this company offers high-quality reclaimed wood BY JERAMY BAKER
People love reclaimed wood. It has history. It has soul. It looks good. But that word—”re- claimed”—what does it even mean? Think about it. If a guy wanted to, he could take a crowbar into his backyard and, one by one, reclaim the floor- boards from his family’s rotting shed. But just because a piece of wood has been reclaimed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s of any good use.
Bryant Dyess, owner of
206 CSD
Encore Architectural Salvage, is an expert on antique reclaimed lumber. His storefront on upper King Street sells reclaimed wood of only the highest grade—old-growth heart pine and oak, nothing younger than 150 years. When it comes to reclaimed lumber, you want it that old.
The antique wood Encore sells is higher quality than modern wood because it was harvested long ago from trees that took hundreds of years to mature. Dyess explains that a pine tree grows tall when it’s young—it shoots straight up until it claims a patch of sunlight in the forest canopy. Then it stops growing upward and starts growing outward. The longer a tree lives, the stronger and tighter the trunk becomes. The richer its color. The better its lumber. Modern-day lumber is har- vested from soft young trees
