsylvania, and a dealer had some of the best architectural elements, whether they were old windows and casings and stuff, I immediately saw it and said, 'Wow, I could make fabulous mirrors with these window casings,' and did. They're all gone now, all sold.

HIS MOST UNUSUAL SALVAGE JOB

We had a lady, and she and her husband collected wine boxes. She asked me to create a backsplash with all the boxes they had collected, using the embossed labels in the piece. We probably did about 40 feet of it and worked it like jigsaw puzzles. I planed them all down and took the boxes apart and made wooden tiles that were all the same depth. It looked fantastic.

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD THEM

A lot of people need to have reassurance. So a great part of what I do is educating the client on what they want and what we're going to do for them. Sometimes the client's like, 'I know it's going to be fabulous and I trust you,' and sometimes it's like you're standing there looking at the husband and he's looking at you and he's like, 'What is this man doing to our house?' After playing with it for so many years, I haven't had anybody not like what I do for them, but if I get the sense that it's not going to work out, then you just kinda have to know when to pull out.

DISCOVERING HIS CRAFT

I worked as a craftsman all my life. Construction, I worked in a sheet metal shop here in Greensboro called Jarret's Sheet Metal ... and I've always been interested in antiques and things with authentic patina on them.

THE VALUE OF PATINA

Patina is the surface of an antique, the old, original surface. If there was a table that looked old, and I was to scrape the table to make it look new, I would strip the patina out of it. All these surfaces you see on stone, if it was a new stone, it wouldn't be attractive. Patina is what makes things interesting.

When you watch that show, "Antiques Roadshow," where they refinish a fabulous piece of old furniture, they're basically taking 60 percent of the value away by taking the patina out of it. It's body oils, it's the wear of the piece. So if you're restoring furniture that's got age, you ruin it by stripping the patina away. If somebody gets an old table and refinishes it and puts high gloss on it so it won't get watermarks on it, they've ruined it.

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com

 

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