Queen City Salvage owner Thomas Sundheim says leveraging the value of architectural salvage demands patience, time, some know- how and a tape measure.
“This stuff is old,” he says. “When we’re that old, we’ll need a little bit of work, too.”
And therein lies the problem with gambling on a roomful of ornate trim that needs to be stripped of paint, or a clawfoot tub that isn’t quite gorgeous.
“A lot of people don’t know how to do anything,” Sundheim says.
Worse, says Architectural Salvage’s Betsy Werhane, is that people aren’t sure how to handle the old house parts they’ve got, whether they are keeping the old sinks or removing doors.
“Nobody knows how to take stuff out,” she says. “They rip it out. They bring it in half-broken so that now it’s worthless. They’ll clean a claw-footed bathtub with toilet bowl cleaner — you can’t use that on porcelain. The acid etches it.”
Werhane and Sundheim share a common lament about their customers: Many arrive without knowing the dimensions of the area where the antique sink might hang or of the space they’d like to fill with an old-fashioned window.
“They will come in and say, ‘OK, I need a bathroom door.’ And I’ll say, ‘What size is your bathroom door?’ And they will say, ‘I dunno, it’s a standard bathroom door,’ ” she says.
The tons of material at Architectural Salvage and Queen City Salvage might sometimes be scratched, dented, tarnished or worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap.
Doors can cost $1,000 or more. Fireplace mantels can go for several thousand dollars.
Before you commit, make sure you’re willing to put in the elbow grease it might take to get the salvaged materials up to contemporary aesthetic standards, or have the extra cash to spend hiring someone else to do the work.
In the end, the work and the money will leave you with reclaimed craftsmanship of a level hard to find today — without spending even more money.
In many cases, the items simply aren’t available elsewhere: The quality of the wood is no longer available, the glass is no longer manufactured, and good luck finding, for example, cross-etched chandeliers from Denver’s now-shuttered St. Philomena’s Church in the lighting section at Home Depot.
“You can buy new stuff for so cheap anymore,” says Sundheim. “It’s hard to compete with cheap. I cannot compete with cheap.”
Douglas Brown, The Denver Post
