I always have to remember that not everyone's interests are the same as mine when I see those shows. Having been in the trades for almost 45 years, I have to grit my teeth when I see home improvement shows, remodeling shows, house flipping shows, and even Mr. Silva. I have watched him do things like retro installing a skylight that is completely wrong. A quick call to the state/local roofers association would have led him to completely different procedures, starting with his choice of adhesives.

Anyway, I think TV shows like the Hobbs guys are made to have broad appeal, and even if they actually knew about old timber reclamation the show would be much more inviting if the average viewer went on a journey of discovery with them rather than to have someone snort their derision by saying they had known about reclamation for years.

I miss seeing that old wood and rarely do anymore. At one time when I was doing some work in the nearby OLD towns, I would tear into walls and ceilings and find beautiful Douglas Fir, chosen and milled because it was so straight. As a young man, I couldn't identify that stuff because the grain was so tight and close and the lack of knots threw me off. But when it was cut, some of it still had that wonderful pine perfume, almost 100 years later..

I worked on homes that had some kind of hard yellow pine for flooring (there are a couple that were harvested here in Texas that were favored for flooring) that folks covered with carpet. As the neighborhoods changed and the old folks moved out, the flooring was revealed, and in many cases the flooring was sanded, lightly stained, and finished. I found it odd as the upscale houses I worked in had white oak flooring, not pine. An old timer that was in his 80s in the 70s told me that the SYP was hard and durable, and wore as well as the oak, but was less than half the price. So SYP was used for flooring, it was that hard.

To bear that out, there are a couple of old, old saloons around here that have SYP flooring installed in the late 1890 and turn of the century. Same with a few old "restored" churches. As old as it is, it is wearing fine. That kind of old growth, super hard pine simply hasn't been available for years.

I have tried to figure out how to reclaim any kind of wood from my remodels/repairs that have the old growth stuff used as part of the build, but those old houses were usually so overbuilt that they have too many nail holes to be of any value. When I was building water bed frames to help my income a few decades ago, I learned that a few nail holes are charming. Too many, and the project looks like it was made from damaged crating.

Robert