On Saturday, January 24, 2015 at 1:54:43 AM UTC-6, wrote:

That top, sanded and refinished, started its second life as the bar in
our basement. My Dad would hold court with the neighbors from behind it
on many a weekend evening.

Nice! What a great save. To appreciate that even more, think about all the time, labor and money he saved to recycle that.

I had a friend of mine years and years ago that was trying to figure out what to do with the old oak flooring found in the trailer boxes hauled around by 18 wheelers. He had some neat things, but the amount of work he had to do to get it to usable condition was prohibitive. Too much of every kind of debris you can imagine was ground into (and then driven over by fork lifts)that flooring. Nails, screws, metal banding clips, staples, gravel, dirt, wire, you name it. He got it for nothing because it was worth little more.

Now a an old shuffleboard top... just the right size for a good bar!

Robert

In the spirit of salvaging, beyond just the quantity of lumber, being salvaged:
My experience with salvaging goes back to my high school years. For me, it was an evolution, of sorts. While hunting, I began to collect old bottles, found at old back-woods home sites, trash piles, etc. Then I began to notice the old houses, barns, sheds, etc. and recognize, not just the quantity of old lumber, but the quality, how it was produced (hand hewn), and wondered about the lives and other goings on, of people, in those, back then, surroundings.

This evolved into learning or surmising the history and workmanship of the home site and its construction.... developing an appreciation for those sorts of things. These days, some of my first thoughts, about a structure to be salvaged, is the aesthetics of the life, lives and living, of those, back then, rather than just the quantity of the material I'm salvaging. Somehow, I incorporate those old "qualities" into my construction of a new project, using the salvaged lumber, hence, I sense I preserve something, more aesthetic, of those old days, other than just the lumber. I think at least 80%, of all my projects, ever, have been made with salvaged lumber.

Similarly, when I discover an old log, I wonder of those long ago days, when few people were around, it having grown in a time of a pristine wilderness, and I wonder what it'd be like to walk among that old untouched forest. A hint of this mindset is in this example of a log in Chicot State Park. I like to think the value of this log is in the thought that an Ivorybilled woodpecker made these holes. There's value in the history of this log..... page right, 3 pics: https://www.flickr.com/photos/438361...in/photostream

In short, my salvaging began as the gathering of/for quantity and/or related money value. It evolved into gathering for its certain historical (of sorts) quality and aesthetics. Salvaging has always been hard work, but, often times, the value is not measured by quantity or retail price.

Sonny